some states have passed laws to protect crypto mining’s access to huge amounts of power.
Why would they do that?
Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power | AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.
Submitted 10 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
eatthecake@lemmy.world 10 months ago
glovecraft@infosec.pub 10 months ago
It’s a combination of kickbacks paid by the miners and the usual owning the libs by wrecking their own power grid.
silence7@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Bribery
AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think they are doing this above board, so it’s just “contracts”. It’s not illegal, just shortsighted. Just like lobbying isn’t technically bribery because it’s “official bribery” so it’s got a different name.
Nudding@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Money is speech now.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Mostly because power should be available to all as long as you are willing to pay (and they do pay, quite a bit, it’s their primary expense).
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Why should power be available to all? If the activity is both incredibly wasteful and brings no value to the public or to the state or to the utility company, why should the utility not be able to prioritize getting power to people who need power to live?
There are these huge crypto mining farms in Texas, and people are literally dying each year from the power grid failing. Why should the crypto farms be protected when they could be cut off in times when human survival is at risk?
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Would have been nice if we were installing nuclear plants for the last two decades (second best time to start is today). Instead we are getting wind/solar backed by natural gas.
silence7@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Utility-scale are getting to the point of displacing a bunch of that gas. Nuclear is sufficiently expensive that we’re probably only going to use modest amounts of it.
farcaster@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think nuclear is expensive in part because we didn’t build enough of it. The more you build of something the more costs come down.
An opportunity was lost in the 80s when everybody abandoned nuclear as oil prices were coming down and energy demand stagnated. And Three Mile Island just happened which, understandably, made utilities nervous to invest in nuclear.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Maybe. And in the mean time we will keep burning that natural gas while a solution we can build today sits idle.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
No duh.
The human brain is powered by calories. Food is a renewable energy source.
But we decided they weren’t efficient enough and now we want to replace them with LLMs, powered by orders of magnitude more electricity than the workstations the humans would use.
And no one stopped to think “Hey maybe adding significantly more power usage isn’t the best idea right now.”
Tolstoshev@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Maybe, hear me out, we could hook up human brains to power the AI? Maybe in some sort of stasis pod?
WallEx@feddit.de 10 months ago
What a great an unique plot idea for a book or a movie!
Grimy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The same argument could be made about the body and farm equipment.
Progress is not the enemy, our shit leaders not investing properly in our energy production is.
ech@lemm.ee 10 months ago
This has nothing to do with llama. We’ve needed a drastic improvement to energy production for ages now, but infrastructure budgets never sound cool enough to actually get an increase, so here we are.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I can’t wait for the day in 2 years when people look back and realize how fucking dumb and useless AI is for 90% of the global population, outside of being lazy or incapable. It’s sad we have to always fight through the bandwagoning steps, and letting all these companies fight to get in the door before it takes off, and fucking up society and our planet in the process. Crypto adoption was exactly the same, broadband, dial-up…and so on going backwards. It will settle eventually, but everyone has to deal with this bullshit (and suffer economically in some cases) until it does. It sucks.
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
I’m not at all convinced that AI is going to be like Crypto - Crypto “solved” a problem that only online drug dealers etc had. AI “solves” a problem lots of companies have in terms of summarizing masses of data, search problems, and currently various rote tasks.
I’m also not convinced dial up through to broadband was a bandwagon… Those were important technological steps forward.
I think most of this is a problem with electricity companies just not wanting to invest in their infrastructure at all. Almost any other company would love explosive demand, and would be working to make ever more money on selling more of their product. What’s even sillier IMHO is just that there’s huge growth in solar farms and the like providing generation capacity for the utility without them having to build anything.
GluWu@lemm.ee 10 months ago
You can either use technology to improve your life in whatever way it allows, or you can be resistant, bitch and whine about it to anyone who will listen to how you don’t use something, and not receive the benefits of that technology.
Lemmy is the only social media I’ve ever used, but I haven’t spent the last 20 years whining to people about how I think myspace/facebook/reddit/100s other companies are bad and doing nothing positive. Only consuming electricity to produce nothing of value. Plenty of people do use it and benefit from it. I chose not to. I did chose to take up lots of other technology that has been beneficial to my life.
assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AI is and will likely in the future be very useful and technologically significant. But I am not convinced it is anywhere near the world changing levels companies like OpenAI (ClosedAI) or microsoft make it out to be. Gen AI will become a useful but largely mundane tool that people will use to help themselves be a little more productive in the future. Think how face detection helps you take better portraits rather than replace the need to take a photograph.
The current problem is that all the excitement is around AI being able to completely revolutionise work and replace workers. Money and effort is being poured into that goal; however, those investing are going to rapidly find out that we don’t know how to create a tool that does that yet and, we are likely a very long way from finding out how.
Usernameblankface@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Huh. Seems like ai startups and clean manufacturing should invest in building their own solar and wind farms, mini nuclear power plants, and geothermal generation plants. If the AI or whatever doesn’t work out, they can fall back on selling the power they generate. if it does work out, they don’t have to pay grid prices for their power needs.
Mastengwe@lemm.ee 10 months ago
So shut AI down. Problem solved we don’t need it.
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Or crypto currencies.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Or proof-of-work crypto currencies.
kromem@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The US has the most data centers today, with 33 percent of the world’s approximately 8,000 data centers. It’s also the country with the most Bitcoin mining. The IEA forecasts a “rapid pace” of growth for data center electricity consumption in the US over the next couple of years, rising from roughly 4 percent of US demand in 2022 to 6 percent by 2026.
ALL data center energy usage only makes up 4-6% of US energy use.
Most tech firms that run data centers don’t reveal what percentage of their energy use processes A.I. The exception is Google, which says “machine learning” — the basis for humanlike A.I. — accounts for somewhat less than 15 percent of its data centers’ energy use.
So AI energy use is maybe less than one percent of total US energy use if we extrapolate from the upper range of data center use and apply the relative usage of data centers of one of the leading AI development firms.
Yeah, this definitely seems like the “AI Boogeyman” is on par with other contributing factors for why energy grids are struggling. /s
Maybe we should be taking a closer look at passive device energy usage given double digit percentages of home energy use goes to “energy vampires”. I just imagine that version of the article might have received less clicks?
Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Increase prices for industrial use, use cash to make more power plants
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Not can’t, won’t.
RiikkaTheIcePrincess@pawb.social 10 months ago
[Very sarcasm] I’m sure real live actual people will get priority if any decisions need to be made. Texas for one has shown that power (and everything else, really) goes where it’s needed to ensure that everyone is safe and well and certainly no one is allowed to just die cold, or their building fall apart or anything like that.
Nobody would do anything about it anyway so ohhh wellllll 🤷
Tolstoshev@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s nuclear fusion or die at this point. Civilization can’t survive without cheap energy.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Fusion won’t be ready for a long time yet. It won’t solve this problem.
Tolstoshev@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Possibly true. The joke in the industry is that it’s always 10 years away. Although some big breakthroughs lately:
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 10 months ago
Maybe you should start regulating things a bit more proactive…
silence7@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Be nice, but a lot of utility regulators are effectively controlled by the utilities.
db2@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sounds like they should have actually upgraded the infrastructure instead of paying out ceo bonuses.