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> Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively.

The 947 GW is the total proposed capacity for solar projects that are in various planning stages. They have not been built yet, and most of them will never be built -- historically only about 14% of proposed capacity ends up entering service [1].

This isn't to say that it's not important to invest in the grid to handle future needs. But it's not like there's a bunch of renewable energy just sitting there idle.

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/queues

I know nothing about this topic, but it seems like maybe this comment and the parent don't disagree.

If most power generation is blocked by a lack of connectivity to the grid then it would stand to reason that most projects are abandoned or fail as they've no path to entering service (unless I've misunderstood).

I had the same reaction as the comment you are replying to.

I read the first comment quite literally. That there is over 900 GW of power that currently exists but just needs to be “hooked up”. i.e. a solar farm that is built, but through some bureaucracy there’s no line running from it to the grid.

With the context of the reply, that is not the case. Most of the cited 900GW isn’t even built yet. This seems like an important distinction when considering the scope of work needing to be done.

Is that 14% different with solar? I’m just bringing this up, because solar is dead simple compared to engineering studies and infrastructure required to build something like a new nuclear plant. I wonder if the simplicity of solar and storage will start to change how power generation is approached.

There's been only 1 build in 2013 and last one before in 1978 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

so nuclear wouldn't affect those 14%

It was just an example of complexity - I would imagine a new coal plant is still more complex than a solar farm.

Microsofts datacenters already use mostly renewable energy. Those emissions are down 6% compared to 2020 and are negligible overall.

What went up 30% is what they call Scope 3 (indirect emissions from suppliers, transport, construction and customers):

"Indirect emissions from all other activities up and down the value chain such as upstream and downstream transportation, materials, and end-of- life impacts, as well as all suppliers’ direct Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

Scope 3 represents over 96% of Microsoft’s annual emissions in FY23. Our Scope 3 emissions result primarily from the operations of our tens of thousands of suppliers (upstream) and the use of our products across millions of our customers (downstream).

Tackling Scope 3 means decarbonizing industrial processes such as steel, concrete, and other building material production for use in our campus and datacenter construction, as well as jet fuel for business travel and logistics."

Full report PDF: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW...

> The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy.

That would only mean that this renewable energy would no longer be available for other uses. Like, for instance, replacing or reducing the use of fossil fuels.

The sun has more energy than that, really. Which reinforces the commenter’s point: Congress should act on making it available, fast

We're not (for now) limited by how much energy the sun puts out. We're limited by how much of that energy we can usefully capture. There's a limited number of solar panels, wind turbines, and water turbines (plus all necessary accessories like inverters and transformers) being manufactured each day.

> The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy.

This is not the case. As long as electricity is fungible on the grid, and there's some fossil electricity production close enough for transmission, changes in renewable electricity use mean increases/decreases in fossil electricity use at the margin.

> At the end of 2022, there were at least 947 GW of utility-scale solar power capacity within the interconnection queues across the nation, 456 GW of which include batteries.

Seems more likely to me that the utilities are expecting a large growth in consumption in the coming years and built out capacity ahead of time. Seems reasonable.

Sounds easy, but thinking about it seems to make it out to be a "last mile" problem. Broadband adoption in the US is still, relatively, extremely horrible.

There is no renewable energy, only moved entropy

So to be clear, this is just a bureaucracy issue?

Yes.

Data centers can't run on intermittent sources.

Why not?

What stops training AI's during sunlight hours only and hibernating as power decreases?

Huge waste of CapEx for those expensive training GPUs if you can only use them 8 hours a day (same goes for all other data center hardware). Nevermind data availability and other hard problems if your DCs don't run 24/7.

You do spot pricing or preemptable instances at the margins to help maximize revenue while minimizing excess carbon.

I assume that most cloud venders are over-provisioning because their margins are so good that they'd rather overspend on inventory than miss out on revenue most of the time.

Doesn’t the data center need to run for all the AI backed services to work?

Somebody needs to run the real numbers ... what activities cost the most energy ( training to get weights, answering queries using weights, etc ), cost of types of energy in terms of external effects (fossil based energy Vs wind|sunlight) demand, bandwidth use, etc.

It's not inconceivable that there's an answer that meets needs based on only running the most energy consuming operations during daylight and migrating those operations about the globe during sunlight hours while having less demand operations run at night.

There's a real issue that needs addressing surrounding ever increasing global emissions, giving lip service while continuing to increase emission related activity is double think.

It's not the data centers directly causing the emissions anyways.

According to other comments, the data centers are less than 5% of the emissions in question. The data centers simply aren't relevant to this discussion.

The article suggests that data centers are the majority of energy consumption and more or less explicitly says they're not running on renewable sources.

> The vast majority comes from Scope 3 (96%), which includes the supply chain, data centers, and "the use of our products across millions of our customers."

> Yet the data centers remain an issue with no easy answer. The race to secure them is in full swing, and it would take years to switch them to renewable energy, experts tell PCMag.