All of the data centers in the US combined use 4% of total electric load.
This map shows readings from about 770,000 home sensors, with red zones indicating areas with the most distorted power.
Bloomberg News analyzed data from about 770,000 Ting sensors from Whisker Labs, which are plugged into homes across the country, to better understand the distribution and severity of an important power-quality measure known as total harmonic distortion (THD). A lower THD is better.
Good large source of data, but possibly misleading about the severity of the problem (as well as the source being somewhat dubious as it’s from a private company).
I’m from Washington and was actually surprised at how small the problem is in the Seattle area and surrounding compared to the rest of the country. We have explosive data center growth here that seems ill represented by this map.
Further, a lot of the massive data centers in Washington are actually on the Eastern side of the state, particularly in Wenatchee, which on this map is just basically entirely black. The small line of spots on the East side of the state seems more in line with Yakima/Tri-Cities/Spokane while not really including the more rural Wenatchee/Chelan area. I wish you could zoom in more on this map so I could do a proper overlay to see what areas are being missed.
Is that because it’s mostly rural and not a lot of the rural residents have the money to be adding home-sensors to be testing their energy and whether its “clean?” Like seriously, that seems more like a wealthy-people service, I had never heard of Whisker Labs or Ting before now. So not only is the data going to be limited to bigger cities (so like so many maps its really just a fucking population map), but it’s going to miss every area that isn’t as wealthy.
So Wenatchee is sparsely populated, shows up as basically black on the map, but is also home to some of the largest bitcoin mining datacenters in the state, if not the largest. Part of the reason they set up there is the cheap electricity due to close proximity to hydroelectric power. Because the population is small, more rural, and generally poorer, there’s fewer sensors showing higher THD in the area.
So anyway, a lot of words to say that this problem may be even more serious than this map shows, because there’s a lot that this map isn’t showing including the explosion of data centers in more rural areas with cheap electricity, where there not be as many rich folks with Ting sensors.
I was going to point out that Seattle’s electricity usage is small on the map but the datacenters are going to Wenatchee and Quincy. The state has plans to remove dams and switch more to wind but the massive investment in datacenters for AI is going to derail that.
Power use by the Washington/Oregon data center cluster was almost entirely covered by a local surplus of hydropower until a couple years ago. That might be why it looks different from elsewhere.
Once again, not the faulty of the technology. Don’t blame your shitty infrastructure on ai
If you’re doing a massive load increase, build out emissions-free generation to match. Some mix of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and geothermal would do fine. Otherwise, don’t do the big load increase.
I’ll go the opposite way. The fact that there are serious plans to spin up nuclear reactors to run nothing but AI datacenters is ridiculous.
As much as I think this is a great solution and should be written into law, the anti-ai crowd only asks it from one industry and it’s a clear sign of bias.
Not to mention that the big companies are literally doing it, either building new nuclear plants or restarting old ones. They aren’t the one holding green energy back, the oil cartel and their corrupt politicians are.
One industry? People are so mad at AI because it’s just another industry, a new one with massive environmental impact, and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists. It’s the absolute worst face of the tech sector, and totally deserving of all the hate it receives.
and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists
This shows you think all AI are LLMs or generative art. Those are only the most visible faces of the tech, and you’re showing your name ignorance of the field.
If you want to talk about machine learning in general, that’s a different conversation. Like it or not, colloquially, AI is LLMs and chatbots
How exactly is the rest of AI a different conversation??? Were talking about the power requirements of running AI at scale and somehow you think it’s not only correct but implied that this convo should just be about colloquial parts AI and anything else is a totally different topic in regards to power consumption?
totally deserving of the hate it gets
Yeah so breakthroughs in chemistry and other sciences for example, deserving of hate eh?
Nothing good comes from AI… when all you know about AI is colloquial lmao
basically no real use
"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.”
Also, will you get mad at the next new industry? I highly doubt it.
People advocating for the 99 shitty technologies that die always seem to like to quote the people talking about the one technology that survived from past generations as if that somehow made criticism of the 99 others a bad call.
Ai is going nowhere mate, you’re on the wrong side of this one. It’s too broadly useful already and has too much potential in the future
If the next new industry is an energy hungry propaganda machine, yes I will
Oh fuck off with “stealing from artists” - that just proves you know nothing about the subject and and should be completely ignored.
This added zero to the discourse other then making you look like a complete idiot. Are we in the shitpost community here?
