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by DANmode 34 days ago
> further reduce the ridiculously low amount of money that consumers get for selling their excess solar power back to the grid.

Batteries are cheaper every week.

Time to build kWh Victory gardens.

2 comments

In Germany its getting insane right now. A lot of the time energy at noon is negative. https://blog.stromflix.com/price-of-power
A price signal that noon is a great time to do AI inference. Unfortunately, people often want AI inference done at other times than noon, when electricity isn't negatively-priced because of abundant solar panels making it in broad sunshine.
I am sometimes wondering wouldn't the most economic thing to be to geographically distribute AI computing. Latencies can be large, but power could be cheaper if the loads are just moved around the globe as needed. This would mean that hardware sits powered off or in very low power state for larger chunk of day, but maybe that is acceptable in some scenario.
This is very likely already happening as customers of data centers doing various types of AI compute schedule their workloads to minimize their own costs.

If data center compute usage was systematically cheaper around local noon wherever in the world that data center happens to be, customers who could tolerate high latency would move their compute jobs from data center to data center as the earth spins to keep their compute happening in the cheap solar energy zone. Or maybe this is a pricing model that doesn't quite exist yet at scale, but that data center operators will introduce where and when they can as more and more solar generation for data centers comes online.

Or maybe it's not actually cost-effective because moving jobs into and out of data centers is so expensive that even the electricity/compute cost savings don't actually offset it. This is ultimately a question for the entity actually paying for the compute and responding to the price signal.

> I am sometimes wondering wouldn't the most economic thing to be to geographically distribute AI computing

Yeah, super-edge compute.

Like…the LLMs shipping with every computer right now? =]

I think a Powerwall is in my future...