Everyone is talking about batteries but honestly you don’t need batteries.

- Data centers don’t sleep

- Data center load (for AI) could be shifted to follow the sun

- The energy requirements mean you aren’t likely to overbuild your solar farm

At night just stop running your GPUs and / or pull from the grid

There isn't a battery in the world big enough to provide enough power for data enter if this size.

Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.

Some batteries? Battery-backed solar has the highest cost as a baseload power source due to high intermittency of solar power.

Maybe they can use the abundant oil for cooling as well :) that is how transformers are cooled

Kind of self evident? If there were opportunity the land would have already been used for something more lucrative than empty.

That doom take has a few roots in truth, but it is mostly false. Our grid for the most part is very good and improving. A lot of the gloom is it is good for today, but here is why we are trying to expand it anyway - that is the gloom itself is helpful to get the needed changes made.

There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.

If you're worried abour grid health, how is adding distributed generation colocated with new loads dystopian?

Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.

Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.

Last year, China installed 1.5GW of nuclear and 300GW of renewables. China's total coal use decreased as they decommissioned and under-utilized more coal than they installed.

This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.

It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.

It's so boring to relitigate this constantly on HN. It's like debating whether the sky is blue. Ridiculous that this comes up so often.

Nuclear is useful but it's hard to see it as a panacea. Renewable energy on the other hand is hard to beat. The economics of it keeps getting better, and previous estimates of the lifecycle of things like solar was grossly misrepresented.

Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.

"Environmentalists" is a large, diverse group and nuclear energy has been a controversial topic splitting the group for decades.

Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.

Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.

The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.

"Environmentalists" have been fighting against many things for decades: eating meat, deforestation, whaling, air travel, mining, automobiles, fur.

Assuming it was really environmentalists who did it, why is nuclear energy the only thing they succeeded at stopping?

Yes, and that dates from the era when everyone thought that a "nuclear winter" (from an exchange of nuclear bombs between the US and USSR) was a more immediate risk than a long slow problem of climate change. That's what the French government carried out a terrorist attack against Greenpeace in New Zealand for: the Rainbow Warrior was protesting against French nuclear weapons testing.

Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?

Please. Show me a nuke that was under 10 billion over budget and less than 20 years late.

Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.

Something tells me if they manage to get nuclear plants accepted, they will be built far, far away from the billionaires' doomsday bunkers.

A lot of environmentalists are just degrowthers and NIMBYs. During the Biden administration multiple groups sued to block high voltage transmission lines for clean energy.

As they should, now that we have renewables and batteries.

Environmentalists are full of scammers.

Right wing idiots are against solar and wind. Left wing idiots are against nuclear… leaving us with no alternative other than gas and oil!

The common denominators are “idiots” and oil.

Because it’s a dangerous technology where profit over security can have severe consequences.

Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.

Even ignoring nuclear environmentalists are still the enemy here.

Green energy is diffuse. Fields of solar. Ridges dotted with turbines. Each unit needs a power cable running away from it, access roads, etc, etc. A lot of area has to be developed for a given payback (sellable power).

Environmentalists and have been instrumental in making it economically impossible to develop land cheap enough to make low value density projects like that pencil out.

The higher power cost states in the US would likely be dotted with all manner of solar infill if not for up front costs that these shortsighted and selfish people have imposed on any land alteration larger than approx SFH lot size. Farmer Johnson would love nothing more than to put up solar on that ~2ac hillside he owns but cannot farm economically. Neither he nor some 3rd party who would put up the panels will shell out half a mil for an EPA CG permit just to clear the vegetation because the panels will never pay that back in their lives.

The economics of compliance are why the only greenfield development that happens these days is value dense commercial stuff (shopping plaza, big box store, data center, office buildings etc) or dense SFH development.

The most rosy possible outlook is that we "just" wait for the hippie boomers who cooked this crap up to croak, shit can the clean water act and come up with some new way of regulating development that doesn't saddle these super low impact projects (it's hard to be lower impact than panels or turbines) with fixed-ish costs that are a non-starter except at huge scale.

But of course there are so many parties who are making rent off this broken system who won't go down without a fight.

But it’s hardly industrialized right?

So is that a fair comparison?

Presumably chasing states and localities with generous tax breaks as well. That is no doubt what is really driving the choice of location.

With unlimited money, you'd be able to do unlimited over-build. At least that's what we thought until recently...

Would the world be inherently different if hardware cost was 4x of what it is per unit of training done? The world would be inherently different if we did not burn through fossil stockpiles at the speed we do, or not at all. It's market mechanisms failing to lead to a desirable outcome. Nothing new about that, plenty of problems of that kind have been solved before, but yes, this one is more difficult.

New conspiracy theory: this is all secretly a big bitcoin mining buildout

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Yeah, this seems like a textbook case where one could apply Jevons Paradox.

"with increases in productivity, we'll all work 2-4 hours a week and maintain the same output!"

No, you'll work 40 hours and just do 10 times more in that time. Same thing.

You should always assume these that benefit most from the technological forefront think they can outrun the output of climate change or any of the outputs.

It generally is called "effective altruism", eg, techno jesus will solve whatever problems creating techno jesus creates.

Or the third solution: a carbon tax.

That is a tough sell in the current environment. It's a regressive tax, so opposed on both ends of the political spectrum. People on the far right don't believe in climate change, and people on the far left don't believe in market efficiency. With 20% of the world's oil flow crimped in the Strait of Hormuz for who knows how long, higher energy prices is the last thing people want to contemplate.

In the longer run, a carbon tax is the best option. The fossil fuel price shock is a strong signal to produce energy through other means. There are major engineering initiatives around developing cheaper and safer nuclear energy. and it's cheaper now to deploy a solar farm than a coal plant.

A carbon tax would raise money to pay off national debts and encourage consumers and producers to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish their needs while minimizing their carbon footprint. It's a tough sell today, but this is they way to go for a better quality of life tomorrow.

>More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work..

But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Heavy fossil fuel use leads to health problems and given a large enough population deaths. Lung cancer, Asthma, heart issues etc

Guessing that is what GP means by body count

Emitting as much greenhouse gas as a country?

That has a body count. It's hard to know which people you're killing, but there's no doubt that at that point there's a number. Maybe... 10,000 or so? They'll die in heat waves and floods and tornadoes and food shortages in dry, poor countries. Obviously 10k is a tiny fraction of the full list of climate fatalities.

That's not to mention talking people to suicide, which by the way is the far more likely way that it would kill your son or daughter, should you have or ever have one.

And for all that cost, are they bringing us real hope? The most ambitious people talking about this technology basically say that when it takes over all thought, there won't be much point in humans anymore.

We went from being evangelists of a message of hope to evangelists of a message of doom.

I'm not going to be one of those people. Fuck those people. I believe in the future. I will stand up and tell the next generation there is still hope, still compassion, still community and humanity and love out there. I fight for the users!!!

Have you ever been in India while they have those incredibly hot heatwaves in the summer? That kills thousands of people every year. This will only get worse the more greenhouse gasses we emit so slop machines can generate funny videos of the pope breakdancing.

Probably yeah, but we could at least try to not make it worse, though even that seems very hard for the tech grifters in silicon valley.