Ideally, the folks who request the new plants and transmission lines pay for them, but it appears tech cos are attempting to pass the transmission cost burden onto residential consumers.
The article referred to driving prices up from 2020 due to making the infrastructure stronger by as much as 30%. Which, yeah, about 150ish of your bill.
It is less clear on how much it will need to go up because of increased demand? The prediction is 8%. Which, again, not nothing. But it is telling that there is more increase from infrastructure than there is generation? I don't know that that will change?
Granted, my memory is largely from when we lived in a smaller house.
I'm not claiming that you don't. Or that you shouldn't. I'm genuinely curious on where the main use of electricity is.
To add numbers, an AC can use up to 5000 watts. That is literally 10x a refrigerator. Over 100x what a TV uses. The car, I'd guess is using a lot. But where are you using that much energy without AC?
That is, even compared to your 5x energy costs, I should have been paying more to keep a decent sized house running with AC in GA since I almost certainly had more than that multiplier on my usage?
Add in a fridge, cooking equipment, water heating, leaving a server on, etc., and it should be straightforward to get to that number.
About the only other large power use thing I could think of would be a pool?
Searching also shows average power bills in CA are 160? If focused on LA, it would be 200ish? What is putting some folks here so far above average? Was that the quarterly bill? I know we get bills every few months.
My guess is that most people don't have AC or are sensitive to price increases and choose not to run it. There's also multiple electricity providers in the state; NorCal uses PG&E and SoCal uses Edison.
For a variety of complicated and corruption-related reasons, PG&E has jacked rates through the roof in an absolutely unconscionable way and Edison's rates have only increased by a lot.
Also what are you doing? Running a flux capacitor?
PG&E works with a capture PUC and cost plus accounting where the only way for the company to increase profits is to drive up expenses.
> In the coming years, artificial intelligence could turbocharge those increases
the cost of residential power is going up because of the shift away from natural gas towards solar
failing to admit this or worse lying about it is not going to actually help long term
Solar with batteries that provide power year long are so expensive they do not exist.
At most you get one day of battery.
As far as that goes, i'd love to see a well researched breakdown of just what percentage of LLM technology is actually being used for anything productive, and what percentage is just being pissed into industrialized spam.
LLMs even have the whole crime angle neatly covered, considering all the innovative uses they're being put to by the same people who brought us ransoms paid in crypto. Would be interesting to see the numbers on how that breaks down too.
When a company requires lot more energy, power plants are expected to produce lot more.
When a power plant produce a lot, the low consumption rates tend to get cheaper. It's gets cheaper to produce energy as the demand increases.
This is, of course, considering the input material is not scarce, like hydro power plants or wind power. Everything else (coal, oil, nuclear, gas, solar) should be easy to increase supply/demand.
grafmax•5mo ago
kolinko•5mo ago
rambojohnson•5mo ago
arghwhat•5mo ago
Also note that there's other cooling solutions than evaporative cooling, such as closed loop water cooling with chillers, cooling with sea water, using heat pumps to redirect the heat to district heating loops (making use of the heat!), just building in colder places requiring less cooling, etc.
cma•5mo ago
aurareturn•5mo ago
We have limited carbon neutral energy production.
croes•5mo ago
https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...
rambojohnson•5mo ago
arghwhat•5mo ago
It's very stupid to evaporate potable water on purpose in dry regions, but note that many numbers in this area are highly sensationalized by taking e.g. the maximum design capacity of the cooling system instead of the actual load, and that there are several other cooling solutions. Most proper facts die tragic deaths before they make it to mainstream news media. :/
croes•5mo ago
arghwhat•5mo ago
Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed. Evaporation from a datacenter is unlikely to make any notable impact through water vapor. What it could impact is highly localized potable water availability and humidity in places with e.g. low precipitation and limited reservoir capacity.
And, again, note that other cooling methods are also in use, and that other things also use evaporative cooling.
Heck, even when evaporative cooling is used, it doesn't necessarily mean that the water escapes into the atmosphere! Both heat pipes and refrigeration cycles are forms of evaporative cooling where the gas is allowed to condense, cool and evaporate again.
croes•5mo ago
> Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed.
And CO2 is constantly released too. The point are the additional released greenhouse gases
BTW we kind of boycott sunlight, it’s called sunscreen
arghwhat•5mo ago
The issue with greenhouse gasses is their potent impact combined with long lifetime. CO2 has to be slowly absorbed by e.g. plants, and adding more does not speed up the process unlike for water vapor.
You also cannot evaporate past 100% relative humidity, an amount of water saturation that naturally occurs. This is unlike gas emissions, where the sky is the limit.
> BTW we kind of boycott sunlight, it’s called sunscreen
Unless you're applying it to the sun, that's not boycotting sunlight, it's adapting to it. Not to mention that your skin requires sunlight, sunscreen just avoids overexposure.
grafmax•5mo ago
While some reports may be sensationalized we deceive ourselves if we conclude that the water scarcity problem as a mirage. It’s a real problem.
esafak•5mo ago