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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

To put that in perspective my house uses an average of 1300kWh per month. Adding 30kWh per month would be an increase of 2.3% at a cost of around $4.20, not enough to notice.

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Do you live in the US? You should know in that case that the US is already one of the most wasteful energy users on the planet, far ahead of most other developed countries, even.

So potentially increasing energy usage even more, especially with likely token usage acceleration, is hardly reason for celebration.

No one is celebrating and using LLMs isn't necessarily a waste of energy. Where I live isn't relevant, LLMs use the same amount of power regardless of where their users are. You also know nothing about how I use electricity in my home, how I monitor my overall energy use and carbon output, and how I offset it.

> You also know nothing about how I use electricity in my home

I don't

> Where I live isn't relevant,

But where you live does matter. Average monthly household energy usage in the EU is 200-400 kWh. In the US it's more like 800-900kWh. So what you consider "normal energy usage" may vary considerably by where you live.

At 200-400kWh total usage, 30kwh starts to look a lot more significant. So you should at least consider the possibility that it's not that energy usage from AI is insignificant, but that your existing energy usage is wasteful.

You're American and the same 2.3% of energy you use would probably represents 5-10% of what the average Japanese person uses, and likely 15-20% of what the average Indian or Ethiopian uses.

My point isn't to attack you personally (I'd rather attack your country's disastrous energy policies) but to point out that LLMs will constitute a huge increase in our energy consumption at a time where we haven't transitioned to renewable energy and we're probably 20-30 away from it.

> my house uses an average of 1300kWh per month.

And the average European house uses like 3000kwh.... per year. We're already wasting insane amount of energy, adding 2-10% more is definitely huge

Neuralwatt prices proportional to the energy used (to cover all the non-energy costs). 30 kWh is $200 of service.

Sure, they have to cover their other costs and make money. I was trying to put the energy use in perspective.

for me it’s more an environmental consideration than financial? Passivhaus Standard for houses is about 50kWh/m²/year, so 30kWh is getting close to 10% of total

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