[robnado]

This is an economics problem: if the cost of energy is lower or equal to the benefit of consuming it, the energy will be consumed. As more and more energy is consumed to run these datacenters, price of energy will go up, and datacenters will learn to either be more efficient, or will pass on these costs to their users who will learn to be more efficient. Of course, there might be inefficiencies like subsidies and monopolies that distort the market for energy for a while, but in the long run, this is a self-fixing problem.

[crowcroft]

Are environmental externalities accounted for? How do we accurately measure the 'benefit' of something when it's still largely speculative (ie. AI is not providing as much value RIGHT NOW, but we think it will in the future).

Economic problems are rarely just economic problems, and saying that it will resolve itself in the long term is dismissive and offers no value to the discussion.

[api]

That's why high-carbon sources like coal and oil should be subject to carbon taxes: to price in externalities.

[Litost]

Not a carbon tax as such, but the supreme court in the UK recently ruled in favour of an activist lead challenge to stop Surrey County Council from ignoring the environmental cost, when granting permission to dig four new oil wells, in what is seen as a landmark case.

Emissions from burning the fuel had been ignored but will now need to be taken into account.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/2...

[fulafel]

We're too late for this to be the main model, we need to ramp down fossils usage way faster than can have carbon taxes happen in most of the world. (Eg when would USA realistically stop/decimate oil and gas production?)

[crowcroft]

I 100% agree. A carbon tax is a purely capitalist thing to do, and by not having one you incentivize bad outcomes.

[Veedrac]

The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.

[crowcroft]

Even if that's true, why would we only price in the externalities of new energy?

If we have a coal plant and add one wind farm we still have one coal plant.

[Veedrac]

Because the article is in context of new demand.

[crowcroft]

I'm just not sure if that's a helpful way to look at it though because we don't know the counterfactual. If we didn't generate new demand would we still have created more renewable energy and shut down non-renewable energy sources.

I suppose it's fair to say energy demand will always go up, and if all new energy creation is renewable then when you extrapolate to a limit the amount of energy from non-renewable sources is an infinitely small percentage of all energy production? I don't know if that is a fair way to model the future though.

[Veedrac]

The price of renewables scale down as demand rises, and the capacity we have building them is growing at an exponential rate at least somewhat capped by demand. It follows that if you want to displace existing power sources, you're probably better off driving demand up, because that lowers their price and makes replacement more economically attractive.

As long as you're not driving demand up faster than the industry is able to increase its rate of scaling (which doesn't yet seem the case with AI, though that's not to say it couldn't be at some point), this should help a renewable transition.

Another effect is that you push issues that arise in transition earlier. For example, the sooner you have a lot of solar on the grid, the sooner grid-scale batteries are incentivized, and the sooner battery production scales. This feeds back into the feasibility and profitability of replacing existing nonrenewable sources.

A simple example where this effect is very clear is synthetic fuels. Synthetics don't compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis yet, but from an energy basis they're getting close. There's an obvious demand phase change once you hit that price point, and the sooner you hit it the better. If you believe the scaling trends, and I think you broadly should, more solar brings that point forward and so is clearly environmentally beneficial.

[IMTDb]

Lithium extraction to build millions of solar panels, batteries etc is not a 0 impact operation.

[wkat4242]

Solar panel production doesn't use lithium. They're made from sand and a lot of energy. A bit like silicon wafers.

You might mean the storage to keep those data centers running throughout the night though and yeah. But this problem is not very big in the scope of other battery challenges like transportation. Because for data centers you don't need the best energy per weight or volume which you do need in a car.

And there's other sources of renewable energy too.

[Veedrac]

Hence why I said “displacement effects are likely to dominate [...] the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.”...

[GaggiX]

Well good news you don't need lithium to build solar panels.

[Spooky23]

This is a straw man usually used by anti electric car people.

There’s always an impact. If you had a sandwich for lunch, the wheat in the bread destroyed a grassland somewhere.

Usually in context of energy, we’re talking about carbon impact.

[ben_w]

Yes, however the economic situation develops not necessarily to most people's advantage.

A (hypothetical) AI that can perform any intellectual labour at for an energy cost of 1 kWh to produce output at the quality and quantity levels of a median human working for an hour, at $0.1/kWh is going to be a better economic choice than 50% of humans on earth even if those humans cut their wage demands to the UN abject poverty threshold.

But at the same time, there's not (currently) enough electricity for 50% of the world's people to be replaced by such AI regardless of the price.

Thus energy prices rise until the machine labour is as expensive as the human labour.

But that likely results in a lot of people even above that threshold no longer being able to afford to keep the lights on.

If we only get this AI quality/cost/generality level around 2031-ish, that may be fine, because renewables are on an exponential growth curve and around then exceed current global demand all by themselves.

[zdp7]

The issue is an environmental one. The cost here is environmental damage. The solution will need to be policy decisions that take that damage into account.

[robnado]

That's why much of the world is gradually shifting over to renewable energy usage. In a world where energy is renewable, does not generate greenhouse gas and (hopefully) does not produce other externalities, our best way of dealing with these resource allocation problems is the free market.

The alternative is regulation, which, I'm not even sure how it could be used to address this particular issue. Ban AI or crypto? Humans will find new ways to waste vast amounts of energy with computers. Require that computers have a certain efficiency rating of megaflops/joules? People will use more of this now far more efficient computing, resulting in more overall usage. Require corporations to be audited for energy efficiency and be certified? Goodbye all small players that cannot handle all the overhead of such legislation.

[keyringlight]

The trouble I see is that new consumption matching (or even some locations where proposed DCs exceed) new green generation may not let us displace dirty generation such as coal, which we should be looking to eliminate.

The other issue that comes up with green generation is how variable it is, sometimes it'll be cloudy and still air, others will be windy and sunny, and the grid needs to capable of supplying everyone in both scenarios and not overbuilding generation they can't turn off. Having industries available to soak up an appropriate amount of energy available within their ecosystem would be great, but it's a hard sell to anyone to invest billions in sites where there could be no guarantees on utilization if they get bad weather for a few months. If there is any "plays nicely with others" regulation on consumption of a common resource, it's going to be reactive to problems than ahead of time.

[samatman]

The solution to all of these problems is an aggressive buildout of nuclear fission plants to provide baseline power and accelerate the closure of all remaining plants which burn fossil fuel. Subsidized if necessary, as essential infrastructure.

[TheDudeMan]

Which is better -- subsidize what you perceive to be the solution or tax what is known to be the problem (carbon emissions)?

[samatman]

Infrastructure is routinely subsidized because of the benefits it brings. Taxing the problem can help pay for that subsidy, that has some hazards because now government revenue depends on carbon emissions, but it can be part of the solution, sure. Tax revenue all goes in the same bucket no matter what the government claims.

It helps that the actual electrical generators don't care where the steam is coming from, so we could be leveraging the gensets from decommissioned coal plants in fission reactors. All that's missing is the political will.

[jncfhnb]

Tax data center usage

[teitoklien]

And watch the entire compute infrastructure and industry of vital importance (state of the art compute capabilities in AI) move to other nations and then later end up being dependent on them.

[jncfhnb]

State of the art compute capabilities, aka hardware, is already built in other nations.

Mandating domestically owned servers is commonplace.

And this was in response to someone whose best idea was “ban ai”

[TheDudeMan]

Is the problem the data center or is the problem carbon emissions?

How about tax the carbon emissions.

[xnx]

It would be great if more externalities were priced in to the cost of energy, but there doesn't seem to be anything special about AI datacenters vs. any other use of energy. Data centers actually seem much more consciences about the impacts of their energy. I don't think I've read any headlines about cement plants trying to switch to 100% renewable.

[FreeRadical]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxee01m5yero.amp

[jononor]

Everyone else has to pay the price that data centers are willing to as well. And they can afford quite high prices before having margin troubles - likely much higher than what we as residents want to pay for energy.

[teitoklien]

This is on the assumption that supply will continue to remain constrained, excess energy usage, might as well be the investments necessary to shift to more Solar Panels and renewable energy storage, high compute intensive workloads can be executed anywhere, higher energy usage, might as well incentivise optimising AI, Research and Other Compute-intensive training workloads to shift to day time, when solar power peaks, and process everything during that time. The capabilities that this unlocks are tons, driving more investment into advanced battery tech, solar tech, etc.

Higher Consumption also drives investments to generate Higher Supply and hence future surplus and improvements in standard of living.

[jononor]

Yes, you are right in that. However we are not yet seeing much uptake in very flexible compute that works only during high energy production. And while I would love to see it, I am not sure we will anytime soon. One reason is capital costs of the compute equipment - if one only runs 25% of the time (daily solar peaks) - then it takes 4x as long to pay back the equipment. And we are still improving energy efficiency of compute a lot over time, so upgrading the equipment often is very beneficial in terms of TCO. Longer payback times is in conflict with that.

[add-sub-mul-div]

In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

[TheDudeMan]

(people sing a different tune when the power consumer is bitcoin miners)

[ben_w]

Bitcoin network produces exactly the same number of bitcoins over time regardless of how much power it consumes; AI, even if you are unimpressed by the quality, does actually make more stuff when more energy is consumed.