The important part remains internalizing emission costs into the price of electricity. Fussing over individual users seems like a distraction to me. Rapid decarbonization of electricity is necessary regardless of who uses it. Demand will soar anyway as we electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
seb1204 · 6h ago
I agree but reducing consumption or increase of efficiency are still very important aspects of the energy transition. What is not consumed does not need to be generated.
0_____0 · 4h ago
Sometimes I see chatter about using solar or nuclear or whatever power for data centers, thereby making them "clean," and it's frustrating that there isn't always the acknowledgement that the clean energy could displace other dirty generation.
Even with things like orphaned natural gas that gets flared otherwise - rescuing the energy is great but we could use it for many things, not just LLMs or bitcoin mining!
adrianN · 6h ago
Yeah, but pricing signals are a good way of reaching those goals.
Lerc · 5h ago
I don't think it a given that reducing energy consumption is a required part of the transition.
Increasing demand can lead to stimulus of green energy production.
Scarblac · 6h ago
Businesses will only start doing that in significant amounts when carbon emissions are priced according to their environmental impact.
mentalgear · 7h ago
When companies make ESG claims, sensible measurement and open traceability should always be the first proof they must provide. Without these, and validation from a credible independent entity such as a non-profit or government agency, all ESG claims from companies are merely PR puff pieces to keep the public at bay (especially in "AI").
stevage · 3h ago
esg?
JohnFen · 3h ago
Environmental/Social/Governance. From Wikipedia:
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is shorthand for an investing principle that prioritizes environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance.
With all the issues and inefficiencies listed, there is a lot of room for improvement. I'm hopeful that just as the stat they give for data center energy not rising from 2005-2017, so to will the AI energy needs flatten in a few years. GPUs are not very efficient. Switching to more task specific hardware will provide more efficiency eventually. This is already happening a little with stuff like TPUs.
mg · 7h ago
The brain uses 20% of the human body's energy.
I wouldn't be surprised if mankind will evolve similar to an organism and use 20% of all energy it produces on AI. Which is about 10x of what we use for software at the moment.
But then more AI also means more physical activity. When robots drive cars, we will have more cars driving around. When robots build houses, we will have more houses being built, etc. So energy usage will probably go up exponentially.
At the moment, the sun sends more energy to earth in an hour than humans use in a year. So the sun alone will be able to power this for the foreseeable future.
> When robots drive cars, we will have more cars driving around
This doesn't seem true. In SF, waymo with 300 cars does more rides than lyft with 45k drivers. If self driving cars interleave different tasks based on their routes I imagine they would be much more efficient per mile.
0_____0 · 3h ago
Is it really only 300 cars? They feel like they're everywhere!
mg · 6h ago
Existing rides will be done more efficiently but since rides are so much cheaper without a driver, much more rides will be done.
A car driving from A to B will cost less than 50% of the current price. Which will unlock a huge amount of new rides.
Scarblac · 6h ago
But the article says that energy use by AI is 48% more carbon intensive than the US average. So talk of solar power is a red herring -- that's not what it is running on now.
mg · 6h ago
I am thinking about the future here.
I don't think there will be much carbon intensive energy creation in a few decades from now. It does not make sense economically.
Scarblac · 5h ago
You said "for the foreseeable future", which I interpret as being about now.
Anyway I hope you're right, but so far global CO2 output is still growing. All the other energy has only come on top of carbon intensive energy, it hasn't replaced any of it. Every time we build more, we find new ways of spending that much energy and more.
mg · 4h ago
Seeing 20 years into the future is quite possible in some aspects.
I remember how me and my friends discovered email in 1999 and were like "Yay, in the future we'll all do this instead of sending letters!". And it took about 20 years until letters were largely replaced by email and the web. And when the first videos appeared on the web, it was quite clear to us that they would replace DVDs.
Similar with the advent of self driving cars and solar energy I think.
amelius · 7h ago
One problem: all this energy is eventually turned into heat ...
mg · 6h ago
Most of the sunlight that hits a roof is already turned into heat. Whether you use that for calculations or not does not make a difference.
Not sure about the exact numbers, but I guess that at the moment normal roofs and solar panels absorb very roughly about the same percentage of sunlight.
So if in the future solar panels become more efficient, then yes, the amount of sunlight turned into heat could double.
Maybe that can be offset by covering other parts of earth with reflective materials or finding a way to send the heat back into the universe more effectively.
amelius · 5h ago
What if you put a solar farm in a desert, though?
And also, people should paint their roofs white.
briandear · 6h ago
Why not nuclear?
mg · 6h ago
Building and running a nuclear reactor involves a lot of physical activity. And if the past is an indicator, we always move from physical activity to the flow of electrons.
The discussion about nuclear vs solar remind me of the discussions about spinning HDs versus solid state drives when they were new.
carunenjoyerlp · 5h ago
HDDs build the backbone of all large storage systems, they serve many purposes today. Magnetic tape is still in use too
Proofread0592 · 7h ago
> When you ask an AI model to write you a joke or generate a video of a puppy, that query comes with a small but measurable energy toll and an associated amount of emissions spewed into the atmosphere. Given that each individual request often uses less energy than running a kitchen appliance for a few moments, it may seem insignificant.
> But as more of us turn to AI tools, these impacts start to add up. And increasingly, you don’t need to go looking to use AI: It’s being integrated into every corner of our digital lives.
Forward looking, I imagine this will be the biggest factor in increasing energy demands for AI: companies shoving it into products that nobody wants or needs.
emushack · 5h ago
I would like to see more data centers make use of large-scale Oil Immersion-Cooling. I feel like the fresh water use for cooling is a huge issue.
Isn't water just the transfer medium between the server and the heat exchangers outside? How would changing that to oil help?
carunenjoyerlp · 5h ago
>you might think it’s like measuring a car’s fuel economy or a dishwasher’s energy rating: a knowable value with a shared methodology for calculating it. You’d be wrong.
But everyone knows fuel economy is everything but a knowable value. Everything from if it has rained in the past four hours to temperature to loading of the vehicle to the chemical composition of the fuel (HVO vs traditional), how worn are your tires? Are they installed the right way? Are your brakes lagging? The possibilities are endless. You could end up with twice the consumption.
By the way, copy-pasting from the website is terrible on desktop firefox, the site just lags every second, for a second.
est31 · 6h ago
I wonder how the energy requirements are distributed between training and inference. Training should be extremely flexible, so one can only train when the sun shines and nobody uses the huge amount of solar power, or only when the wind turbines turn.
jnsaff2 · 5h ago
AFAICT the energy cost of training is still fairly low compared to cost of GPU's themselves so especially during a land grab it's important to drive as near as possible full utilization of the GPU's, energy be damned.
I doubt this is going to change.
That said, the flip side of energy cost being not a big factor is that you could probably eat the increase of energy cost by a factor of say 2 and this could possibly enable installation of short term (say 12h) battery storage to enable you to use only intermittent clean energy AND drive 100% utilization.
mark_l_watson · 6h ago
The book “AI Atlas” covers the energy and other costs of AI.
emushack · 5h ago
Link?
briandear · 6h ago
What’s the net energy footprint of an employee working in an office whose job was made redundant by AI? Of course that human will likely have another job, but what’s the math of a person who was doing tedium solved by AI and now can do something more productive that AI can’t necessarily do. In other words, let’s calculate the “economic output per energy unit expended.”
On that note, what’s the energy footprint of the return to office initiatives that many companies have initiated?
folkrav · 5h ago
> Of course that human will likely have another job, but what’s the math of a person who was doing tedium solved by AI and now can do something more productive that AI can’t necessarily do
That’s a lot of big assumptions - that the job getting replaced was tedious in the first place, that those other “more productive” job exists, that the thing AI can’t necessarily do will stay that way long enough for it not to be taken over by AI as well, that the tediousness was not part of the point (e.g. art)…
lm28469 · 3h ago
> a person who was doing tedium solved by AI and now can do something more productive that AI can’t necessarily do.
Like driving a uber or delivering food on a bicycle ? Amazing!
carunenjoyerlp · 5h ago
Net energy change of people doing work on their desk versus browsing the internet versus playing games, you will likely not see difference at all. They're all at rest, more or less thinking something. People at home sofa always have metabolic processes running regardless of whether it produces additional value to some corporation
Scarblac · 6h ago
When human civilization crashes due to yearly climate change caused famines it won't matter how useful the work done by the AIs was.
Lerc · 4h ago
The point that stood out to me as concerning was
"The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average."
I'd be fine with as many data centers as they want if they stimulated production of clean energy to run them.
But that quote links to another article by the same author. Which says
"Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly “dirty.” Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing regions, like Virginia, the “carbon intensity” of the energy they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of electricity that are dirtier than the national average. "
"The average carbon intensity of the US data centers in our study (weighted by the energy they consumed) was 548 grams of CO2e per kilowatt hour (kWh), approximately 48% higher than the US national average of 369 gCO2e / kWh (26)."
which shows 375g/KWh (after converting from lb/MWh)
But the table they compare against shows.
VA 576g/KWh
TX 509g/KWh
CA 374g/KWh
and the EPA table shows
VA 268g/KWh
TX 372g/KWh
CA 207g/KWh
Which seem more likely to be true. The paper has California at only marginally better than the national average for renewables (Which I guess they needed to support their argument given the number of data centers there)
I like arxiv, It's a great place to see new ideas, the fields I look at have things that I can test myself to see if the idea actually works. I would not recommend it as a source of truth. Peer review still has a place.
If they were gathering emissions data from states themselves, they should have caclulated the average from that data, not pulled the average from another potentially completely different measure. Then their conclusions would have been valid regardless what weird scaling factor they bought in to their state calculations. The numbers might have been wrong but the proportion would have been accurate, and it is the proportion that is being highlighted.
Even with things like orphaned natural gas that gets flared otherwise - rescuing the energy is great but we could use it for many things, not just LLMs or bitcoin mining!
Increasing demand can lead to stimulus of green energy production.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is shorthand for an investing principle that prioritizes environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance.
I wouldn't be surprised if mankind will evolve similar to an organism and use 20% of all energy it produces on AI. Which is about 10x of what we use for software at the moment.
But then more AI also means more physical activity. When robots drive cars, we will have more cars driving around. When robots build houses, we will have more houses being built, etc. So energy usage will probably go up exponentially.
At the moment, the sun sends more energy to earth in an hour than humans use in a year. So the sun alone will be able to power this for the foreseeable future.
kindof sounds like Jevons paradox? https://wiki.froth.zone/wiki/Jevons_paradox
This doesn't seem true. In SF, waymo with 300 cars does more rides than lyft with 45k drivers. If self driving cars interleave different tasks based on their routes I imagine they would be much more efficient per mile.
A car driving from A to B will cost less than 50% of the current price. Which will unlock a huge amount of new rides.
I don't think there will be much carbon intensive energy creation in a few decades from now. It does not make sense economically.
Anyway I hope you're right, but so far global CO2 output is still growing. All the other energy has only come on top of carbon intensive energy, it hasn't replaced any of it. Every time we build more, we find new ways of spending that much energy and more.
I remember how me and my friends discovered email in 1999 and were like "Yay, in the future we'll all do this instead of sending letters!". And it took about 20 years until letters were largely replaced by email and the web. And when the first videos appeared on the web, it was quite clear to us that they would replace DVDs.
Similar with the advent of self driving cars and solar energy I think.
Not sure about the exact numbers, but I guess that at the moment normal roofs and solar panels absorb very roughly about the same percentage of sunlight.
So if in the future solar panels become more efficient, then yes, the amount of sunlight turned into heat could double.
Maybe that can be offset by covering other parts of earth with reflective materials or finding a way to send the heat back into the universe more effectively.
And also, people should paint their roofs white.
The discussion about nuclear vs solar remind me of the discussions about spinning HDs versus solid state drives when they were new.
> But as more of us turn to AI tools, these impacts start to add up. And increasingly, you don’t need to go looking to use AI: It’s being integrated into every corner of our digital lives.
Forward looking, I imagine this will be the biggest factor in increasing energy demands for AI: companies shoving it into products that nobody wants or needs.
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10101126
But everyone knows fuel economy is everything but a knowable value. Everything from if it has rained in the past four hours to temperature to loading of the vehicle to the chemical composition of the fuel (HVO vs traditional), how worn are your tires? Are they installed the right way? Are your brakes lagging? The possibilities are endless. You could end up with twice the consumption.
By the way, copy-pasting from the website is terrible on desktop firefox, the site just lags every second, for a second.
I doubt this is going to change.
That said, the flip side of energy cost being not a big factor is that you could probably eat the increase of energy cost by a factor of say 2 and this could possibly enable installation of short term (say 12h) battery storage to enable you to use only intermittent clean energy AND drive 100% utilization.
On that note, what’s the energy footprint of the return to office initiatives that many companies have initiated?
That’s a lot of big assumptions - that the job getting replaced was tedious in the first place, that those other “more productive” job exists, that the thing AI can’t necessarily do will stay that way long enough for it not to be taken over by AI as well, that the tediousness was not part of the point (e.g. art)…
Like driving a uber or delivering food on a bicycle ? Amazing!
"The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average."
I'd be fine with as many data centers as they want if they stimulated production of clean energy to run them.
But that quote links to another article by the same author. Which says
"Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly “dirty.” Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing regions, like Virginia, the “carbon intensity” of the energy they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of electricity that are dirtier than the national average. "
Which in turn links to https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09786
Which puts the bulk of that 48% higher claim on
"The average carbon intensity of the US data centers in our study (weighted by the energy they consumed) was 548 grams of CO2e per kilowatt hour (kWh), approximately 48% higher than the US national average of 369 gCO2e / kWh (26)."
Which points to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
For the average of 369g/KWh. That's close enough to the figure in the table at https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-01/egrid2022...
which shows 375g/KWh (after converting from lb/MWh)
But the table they compare against shows.
and the EPA table shows Which seem more likely to be true. The paper has California at only marginally better than the national average for renewables (Which I guess they needed to support their argument given the number of data centers there)I like arxiv, It's a great place to see new ideas, the fields I look at have things that I can test myself to see if the idea actually works. I would not recommend it as a source of truth. Peer review still has a place.
If they were gathering emissions data from states themselves, they should have caclulated the average from that data, not pulled the average from another potentially completely different measure. Then their conclusions would have been valid regardless what weird scaling factor they bought in to their state calculations. The numbers might have been wrong but the proportion would have been accurate, and it is the proportion that is being highlighted.