[acc_297]

This is a common agreement to have with industrial power users. I know in Quebec during the coldest days in winter industrial users are required to scale back.

I would hope there aren't too many large utility jurisdictions which would curtail citizen consumers in favour of industrial users in the event of a demand surge.

On a related note. It's worrying to me how quickly we've accepted that we're going to boost electricity consumption massively prior to achieving anything close to the carbon intensity reduction targets which would mitigate the worst of climate change effects. It's all driven by a market force which cannot be effectively regulated on a global scale for multinational tech firms who can shop around for the next data centre location with near total freedom. And with advances in over the top fibre networks etc... a tonne of AI demand can be met by a compute cluster on the other side of the world (especially during model training) so the externalities related to the computing infrastructure can theoretically be completely dumped somewhere far away from the paying customer.

[everdrive]

It's extremely important to our future that people can vomit out fake movie trailers, and that CEOs can hire fewer people. This is just a cost we need to bear. For sure, any problems introduced by _this_ complex technology will just be solved by future and even-more-complex technologies.

[quirk]

https://lomborg.com/

[jeffbee]

But electricity consumption is a minority of energy consumption. It was always true that decarbonization was going to massively increase the use of electricity.

[acc_297]

Yes but the task becomes that much harder - we are scaling up natural gas generation not to phase out coal but simply to meet demand that wouldn't exist without the fierce competition to build the biggest LLM. Any feasible plan made 5 years ago which may have worked to transition a large industry from fuel burning energy sources to electricity generation (renewable or otherwise) is made 10x harder by the introduction of this rapid rollout in datacentre capacity.

[schiffern]

  >But electricity consumption is a minority of energy consumption.

Everything is a minority of energy consumption.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_energy_consumptio...

If your standard is "I won't do anything unless it's the majority of energy consumption," you're really just saying don't do anything period.

  >It was always true that decarbonization was going to massively increase the use of electricity.

That was the plan (and it could have worked too), but what actually happened is the new decarbonized energy is supplementing fossil fuel instead of replacing it.