In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.

People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.

So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.

So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.

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phil21 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.

The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.

Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.

To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.

	▲	infecto 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Agree! My wish is that instead of focusing purely on demand (it’s kind of hard to disaggregate) we refocus on figuring out how to renew generation efforts and updating our transmission. I have seen the same exact issue locally. Large solar farms tens of miles away from civilization in pure farm land that get pushed back on for no good reason. We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.
	▲	cduzz an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!" Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand. And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power. In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.