Comment by golem14
5 days ago
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikesimoncasey_our-team-at-re...?
How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?
Also, consumer prices _have_ risen (mine included), but it's not clear that this is only because AI. While EV charging is not at the scale of all data centers combined, it seems to grow even faster than the datacenter's consumption, and is expected to eclipse the latter around 2030. Maybe sooner due to missing solar incentives.
Also, to rant on: According to [1], an average Gemini query costs about 0.01 cents (Figure 2 - say 6000 queries per kWh at 60 cents/kWh, which is probably more than the industrial consumers pay). The same paper says one other providers is not off by that much. I dare say that at least for me, I definitely save a lot of time and effort with these queries than I'd traditionally have to (go to library, manually find sources on the web, etc), so arguably, responsibly used, AI is really quite environmentally friendly.
Finally: Large data centers and their load is actually a bit fungible, so they can be used to stabilize the grid, as described in [2].
I would think it would be best if there were more transparency on where the costs come from and how they can be externalized fairly. To give one instance, Tesla could easily [3] change their software to monitor global grid status and adjust charging rates. Did it happen ? Not that I know. That could have a huge effect on grid stability. With PowerShare, I understand that vehicles can also send energy back to power the house - hence, also offload the grid.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358514...
[3] that's most likely a wild exaggeration
> How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?
This only makes sense if you ignore profits. We've been paying the bills since before this was "overdue"; for instance i am still paying a storm recovery surcharge on my electric bill from before i ever moved to this state. At the point where a "temporary infrastructure surcharge for repairs" becomes a line item on their profit statement, that's where i start to get real annoyed.
Our electric company has 287,000 customers and has a market cap of >$800,000,000
what percentage of that eight tenths of a billion in market cap came from nickel and diming me?
* note: nickel and dime was established as "an insignificant amount of money" in the 1890s, where sirloin, 20% fat was $0.20 a pound. That's $13.50 now (local); chuck $0.10 and $19 now. So somewhere between 67 and 180 times less buying power from a nickel and dime, now. Also that means that, y'know, my surcharges being $15-$30 a month is historically "nickels and dimes"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112019293742&s...
In my personal case, it was cost of energy due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggering a stop on buying cheap gas from them. Infrastructure upgrades are also being done, costing tens of millions per year because the grid can't handle the sudden increase in renewable energy generation and electrification (to ironically move away from dependency on gas).
I mean part of me thinks it's a necessary evil because we relied too much on Russian gas in the first place. But that's because we extracted most of our own gas already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field), which that article lists as one of the factors in the Dutch welfare state being a thing - it and smaller fields out at sea contributed over 400 billion to the Dutch economy since the 1950's.