memes

In the article it directly tells you "the facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area last year.

again, this is just a statement What even is a gigawatt here specifically? A gigawatt over the period of a week? A month? A year? 10 years? What's the time frame we're talking about here, what's the real world implications of "facilities" are we talking a group of 10 data centers? What does this even mean? Are we talking about reactive power or real power?

Also to be clear, it looks like this is contract negotiation, not even listed power consumption. So it looks like we're talking about what the grid is willing to supply at most at the utility hookup point. Not the actual consumption capability. It's still technically a kind of consumption, but it's the same as paying for gigabit speed internet, and then not using it at gigabit speed the entire time, you might be paying for that theoretical gigabit link, but unless you're actually using it, it means nothing.

A gigawatt-size data center using 85% of its peak demand over the course of a year will consume nearly as much energy as 710,000 U.S. households or 1.8 million people.

looking into the article some more, it looks like they even said as much. Over the course of a year it's about 1GW. If we;re converting this into real world units, this is about 3 million watts a day. Which is still a useless unit because watts are measured over the course of a second. Interestingly converting it into seconds, a unit where watts actually makes sense, it seems like this is an average continual consumption, on the range of seconds, of about 30 watts, constantly. This is like, a light fixture with LED lights, running 24/7 over the period of a year. Your phone is literally comparable to this.

It looks like global energy consumption across the entire world for the year has been about 180,000 TWh To be clear, 1GW is a completely different order of magnitude compared to the global consumption that is the entire earth.

I provided a link. Did you not see it?

yeah no i saw it, but you never cited anything actually useful to your argument so i just assumed it was irrelevant, otherwise you would've included it, or at least mentioned it. But you didn't.

Why are you talking to me this way? 🤔

because people just say shit and then expect it to win arguments, not understanding literally anything about how arguments work apparently.

To be clear, i mentioned a very true fact, which you then responded to with an entirely different, irrelevant, but also true fact. Do you expect me to pat you on the back for pointing out that the sky is blue after i solve cancer? There is a standard for making an argument, and that barely meets the standard for making a statement.

If you wanted to counter the fossil fuels point, you could've pointed to the fact that china has one of the largest and fastest growing renewable energy sectors, globally, which would've actually been relevant, and a pretty ok point to make.

like i try to be nice, but it's really hard when people are literally just ignoring what you're saying, shoving their fingers into their ears, and then mentioning something else that they like instead. It's not even a conversation at that point, you're discussing past the other person.

Yeah, because we outsourced our industry to them. They consume that electricity making stuff for us. It’s all for external consumption. It’s real easy to reduce electricity consumption when you shut down your manufacturing capacity lol

yeah, that's generally how manufacturing economies tend to work. You could make the argument that AI in the US is equivalent to manufacturing industry in china for example.

Again, they make everything for everyone else. They’re the world’s factory. Just because a widget is manufactured in China doesn’t actually mean China is the sole country responsible for the emissions from manufacturing the widget.

oh, interesting, so you're telling me it's not actually the companies that are responsible for all of the pollution, but in fact it's actually the consumers that buy the products, that enable the companies to then pollute the earth? Did i get that correct?

Yet even so, new energy production capacity is not coming from coal. Why are we talking about this anyway?

oh, see i thought we were concerned about like, the environmental effects of pollution on things like global warming from things like AI, which are primarily US based, and not actually a massive consumer of dirty energy compared to countries like china who mostly consume coal power, a very dirty source of energy, where you could very easily make significant changes to impact significant carbon emissions.

It's almost like hyper-focusing on a technicality of a specific thing that happens to be negative is worse than focusing on the actual problem behind that negative. Weird.

China makes useful stuff with the energy they consume!

oh interesting, so what about things like shein and temu, and fast fashion, and a lot of consumable electronics products that come straight from factories in china? Or is there a magic utility to these products, even though they are inevitably going to be waste product given enough time.

AI makes bad art, bad articles, bad videos, bad music, and bad customer service bots.

and you're just using it incorrectly, if you burn fabric in a giant pile, it does little more than produce a lot of carbon, and create a little pile of ash, i guess we should delete the entire textiles industry under this basis.

AI is just burning energy for nothing.

so is Chinese manufacturing, since it's using primarily dirty energy, compared to another country producing a similar thing using cleaner energy, it's literally "creating carbon for nothing" Just stop buying Chinese steel. Simple as that.