this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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So households will pay higher prices because of this shortage. It's time to separate markets and prices between vital and non vital stuff and make the non vital market bear the costs of these higher prices. That makes it more fair.
Also why can't these datacenters be in the desert? Use daytime solar and wind down at night. Follow the sun.
The study this cites has data centre (so not just AI but all internet stuff) rising to 300TWh by 2030. Two years ago the USA's power usage was 4000TWh a year. So in about 6 years time they estimate that data centres will be using about 8% of 2022's electricity usage, up from currently about 4%. An increase sure, but hardly one that's going to move electricity prices significantly.
I can't find the source but I remember an article thatdiscussed the rate solar energy is adopted. The researchers made lower and upper bound predictions, and what if all solar PV development stopped immediately. The worst case scenario based on availabile data suggested a three fold increase in solar PV electricity generation, the number used by the article you cited, to a best case scenario of solar PV increasing to the power of three, really big exponential growth. Now the optimistic model seemed a bit too optimistic for me, but it at least suggested that there is a lot more capacity to build out solar PV. If that capacity is realized or wasted was the biggest unknown factor in that study, which like duh. Still, I took it to mean that the future will probably be a little bit more optimistic than the most pessimistic projections. It's a small comfort.