It’s not the same.
Datacenters are rather few single points of massive consumption. Charging hundred million cars requires millions of points of high consumption.
The grid to charge an enormous fleet of EV really is more difficult and expensive to build than supplying a few dozen data centres. On top the EVs need charging in urban environment, while data centres are located in industrial environment. It is easier to lay a few massive cables from a nuclear power plant to a datacenter, than to lay millions of kilometres of mediumthick cables to every neighborhood in a country.
I’m not justifying the enormous energy usage of data centres, but this is a bit like comparing apples with oranges.
The Texas grid can’t handle winter and Texas summers. But sure, let’s throw in 50 massive data centers
This 20-year-old meme of a 40-year-old advertisement is getting somewhat tiresome.
Death is my only release
The grid really can’t handle AI data centers. Elon’s monster in Georgia is surrounded by turbine generators. A bunch of these new builds need power capacity added to work.
Honestly that realization is the most infuriating part of this saga.
If that’s still true we have already lost the Ai race with china
We already lost it. That’s why the IPO ing now. Try kimi, glm models - no difference from opus
When that bubble pops, it will be the funniest, saddest and stupidest economic crisis we’ve ever had.
I’m convinced it’s intentional because the ultra rich have figured out that we have gotten so close to an Economic Singularity that they are burning money in any way possible so that they don’t lose the power they have currently, and would lose the moment that an Economic Singularity actually takes place.
They aren’t just burning the world to cause climate change to kill the poors, they are, in fact, burning the planet to desperately pull up a ladder, that isn’t a ladder, and is a floor, to prevent it from materializing. They’re trying to kill the rest of us, before we all have the exact same buying power they have, or at least close enough that the difference is academic.
Economic Singularity what is it?
Same as a Technological Singularity, except with money. We basically produce an infinite money glitch.
Elon Musk multiplies with himself.
The net worth of Musk² would be a singularity of all the money in the world.
What?
Same as a Technological Singularity, except with money. We basically produce an infinite money glitch.
So like post-scarcity ?
Yeah
People really said that electric vehicles were too much strain on the grid? All I ever heard em say was that they’re pointless.
Nope, it really is something anti-BEV folks say. “We can’t just all switch to electric cars, we couldn’t possibly charge too many simultanously.”
It is a real problem if everyone switched at once, which isn’t realistic. Even with a gradual approach, at some point residential areas will require upgraded supply lines if every house has 1 or 2 240v chargers. The upgrade cost will probably start becoming an issue in roughly a decade, unless something drastic changes with power supply.
which is bullshit, of course. we couldn’t possibly all fill up with gasoline at the same time, either.
and many would be charging cars overnight at home on ordinary 220-240v, when electric demand is lowest. you can’t fill up a gas tank at home.
No, people would be charging their cars when they come back from work. And that is also the time where energy demand already is at it’s highest. If everyone were to drive a BEV it’d be a lie to say that this wouldn’t have an impact on the grid.
Yea our grid actually cannot yet handle having every vehicle be an EV. But it also cannot handle data centers either. There’s a great video on this for anybody interested that also has some commentary on the effect on green house gasses, backed by nothing but statistical information. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic. If we want more electric vehicles on the road, we need to keep building renewable sources of electricity everywhere we can. Most EVs consume far more power than a household does every year! We already built all the infrastructure for ICE cars decades ago, it’s only logical some infrastructure needs to be built to support EVs! It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way forward.
I’m not at all on these people’s side, but to be completely fair, you’re right, many would be charging their cars overnight, so at the same time. If many do this, electric demand at night would shoot up dramatically.
I don’t know if grids will be able to handle this (varies by country surely), but it definitely has an impact.
Think it depends where you live. Here in Alberta after having switched fully to electric every single human (not a exaggeration) has told me we can’t all switch cause the grid can’t handle it. Not sure why they continue to keep telling me that cause I really don’t care if people switch or not, I just wanted to switch to become more sustainable for retirement.
Those “it just offset the emissions to the powerplant” folks is probably eating their own word now.
“it just offset the emissions to the powerplant”
which is, of course, actually better than tailpipe emissions all over town.
Why? Just because the grid is more renewable than ever or something to do with datacenters?
A few years back there’s a huge pushback against EV because they’re saying the tailpipe emissions is only outsourced to the coal/gas plant, so no point doing that for cleaner air. Now datacenter is using more power than people can imagine, raking up the emission even more than EV. Now you have tailpipe emissions AND the emissions from the excessive power usage of slopcenter.
Its really the water that’s the big issue now.
To be fair they want to attach new power plants to some of them.
By bypassing safety regulations to rush build new nuclear reactors
Lots are natural gas plants.
Yo dawg, I heard you like power…
Yeah I think some of them are even trying to be self-sufficient in terms of power.
They are still taking capacity and parts for powerplants which could have been used to power actual useful stuff. This is like when cryptobros attempt to claim that they were mining with green energy. It doesn’t matter, the energy used should not be used for this useless shit which only exists to fulfill the greed of a small handful of shitty people.
