[dopylitty]

>But alot of the new non-fossil energy production is now added to the existing energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels.

This is a really good point that worries me quite a bit as well. Energy is essentially fungible so any energy used by wasteful and pointless endeavors such as cryptocurrency mining or model training is energy that's not going toward reducing our use of fossil fuels. Worse it's energy that still has externalities associated with production and storage such as mining for solar/batteries destroying natural areas and hydroelectric impacting river ecosystems.

Fossil fuels should be phased out ASAP and the way to do that is to stop increasing energy usage and to ensure renewable energy is used only for activities that are actually necessary such as food production and heating/cooling.

As someone working in the "cloud computing" industry I see companies spending huge amounts of energy to index non-production logs they'll never look at. I see developers wasting huge amounts of energy to create useless models for generating content nobody will ever look at. I see companies leaving huge infrastructures running 24/7 just in case someone might want to get an Ad served at 3am. And I see the enormous grey data center housing all that junk that now sits nearby where there used to be a pristine forest full of wildlife.

>Close by where I live (45 min drive), Google is building a huge server park that will require approximately 5% of Norways total electricity production.

It's amazing how much these things consume and at the end of the day they aren't doing anything of value. Communities really need to come together to prevent new data centers and remove existing ones.