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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number".

For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.

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Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.

The problem is we need to be reducing our use of highly polluting energy sources and shifting to renewable sources.

The more our energy use increases the harder it is to do so.

Going by those figures, would mean that AI datacenters built so far, consume enough energy to undo almost a year of solar power buildout. AND growing like crazy. That's running costs. Not energy going into a building's construction or fabrication of the gear going in there.

Does seem like a problem worth worrying about.

The obvious solution here is for datacenter buildouts to include the power generation necessary for them to operate. Here in Nevada that's exactly what quite a few of the larger datacenter companies (Switch, Google, Apple, etc.) have been doing, whether by outright building solar farms themselves or by signing PPAs with geothermal companies like Ormat. That's indeed how these companies are able to advertise their datacenters as powered by “100% renewables” despite NV Energy's grid power mix including non-renewables (namely natural gas).

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