Does that use a lot of energy?
hannahritchie.github.io
hannahritchie.github.io
- Anything even even halfway approaching a toaster or something with a heater in it is essentially impossible (yes, I know about that one video).
- A vacuum cleaner can be run for about 30 seconds every couple minutes.
- LED lights are really good, you can charge up the caps for a minute and then get some minutes of light without pedaling.
- Maybe I could keep pace with a fridge, but not for a whole day.
- I can do a 3D printer with the heated bed turned off, but you have to keep pedaling for the entire print duration, so you probably wouldn't want to do a 4 hour print. I have a benchy made on 100% human power.
- A laptop and a medium sized floor fan is what I typically run most days.
- A modern laptop alone, with the battery removed and playing a video is "too easy", as is a few LED bulbs or a CFL. An incandescent isn't difficult but why would you?
- A cellphone you could probably run in your sleep
Also gives a good perspective on how much better power plants are at this than me. All I've made in 4 years could be made by my local one in about 10 seconds, and cost a few dollars.
They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.
Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with LEVEL 2 using city provided charges, during the day, it's more expensive than gas.
Cheap electricity means you can do things that made "no sense" with expensive electricity. (e.g. smelt aluminum)
Cheap electricity means you can underbid regions that have expensive electricity...
As Technology Connections said, "Panels that cover your electrical needs for the next 25+ years? In the Midwest, we call that a good deal!"
> Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.
What does this mean? It means we are most of the way there with solar and batteries alone, even if we need a bit of carbon based generation to bridge the gap while solar and battery deployments scale globally. Solar and batteries will only continue to get less expensive and better.
Our World In Data: Installed solar energy capacity - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Solar PV go brrr.
The economics works out even if you were lifting concrete blocks rather than water, hence why you get pictures like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_Vault_Test_Tower_2...
The argument against lifting concrete is that you can dig a hole in the ground an pump water in/out of it for more reliability and lower cost than having a crane lift and lower concrete, and it's easy to make it much bigger both horizontally and vertically, so why bother.
But it does appear to be economical even with that, and water is cheaper.
We make lots of holes in the ground on a regular basis, including for extracting fossil fuels. Here's two, note scale bar, though I have no idea what the rock around it is like regarding water losses: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.9063171,6.4418046,17655m/dat...
* it's never "just" with things on this scale
It has a storage capacity of about 9.1GWh.
The upper reservoir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchlyn_Mawr) holds 9.2 million cubic meters of water.
So 1 million cubic meters of water provides ~1GWh.
We can see how that compares in terms of raw GPE (Gravitational Potential Energy):
1 million cubic meters of water = 1E6 * 1E3 kg = 1E9 kg
There's roughly a 500m vertical drop between the upper and lower takes at Dinorwig so:
1E9 kg * 500 m * 9.8 m/(s^2) = 4.9E12 J =~ 1.36GWh
As for water towers, if you look at something like the Roihuvuori tower in Helsinki (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_tower) which is one of the largest:
Height: 52m, Capacity: 12000 cubic meters
If we are generous and say that all of the water is stored at the maximum height then:
12000 * 1E3 kg * 52m * 9.8 m/(s^2) =~ 1.7MWh
You'd need over 5000 of them to match what Dinorwig can provide.
False. If you'd stopped before the "and" you would have been correct, though.
Batteries are really cheap now, and supply of batteries is growing basically as fast as people can get the investments and permissions for the inputs and the factories.
Solar has one of the lowest capital costs [1] so the discounting works in it's favor. And then the non-discountable operating costs also works in its favor since the fuel supply (light) is free.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
They'd be even better if we didn't have extreme tariffs on China.
That's actually what's convinced me that renewables are a better choice than nuclear. I still like nuclear, but renewables are just so much easier and faster to deploy while being a lot cheaper. To make nuclear competitive requires regulatory changes along with a government that's simply willing to tell it's NIMBY citizens YIMBY.
Government literally has to get in the way of renewable deployments at this point to stop them.
Well, at least we don't believe in tariffs where I chose to live.
You are one level ahead: I'm more than happy to debate what discounting rates you should be using!
Sounds more like you guys should be lowering barriers to entry, not setting up a global non-profit cartel.
Where I am, we have a solidly aligned state government. There's no concept of consequences for anyone in power. They're paid by the local companies to pass laws to make competition legal. Some are investors. All corrupt. That's what you get with a solid political alignment.
It's the McDonald's theory of policy: you don't vote on their burgers at the ballot box, you just go to Burger King or get a doner kebab, if you don't like it.
https://hackaday.io/project/191731-practical-power-cycling
and is also a few years out of date.
I did do a video back then going against the infamous "bicycle toaster challenge" video (in which I determined it was probably less real than they made it out to be). I'm nowhere as fit as those guys, so in my attempt I was only able to turn a bagel into a dry crouton over the course of an hour.
https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...
I've seen numbers like 250W mechanical power for an average trained cyclist, so either my setup is rather inefficient, my measurements are off, or I'm going to find out that I'm nowhere near as strong as a real cyclist.
On the other hand, the stationary bike I got originally had a rubber belt, which it would chew excessively and I eventually swapped it for a chain because it kept slipping in spite of tensioning it more, suggesting I'm hitting the thing harder than it was originally designed for (how that translates into power I'm not sure).
Thanks for sharing the details.
Cyclists' power output is sometimes reported as a 'power curve' - a chart with power on the vertical axis, and duration-of-that-power on the horizontal axis.
For example, a cyclist might be be able to produce 500W for 15 seconds; 350W for 1 minute; 270W for 10 minutes; 200W for 1 hour; and 150W for 5 hours.
I don't know what you can take of this, maybe you can see it as advance pedaling, or to get a feel for energy conversion losses. Anyways, it is the kind of harmlessly stupid idea that I would want to try just because I could.
This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).
https://ourworldindata.org/funding
[1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack
Could be wholesome and altruistic. Or it could be something else.
Someone can be an honest ideologue (useful idiot) without being directly funded by someone shady.
It's interesting to see how upset people are on Goodreads about that book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624737-not-the-end-of...
The top reviews are mostly people angry with Ritchie for not being a catastrophist.
My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.
Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.
That works out to around $0.035 per day for the lifespan of the lamp if you run it constantly for 24 hours a day, I wouldn’t waste time thinking about it. It’s an extra $10 over 12 years, you’re still using the energy.
Investing in occupancy or vacancy sensor wall switches at $25 a piece would be the best option, then you don’t need to remember to turn the lights off!
But yes, I have thought about presence sensors. I'd really only need 3-4 to cover the primary areas where lights get turned on and not off (if I don't do it). I just haven't gotten around to it
Same goes for televisions. Your modern TV is probably closer to the basic light bulbs before LEDs.
I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
For commercial and industrial installations, VFDs have probably been the biggest efficiency gain, even moreso than lighting. Half of all electricity consumed is used by motors. Thank goodness for solid state power electronics!
Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and most of the processing is complete. Our cost (in money and energy) to "make" gasoline is really just gathering it. This is why the comparison to renewables is often a hard sell, it's just apples to oranges. Gasoline started on third base, renewables are batting from the plate. Some of the internal combustion enthusiasts are holding up e-fuels or synthetic fuels as the solution but then we have to pay for the entire energy gathering and processing pipeline and still be using a conversion method that's not at all efficient. It's the worst of both worlds.
There's a good reason so many sprawling civilizations of the past involve leveraging wind-power for transport.
Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades. They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.
Battery power would be better, because you can build even larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is too large, so far. That is changing.
Maybe building overhead power lines for rail infrastructure should be the "hip" thing right now instead of AI. Maybe building oodles of solar power farms and batteries should be "hip"
We built electrical infrastructure to the most remote residences just because we could and because it was an investment in our people. We directly funded our massive and formerly world class rail network because we could, and because it would pay off. We built a world class road network half as a make-work project, and it still pays dividends. We purchased Alaska, with no obvious reason. We built a space program to have slightly better nuclear weapons, and it's part of the reason we were so dominant in computer chips for so long.
We have spent something like 40 trillion dollars over the past 25 years, and almost none of it on anything of real value. More than a little of that debt is just handouts to already rich people.
We can build new electric transmission lines and I'm so tired of things that we absolutely 100% can do if we just demand it be done being somehow treated as a problem. America can afford infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification
"Maintenance costs of the lines may be increased by electrification, but many systems claim lower costs due to reduced wear-and-tear on the track from lighter rolling stock. There are some additional maintenance costs associated with the electrical equipment around the track, such as power sub-stations and the catenary wire itself, but, if there is sufficient traffic, the reduced track and especially the lower engine maintenance and running costs exceed the costs of this maintenance significantly."
https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...
It's a really good drivetrain that was unfortunately made untenable for a long time by a combination of regulation and market forces.
Measured in terms of mass * distance, trains with steel wheels will beat anything with rubber pneumatic tires.
Part of the magic of hybrid trains is that you can have multiple generation units that can be turned on or off as needed.
---
Efficiency is just one consideration for a power plant.
Historically, reliability has been more important than efficiency, especially for industrial applications like locomotives. In other words, locomotives are probably not as efficient as they could be. For instance, you could use a lower viscosity engine oil for lubrication, but that would reduce reliability as engines fail due to friction.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a single constant speed and load. But most of the advancements in internal combustion engines over the last 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve timing and lift are probably the most underrated and overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid 30s.
So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope. In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more emissions and product features. You can get the full torque and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak load.
From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to use it in applications for which you just can't use full electrification. Planes are currently the best example of this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just doesn't get much.
The problem with gas is not that burning it doesn’t maximally capture all energy, but that there are externalities to doing so.
It's inefficient but not hilariously so. Modern ICE are quite amazing technology.
Combined gas turbines (you know, the energy source that powers your electric car) are about 60% efficient for the really good ones, minus 5-7% transmission losses, minus 10-12% charging losses, minus 20% loss in cold climates, lands you at around 35-40% efficiency from fuel source to the wheel.
The Atkinson-cycle engine in the Toyota Prius gets around 40% give or take some losses in the drivetrain. Electric have plenty of upsides, but for some people with cheap gas+high electric costs+cold climate you would honestly be better driving a hybrid.
Whenever you do the real world calculation for what an electric cars CO2 profile looks like it turns out to be the same as a gasoline car unless your country is majority nuclear.
Not at all true: https://www.carboncounter.com/
US-specific but you can even pick a state and it will use the generation mix of that state
At night the sun doesn't shine.
The mix is mostly coal or if you're lucky mostly gas.
This is the type of bullshit I mean by doing real world calculations.
For you to prefer charging there your employer only has to charge you less during the day than your utility charges during the night, so the day/night rate arbitrage can easily pay for the metering hardware and installation (at the next opportunity to install without having to dig the parking lot up just for the chargers), with the rest being profit to incentivize the managers to install/offer this.
In my state (idaho) at night the power mixture is primarily renewable/clean because of this.
Not everywhere. My car charges off an average of 80% renewables (mostly hydro and geothermal), right now it's 95%.
But it is definitely something you need to take in to account when purchasing, an EV isn't right for everyone.
You can't pump hot water the same distance you can transmit electricity on HVDC towers.
Like, if you "save energy" by not driving a petrol car, you can't "use the same energy" on electric car, or lighting.. not even prower a generator.
They are not interchangeable.. But this chart encourage us to think them as the same.
For instance: The cost section, wherein 1kWh in the US is figured as having a cost of 9.7 cents.
In reality, it's not that way at all. Unless we're fortunate enough to live in an area where we can walk over to the neighborhood generating station and carry home buckets of freshly-baked electricity to use at home, then we must also pay for delivery.
On average, in 2025, electricity was 17.3 cents per kiloWatt-hour -- delivered -- for residential customers in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
On the costs tab, for the United States: It says that this has a cost of $0.97.
97 cents ÷ 10kWh = 9.7 cents per kWh
(I didn't look further than that. Perhaps I should have.)
---
edit: I now see a note at the very bottom stating that it is using an assumed "$0.17 for electricity".
$0.17 per kWh is plenty close enough for rough figurin', so I'd like to take this opportunity to retract my previous complaint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Gas...
Assuming 33.41 kWh/gallon it takes about 0.3 gallons to get 10 kWh, which costs $0.97 at a pump price of $3.23 per gallon.
The house is getting a split-system air-to-water heat pump with an indirect tank for domestic hot water, so it should cut that down substantially (the unit maxes out at around 3kW input but likely will run longer to recover/preheat).
It turned out that it had been plumbed backwards.
The cost of having an electrician wire that switch is probably more than a little 2.5 watt light will use in it's lifespan - particularly when you account for the fact lights in hallways are probably in use most of the time anyway.
Add in the effort of switching the light switch a few times a day for many years and it's certainly the case! Or the risk of fumbling in the dark for a light switch at the far end of a room or in a house you aren't familiar with.
Obviously you might still want to turn it off for maintenance, but you have the breaker for that.
I think that mostly only applies bulbs without inverters.
They are direct AC bulbs, no inverter needed. They do have smoothing capacitors so they don't flicker, and I think a slight redesign of the drive circuitry could add ~10% more efficiency...
Here's a post that makes an estimate:
https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
> So, if I wanted to analogize the energy usage of my use of coding agents, it’s something like running the dishwasher an extra time each day, keeping an extra refrigerator, or skipping one drive to the grocery store in favor of biking there. To me, this is very different than, in Benjamin Todd’s words, “a terrible reason to avoid” this level of AI use. These are the sorts of things that would make me think twice.
At any rate, the power usage will become more apparent when these products stop being subsidised, where power usage is being charged to the end user.
I also was under the impression that queries cost were mostly meaningless, but it seemed only is true for fresh sessions and short queries. I have to say, the result is less dramatic than I expected but still more significant for heavy users (such as myself).
When you look at people's energy usage, quite a lot of it ends up being the embodied energy in the stuff they buy. For quite a lot of people, it's probably the largest category of energy consumption. I once had a very rough go at calculating this here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/
This source[0] says
> One Bitcoin now requires 854,400 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce. For comparison, the average U.S. home consumes about 10,500 kWh per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, April 2025, meaning that mining a single Bitcoin in 2026 uses as much electricity as 81.37 years of residential energy use.
Edit: made a chart with this data, but adding in a bitcoin transaction[2]
[0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
https://bsky.app/profile/davidho.bsky.social/post/3mga7uhxnd...
Even an eBike is way, way more efficient than a gas-powered car, and causes orders of magnitude less wear and tear on the road.
And by the look of it, that'll be the norm pretty much forever - unless something fundamental about how models can be trained/updated, an "older" model loses value as it's knowledge becomes out of date, even if we no longer get improvements from other sources or techniques.
But other things likely change based on "lifetimes" and usage patterns too - e.g. a large battery for an electric car may have a higher upfront energy cost in manufacturing than a small ICE + fuel tank, but presumably there's a mileage that the improved per-mile efficiency overcomes that, and then continues to gain with each additional mile.
The washing machine seems also inefficient.
My dryer is also a lot more efficient than theirs, at least if Miele's app is to be believed about how much it uses each cycle.
The author is in the UK, so they probably looked at a product like [1] which is "ideal for rooms 16-26m²" and has cooling power consumption of 1005W.
Residential air conditioning in the UK often involves small, noisy units that are only used for a few weeks at the height of summer. They'll have a thermostat built in, sure, but the user will eagerly turn them off when the room's cool just to get some quiet.
Wow dude, your room is very-very poorly insulated. Having a 2700W heater turned on constantly just for one room is a lot. If it's 0C outside and 20C inside, a typical room should not lose more than 500W, but better be in 200--400W range .
Where does that electric car's energy come from?
Suppose the electric car's energy is solar. Then driving the electric car consumes zero barrels of oil, and so is infinitely more renewable than the petrol car. Or how efficient is the electric car at capturing available energy? Maybe the petrol car is 20% efficient at capturing available oil reserve energy. But the electric car is like 1e-30% efficient at capturing available solar output. Incomparable.
This is only "true" if the energy stored in the vehicle's battery got there without any relevant conversion inefficiency; If those joules came from a gas-fired plant, overall efficiency is only about 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.
It's not a direct analogue to energy but CO2 emissions per km are roughly 4 times lower for an EV charged on the EU grid in 2025, well to wheel.
Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.
(With caveats like heat pumps are much less effective in extreme cold)
You can get that up to 7 or 8 watts (or more!) per watt with evaporative cooling towers and vapor-compression combined.
AFAIK you can’t move heat into somewhere using cooling towers, they only increase cooling efficiency.
Heat pump heating is limited to around 4W of heat moved for every 1W of electricity, with the efficiency dropping as delta T drops (aka as it gets colder outside)
You can generate 1 watt of heat with 1 watt of electricity and a resistive heater, they’re more or less 100% efficient.
Physically, it makes sense, but its sort of counter intuitive in terms of utility. You might imagine the tools with the most utility use the most energy.I think thats how many people think of it.
The GPU alone is probably pulling close to 0.2Wh per second.
My (admittedly old) gpu+CPU idles around 50-75w.
Ryzen + GPU + 1h of gaming, but 3 screens attached.
still a "desktop computer" - stuff in the browser can spike GPU wattage, but I don't think it will be meaningfully different over several hours of true idle..
My problem is more like: I could measure that, but I'd have to recable everything to have the power meter behind the power strip with just PC + screens... which I will probably do at some point, but it involves redoing 50% of the cables in this room.
I think lists like these might be useful for energy audits and thinking about ways to make better use of energy
You can’t get more than 35-40% efficiency so converting to electricity is a wash, you lose the energy to heat no matter what.
Also, the chart does not take into account how the electricity for the EV is generated, it would be just as inefficient as the gasoline car if the electricity was generated by burning hydrocarbons, but that detail is left out.
I'm not sure how many queries is equivalent to an hour of Claude code use, but maybe 5 seconds, which means an hour of continuous use = 216 Wh, or ~50x less than an electric car.
OP has a longer article about LLM energy usage: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
For a long input of n tokens from a model with N active parameters, the cost should scale as O(N n^2) (this is due to computing attention - for non-massive n, the O(N n) term is bigger, which is why API costs per token are fixed until a certain point and then start to rise). From the estimates from [1], it's around 40Wh for n=100k, N=100B. I multiply by 2.5 to account for Opus probably being ~2.5x larger than gpt-4o, and also multiply by 2 to pessimistically assume we're always close to Opus's soft context limit of 200k (it's possible to get a bigger context for extra cost, but I suspect people compact aggresively to not have to use it). That gets me 7.2J/t, which at a rough throughput estimate of 20t/s gives me power of 144W. Like a powerful CPU or a mediocre GPU, and still orders of magnitude lower than a car.
[1] https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...
"A lot of energy used for cooling": hyperscale data centers use the least cooling per unit of compute capacity, 2-3x less than small data centers and 10-100x less than a home computer.
"Water consumption is enormous": America withdraws roughly 300 billion gallons of fresh water daily, of which IT loads are expected to grow to 35-50 billion gallons annually by 2028. Data center water demands are less than a rounding error.
"distributed and does not suffer from the same problems": technically correct I guess but distributed consumption has its own problems that are arguably more severe than centralized power consumption.
https://imgur.com/a/https-ohmaticelectrical-co-uk-scams-OmLx...
(The scammer didn't actually manage to put anything in my clipboard, so I'm not sure what they were hoping I'd run.)
- AI related values of course
- elevators, escalators
- traffic signals, street lights
That seems low...
Next.
I can do my laundry at night because the electricity is cheaper.. oh wait I can’t. That’s apparently unsafe. So I have to do it in the evening. Okay. I’m not going to move my whole small freetime evening around to save a buck on the half-evening long wash cycle. So nevermind that.
The nagging about turning off all the lights were always a consumer blaming ritual that doesn’t matter.
Turning the lights off made a lot of sense in the 1990s and earlier, when each bulb was 60W.
That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.
If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.
As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken.
Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality.
That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.
And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?
It's like worrying about how many times you personally ordered Chinese food affects the price of Diesel fuel in India. It's an absurd leap of logic, and the parent is right to call out these arguments which are almost always emotional.
Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.
> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals
Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.
Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.
Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?
Focus your thinking on solving/promoting energy production instead!
Why are people so gullible?
And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.
Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.
You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.
If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”
Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector.
The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.
I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.
Freedom is Slavery,
Facts are Whitewashing.
You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is biased towards LLM than that.
It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.
- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution
- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
2. > most of this will be done just to sell more ads
Are you predicting that the value of ads is going to increase by a number of magnitudes? Because 30,000+ Wh of electricity has a quite significant cost, and even a video ad currently only earns pennies, so I'm trying to imagine how the math would work in this scenario?