Liebreich: Net Zero Will Be Harder Than You Think – and Easier. Part II: Easier | Hacker News Reader

Liebreich: Net Zero Will Be Harder Than You Think – and Easier. Part II: Easier

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28 pointsjillesvangurp16 comments

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Then why do we read stories about AI consuming too much electricity?

https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-clima...

Coal usage increasing globally. Shouldn’t we be using renewables?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-may-upend-...

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/07/27/coal-consumption-hit-an-...

The optimism in the article does seem to match reality

Because while AI uses a lot of energy, it's mostly of the renewable variety. E.g. Amazon just bought power from a nuclear plant.

Coal is actually on its way out in most places that have AI data centers. Even in the US. Even in hard core coal states, like North and West Virginia. Where that data center is that Amazon just bought nuclear power for.

New use cases drive new demand. Most of that new demand leads to new energy production. The vast majority of that, also in China, is renewable.

Nuclear is considered low-carbon energy, but it's not considered renewable energy.

I’m not sure AI is using “mostly renewables”. I’ve seen lots of stories like this:

“AI Needs So Much Power That Old Coal Plants Are Sticking Around”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/ai-needs-...

AI usage is indeed increasing energy demand.

Overall coal usage in places like the US is actually down. About 3% in the US last year. Coal peaked in 1997 and has been trending down ever since.

Any large users of power would want cheap power (i.e. not coal). Tech savvy companies running these data centers doubly so. They all have announced net zero targets years ago and the new data centers they are building with all the fancy new GPU hardware are exactly where they are putting in a lot of money to make that happen.

It's true that there are still some data centers powered by coal. The article mentions Virginia. Which is exactly where Amazon just bought the rights to a lot of nuclear power for the next few years. Because they don't want to have anything to do with coal going forward. So they are investing in alternatives. Even expensive stuff like nuclear is preferable to coal for them.

At best you could say that power companies are keeping some coal plants open a bit longer than planned because all their renewable power is being gobbled up by big data centers and they still need to serve their other, less picky customers. They simply did not plan for this much growth. Big data centers buying lots of renewable power is also a thing in Europe that has actually lead to some places limiting the construction of new ones.

Keeping coal plants open is of course a stop gap measure as it's at this point not really a profitable business to be in. They are trying to get more more lucrative renewables online ASAP. Virginia has a few offshore wind projects coming online, for example.

> Because while AI uses a lot of energy, it's mostly of the renewable variety.

This bullshit again?

Power is, to an approximation, fungible. Marginal power generation is fossil. It doesn't matter whether your electricity is renewable, as long as renewables aren't powering the grid completely you're effectively just squeezing someone else onto fossil power instead.

Is it know if the companies shut down their servers and model training or services provided when there is no solar available for example? Wouldn't that be the responsible and green thing to do. No AI during nights?

> Coal usage increasing globally

Well.. in China and India only basically. As far as I understand it's about their need to scale up energy production. They can't scale up wind and solar fast enough even if it's cheaper, so they build out both. When they don't need to increase construction so rapidly they will shift build out more and more to cheaper stuff.

Do you reasonably think China or India cares about the climate? The argument that they need to ramp up production using dirty energy first and will transition later is entirely devoid of evidence.

China has given massive subsidies for EV and PV production. That is strong evidence of "caring". You can argue that they're just doing it to capture markets, but given that the Chinese vehicle market is about 3X as large as the American vehicle market, that argument is hard to make.

China also cares very strongly about local pollution levels. The air in Beijing over the last 15 years has gotten dramatically better.

It has been well known for over a decade that China’s building electric vehicles to reduce their imported oil.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN28008X/

China is building massive amounts of renewables right now.

China has a lot of big cities along the coast that will flood as the oceans rise.

That is a totally irrelevant point. And it's also a non-sequitur. I didn't claim they do, and it's irrelevant if they do. Wind and solar are cheaper. They out compete coal. It just doesn't matter if you care about the climate, you WILL switch to renewables or go out of business.

Data centers produce 30M tons of co2 [0], concrete 4 billion tons [1]. 2 orders of magnitude.

I'd really like to see more depoliticized, scientific discussion of the topic. So many discussions of climate change end with all participants satisfied that nothing is being done and very little can be done.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1 [1] https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/11/3/cement-and-concret...

If you don’t mind YouTube, here is a decent video and a follow up more positive one I found. It does mention concrete and many other forms of co2 production we haven’t figured out yet.

2022 Kurzgesagt in a nutshell. https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc?si=El6tzqQVhuNKKEj-

2023 less doomerism climate change update: https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw?si=3RZ2Q414vvfYDSc7

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