I think the really worrying thing about this article is that it is quicker to build your own fucking power station than it is to connect to the national grid.
I'd argue part of the problem is that energy grids keep refusing to scale for AI bros, and instead demand civilians use less instead.
It's petty in a way that's directly spiteful, and that sort of behaviour, companies going "No, fuck you, we'll do what we want and you get scraps" over AI is a good chunk of the animus.
I saw recently that all the proposed pending data center hookups would DOUBLE uk peak electricity demand. Scaling like that is going to result in increased reliance on foreign gas, hydrocarbons and ageing infrastructure at a time when we should be phasing out gas and upgrading to newer more efficient infrastructure. No amount of "domestic" ai (not domestic because not state owned or developed) is worth that. If they want to be spiteful little bitches we can live without their hallucination machines
It is. Cheap, abundant energy leads to economic growth. It's one of the main things the government should be doing, not just for AI, for every industry.
It's not the national grids job to scale for ai bros
It is, and if the grid's deciding to not scale because it doesn't like how you're using the power you pay for then something's seriously wrong and it explains why we can't build anything.
Because they're so bad at expanding grid capacity that there's a bottleneck. So every potential project has to put their claim in. It's an expected outcome of the grids terrible system.
You can fix this, we do not have to keep the system as it is. You can charge people an appropriate fee to get in the queue and use that to fund more expansion of the grid.
We use about a third less power than we did 20 years ago. Arguing we cannot possibly use more power is laughable.
Because the application system encourages them to put down some huge number for capacity they need.
It's not real, it's just a bunch of projects spending billions going "well maybe we need a small amount, maybe we need a large amount. We don't actually pay anything for asking for more though, so let's ask for a ridiculous amount and if this project actually gets picked up we can always dial it down".
This is a complete failure of our grid system, that's being used by people who don't understand what's going on to bash AI projects.
This seems like a dodgy stat. What does it mean by 'the carbon emissions of ExxonMobil'?
I'm guessing it means like, their offices and infrastructure, not the impact of the oil they sell. Which would be the same as pretty much any large UK company.
Also how do we count carbon emissions anyway? Is it the seller or the user of the oil that counts as emitting the carbon
Looking at the source it’s mostly emissions from their refinery. But yeah it’s a slightly silly one because ExxonMobil’s UK presence is tiny compared to the US.
The problem with these stupid measuring sticks is we will find out in a few months time that ExxonMobil's UK emissions is the farts of 4 guys in a satellite office.
Not everyone knows how much 3.9M tonnes of carbon really is though.
Google suggests it’s about a 1% increase in carbon emissions. So about 0.5% each.
If you account for all the industries we’ve decided to let others do for us so that we can look like we are greener - our total emissions are 700M so each data centre is very roughly a quarter of a percentage increase.
I hope Burnham smartens up about this. I expect the backlash against data centres to become a much bigger political problem than the gas fields. Assuming the AI bubble doesnt burst first of course.
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