Essay by Eric Worrall
Tech giants which in public virtue signal their commitment to useless renewables are quietly arranging more potent and reliable energy sources for their own needs.
Don’t let a hyper-data center suck up CT’s electric power
by Bryan SaylesApril 19, 2024 @ 12:01 am
Fred V. Carstensen’s March 22 “Opinion: CT SB299—afraid of the future, data centers and AI” ignores the legislative events and legitimate concerns that led to SB-299 being introduced in the first place.
For starters, House Bill 6514 (HB-6514), a law passed in 2021, incentivizes data center development. Under HB-6514, any data center built or rehabilitated in Connecticut does not pay property or sales and use tax for the life of the facility, typically 20 to 30 years. Instead, it is required to pay the host municipality a Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT), an often absurdly low fee negotiated with the host municipality.
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Siphoning 15% of nuclear power production to power Quinn’s Waterford data center will create grid scarcity. Instead of selling full capacity to the grid wholesale market, Dominion will only be offering 85% of daily capacity. That shortage will handicap wholesale electricity markets run by Independent System Operator-New England (ISO-New England).
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Read more: https://ctmirror.org/2024/04/19/ct-data-center-nuclear-plant-bill/
15% of the capacity of a nuclear power plant, for one data center? No wonder they are quietly sidelining wind and solar.
I decided to delve more deeply into this nuclear tech center controversy. Turns out all the tech giants want properly reliable energy for their data centers.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft signal growing interest in nuclear, geothermal power
Rising demand from artificial intelligence is forcing big technology companies to look beyond wind and solar for clean energy.
By Heather Clancy
March 25, 2024The push to commercialize artificial intelligence is swelling the electricity demands of the three biggest cloud computing companies — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — and they’re looking for carbon-free energy, including nuclear and geothermal, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from that growth.
In mid-March, Talen Energy announced a $650 million deal with Amazon Web Services to sell a data center powered by one of the largest U.S. nuclear plants. The Pennsylvania campus hosts a 48-megawatt computing facility, and Amazon plans to build a 960-megawatt campus there.
“To supplement our wind and solar energy projects, which depend on weather conditions to generate energy, we’re also exploring new innovations and technologies, and investing in other sources of clean, carbon-free energy,” Amazon said in a statement. “This agreement with Talen Energy is one project in that effort.”
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From Times of India;
How AI may force Google, Microsoft and others to push their nuclear energy game plan
Sourabh Kulesh / TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Mar 8, 2024, 14:14 IST
Tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft are working to become carbon neutral in their operations by 2030. But as the next-gen AI technology grows, offices and data centres are becoming more energy-hungry. As per a report published last year, by 2027 AI servers may use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (Twh) annually – which approximately equal to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year.
To solve this problem, these companies have been pushing for nuclear energy as a source to power their AI tech.
“If you were to integrate large language models, GPT-style models into search engines, it’s going to cost five times as much environmentally as standard search,” Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group focused on the social impacts of AI, recently told CNBC.
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Last year, Microsoft agreed to buy power from Helion starting in 2028. Microsoft signed a deal last summer with Constellation, a top nuclear power plant operator, to add nuclear-generated electricity to its Virginia data centers.
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Don’t forget, these are the same hypocrites who until recently were ignoring nuclear in public and pushing renewables, until they suddenly discovered they themselves needed reliable, industrial scale energy.
From Google;
Five years of 100% renewable energy – and a look ahead to a 24/7 carbon-free future
June 24, 2022
Google operates the cleanest cloud in the industry, and we have long been a leading champion of clean energy around the world. Since we began purchasing renewable energy in 2010, Google has been responsible for more than 60 new clean energy projects with a combined capacity of over 7 gigawatts — about the same as 20 million solar panels. Our long-term support for clean energy projects has contributed to the rapid growth of the industry, remarkable declines in the cost of solar and wind power, and innovative new contracting models and industry partnerships to accelerate corporate clean energy procurement.
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Read more: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy
Microsoft;
Advocating for decarbonization of the power sector
Aug 16, 2023 | Michelle Patron – Senior Director of Global Sustainability Policy
This month, Seattle hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Senior Officials’ and Ministerial Meetings, and Microsoft was honored to welcome the APEC member energy ministers and their delegations to our campus for a private-sector decarbonization roundtable.
APEC’s member economies play a critical role in advancing Microsoft’s and the world’s clean energy goals. The 21 economies account for more than half the world’s energy demand and over two-thirds’ the world’s electricity generation.
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At Microsoft, our long-term vision is to reach a state where, on all the world’s grids, 100% of our electricity, 100% of the time, is generated from zero-carbon sources. On the path to reaching this vision, our target is to cover 100% of Microsoft’s load with renewable energy purchases by 2025; meaning that we plan to have clean energy contracted for 100 percent of carbon emitting electricity consumed by all our data centers, buildings, and campuses.
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Soon it won’t just be the tech giants.
Large data centres will continue to be a part of the AI revolution, but you can’t do everything via a connection to a remote data center. No imaginable internet network could carry all the data traffic which would be required to do everything remotely. So a lot of AI hardware will have to be installed in homes, right next to where it is used, to realise the full potential of the AI revolution.
Computer manufacturers are already anticipating this demand for AI in the home, and are rushing to market with AI ready desktop and laptop computers. They are developing PCs filled with power hungry AI chips capable of efficiently executing massively parallel neural net programs, in addition to the usual graphics chips and CPUs.
While initially these “AI ready” products will be quite rightly derided as a joke, a product looking for a purpose, it won’t take long for programmers and entrepreneurs to make them more interesting. The hunt is already on for the breakthrough software app which drives the next cycle of PC upgrades. I anticipate over the next 10 – 30 years power hungry AI systems will become increasingly integrated with all our lives, and everyone’s energy needs will surge.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of the surge in energy supply levels ordinary households could demand in the near future. As our houses will fill with machines which take care of everyday chores without any human intervention at all, the promise of AI is that within most of our lifetimes, everyone will have the opportunity to live like the rich people of today who have teams of servants looking out for all their needs, providing household energy supplies keep up with demand.
In the rush to automate everything, politicians who stand for green power rather than more power will be brushed aside.
Of course, with every household running AI systems which emit thousands of watts of heat on a near continuous basis, people in urban areas will need more powerful air conditioners as well to deal with all that additional waste heat.
Imagine a large inner city apartment block, where every apartment’s energy use over the course of less than a decade goes up by an additional 3-4 thousand watts. That one large apartment block could be pumping megawatts of extra heat into the surrounding environment over today’s heat emissions, once all the near future AI toys are installed. And of course, that apartment block won’t be alone, all their neighbours will be doing the same. This coupled demand for energy and more air conditioning will likely create a positive feedback cycle of increasing energy use and urban heating, along with ever more powerful air conditioners to push back the rising urban heat load dumped into the environment by all those newly installed AI systems. The pump motors in those bigger air conditioners will themselves contribute to the surge in urban heat pollution.
My prediction, when the AI revolution really kicks in and reaches into every corner of everyone’s lives, the only reason for say installing rooftop solar will be if you need a small topup, because you can’t suck enough electricity out of the grid to run all your toys.
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