Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.

True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.

In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.

The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:

  “Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday.  If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight.  Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs.”

$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.

Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.

Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.