By Jo Nova
All those sustainable dreams, gone pfft
Google, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to do it with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock.
In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race.
It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants.
Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups.
The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback
The AI boom has left technology companies scrambling for low-carbon sources of energy to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI, data centers, and crypto could more than double by 2026. Even its lowball estimates say that the added demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or—in the high-usage case—Germany.
Australia uses ten times as much electricity as Microsoft, but is still fantasizing about reaching 82% renewable by 2030 with no nuclear power “because it will cost too much and take too long”. Microsoft uses 24 TWh of energy a year and employs 220,000 people, and knows it needs a nuclear plant to be competitive (and reach, albeit frivolous weather changing ideals). Australia uses 274 TWh of electricity, and employs 14 million people but is going to aim for frivolous climate witchery anyway, and do it the double-hard way.
Who needs to be competitive, right?
Pierre Gosselin discusses how Germany risks being left behind because it has switched off all its nuclear plants. At least it has some power lines to France. Australia has no nukes, not much hydro, no mountains to spare, is the driest continent on Earth, and it has no powerlines to anywhere. We are the crash test dummy. Soon most big companies will have more reliable power than we do.
It speaks volumes about how poorly run France is that they haven’t found a way to capitalize on being the only nation on earth with cheap, abundant, reliable zero CO2 emissions energy thanks to their 1970s nuclear buildout.
European tech startups and energy-intensive industries should be flocking to France to take advantage of French nuclear power. But instead, France has largely sat on it’s competitive advantage for the past 30 years rather than expanding it, and been content to sell off their excess power to their neighbors for a modest profit rather than using it all themselves (and building more) to revolutionize their industrial base. They’ve also allowed those 50 year old reactors to fall into a state of disrepair as they spent their energy dollars on ‘transitioning’ from the cleanest and most reliable grid in the world to less efficient solar and wind installations.
Hopefully, big tech will start a trend and we will see other American companies invest in nuclear, even if the government won’t. That’s why the free market is the greatest economic engine the world has ever know, and why governments picking winners and losers always ends up in taxpayer money being wasted.
And hopefully, sooner or later the country with the world’s largest reserves of nuclear fuel will figure out that they should probably be investing in nuclear as well, instead of building out unreliable wind and solar.
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France sells electricity to all of Europe … they make good money.
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As I have mentioned here before, the Amazon data centre consumes a staggering 960ME of nuclear power.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpowered-data-center-from-talen/
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Thst should be 960MW or 960MWe not 960ME.
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Fundamental Question: Where is the market for all this AI? and who is going to pay for it? I just don’t see the numbers mounting up. AI is all well and good in niche areas but I certainly don’t see it as a replacement for a search engine \ Wikipedia in any paid sense to who is going to pay for it? and why? And, yes, it can draw pretty pictures and movies but people will get bored with them pretty quickly.
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AI as it exists today is 1st generation.
It is going to improve exponentially over time. Today’s AI is the equivalent of the brick phones we used to lug around in the 1980s, or of Pong in the video gaming world, or of those giant console TVs we had back in the 70s built into 200 pound wooden cabinets with a 19″ screen. Compare all those to their modern equivalents and then let your imagination go to work on what AI will be like in 20 or 30 years.
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Ultimately, the purpose of AI as it’s being implemented is for Leftist propaganda purposes. It is now the basis of many or most search engine inquiries and it has already been proven how the big AI engines have been taught with an extremely Leftist bias. Search engine inquiries typically give a low ranking (or none at all) to conservstive responses on questions where there is a chance to provide either a Leftist or conservative point of view. Obviously, answers from both points of view should be treated equally.
E.g.
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‘who is going to pay for it?’
When you sign up for your digital passport, and use your digital currency, and want to leave your 15 minute city, or apply for an exemption to your carbon allocation, or pay your fine for truth-speak in order to get back your capacity to purchase food, or want to visit your young children in their ‘boarding schools’ or your older children in their barracks as they are prepared for the ongoing war with ‘the enemy’, I am sure you’ll be happy to pay the fee from the ‘money’ left over after your war tax is deducted.
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These woke Big Tech corporations promote wind and solar to the Proles and censor opinions critical of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fraud.
However, you can’t run the same data centres used to track, trace, control and mould our opinions on the expensive, useless, environmentally destructive wind and solar power they advocate.
No. No. No.
For them it has to be proper power sources that are inexpensive and reliable like nuclear power. The same ones they run campaigns against to prevent we Proles using them.
It really is a fight by the Elites who want to control us, represented by the Left, vs everyone else, represented by conservatives (not the fake conservative Liberal Party of Australia but more like the people Donald Trump represents).
It is the road to serfdom as Friedrich Hayek called it in his book of the same name in which he criticised government control of economic decision making through central planning (and/or these days, the corporate state).
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This is actually fantastic news. The big tech companies dumping renewables for nuclear will provide the unassailable evidence that wind and solar cannot cut it. The virtue signaling politicians and leaders will be forced to change direction in a most positive way.
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significant damage has already been done.
they need to be held to account.
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Energy for big brother good, Energy for proles bad.
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For me it just underscores the size of the NWO con trick! First they made electricity too expensive using C02 as the bogyman then switch sides and make like the good guys. We are being manipulated to death!
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I’m not dead. Whack!
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I need some new conspiracy theories! All the old ones have come true!
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The elephant in the room is surplus solar.
Until it is mandated that solar power can only be connected to the grid if it is dispatchable i.e. with batteries, there will be a midday glut, forcing all other generators to curtail production.
AS an example, according to OpenNEM, yesterday at 12.30pm, solar was supplying 65% of demand, forcing coal generators to curtail production to supply just 26% of demand, yet at 7pm ramp up to supply 60% of demand.
Maybe the answer for big users of electricity is to go off grid with a modular nuclear reactor.
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“All those sustainable dreams, gone pfft.”
Along with trillions of dollars ‘investment’ now converted into floating, marble-encrusted floating palaces, private jets and oceanside mansions. Of course, the money was the real objective, not environmental concerns, and should the solar/wind scam truly start to wither, it will be replaced with a similar con in order to keep the money flowing.
Hydrogen power anybody?
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Again Labor, Greens and Teals want to destroy thousands of klms of our wilderness areas and farms to force us to use toxic W & S and then replace the entire toxic mess every 15 to 20 years.
Even Bloomberg and their ABC etc admit it will cost Aussies trillions of $ and yet Labor tells us that Nuclear will cost too much?
But Nuclear is cheaper than unreliable, toxic W & S and the reliable 24/7 Nuclear stns built today will easily extend past 2100.
Of course Labor’s B O Bowen loony is also pushing for more W & S to destroy our coastal ocean environments as well and whales are beaching in greater numbers in the US according to their concerned citizens.
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But this can’t be true… Albo said prices were going down.
I was wondering why this hadn’t happened earlier – old contract now up for renewal.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-02/electricity-prices-food-manufacturing-rising-costs/104413466
Cheers
Dave B
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Not to worry Neville – “the country’s in the very best of hands”. Here is an example of gross hypocrisy evidenced by Tanya Plibersek’s mob (DCCEEW) giving the Fitzroy Basin Association $4.5 million from the Australian Government’s Saving Koalas Fund “to restore and protect koala habitat in areas of significant koala populations in the Clarke-Connors Range” in Central Queensland (Link: https://fba.org.au/fba-koala-projects-in-the-clarke-connors-range ) – while at the same time the State Government approved Twiggy Forrest’s (Squadron Energy) massive bird chopper project to effectively devastate prime koala habitat in the same Clarke-Connors range system! A largely pristine wilderness area in this coastal range continuum.
But of course, all this is completely opaque to your urban yuppie voter. As is the fact that the State has exempted the clearing of forest/woodland for ‘renewables’ on land that would have led to 5-6 figure fines if carried out by rural landholders.
Steven Nowakowski and his mates are brilliant at producing short videos monitoring this unending disaster. See: https://www.youtube.com/@rainforestreservesaustrali5016 . I recommend looking at the ‘Clarke Creek Vandalism’ YouTube presentation for a quick appreciation (3 mins) of Twiggys activities.
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onto the next boondoggle.
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Here’s a very informed recent video from Mark Mills and you can select or watch by chapters if you like under the video.
Mark has been telling us for years that toxic W & S is an expensive disaster and the so called energy transition is a delusional sick joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30e58egoHC0&t=15s
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BTW Mark Mills claims in the video at 35.5 minutes that the PV Chinese solar panels on a typical roof in California has already used about 100 tons of coal to manufacture the panels.
Think about it and the how we’ve been misled for decades by the con merchants and liars.
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