AI eats energy for breakfast.
By Jo Nova
If the grid breaks, remember it’s all AI’s fault!
New data centers in Australia may use as much as 6% of the electricity demand by 2030. (That’s a whole six percent increase in demand four years from now. Call the ambulance, eh!).
But the thing is, our fragile grid already has these odd jiggly voltage and frequency spikes now that we’ve blown up all the spare coal plants, and any one of these jiggles may trigger a cluster of data centers to trip out at the same time to protect themselves. If a large load disappears off the grid simultaneously, it could set off a cascading chain of failures causing a widespread blackout. (A bit like the wind farms did in the Great South Australian Blackout of 2016).
So the manager of our forced fantasy transition is lining up the excuses to cover for his own failures. If there’s a blackout, it’s AI’s fault he says. And if prices rise, it’s AI’s fault too claims Minister Chris Bowen — who says that “Wholesale electricity prices could jump by a quarter in NSW and Victoria if data-centre growth is not matched by new renewable generation and storage…“.(Unlike the 50 years before that where demand grew and prices fell because we just built more coal power).
Then there’s the extortion. If AI want to do business here, they have to install renewables to “strengthen (meaning, weaken) the grid” says Mr Bowen.
Why don’t we just let the AI centers choose the generator themselves Minister, like there was a free market? Is it because we all know they’d build gas or coal plants?
The sad story is his new Capacity Investment Scheme is failing to win over investors, so Chris Bowen has to force the new customers to buy his pet generators, to help him pretend to meet the targets we have no chance of reaching.
Australia’s AI boom fuels data centre threat to national electricity grid
By Perry Williams, The Australian
Australia’s $135bn data-centre industry poses a new risk to the nation’s electricity system, authorities have warned, with sudden dips in voltage potentially causing a mass grid-scale shock and threatening power connections between states.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen has warned that data centres must “do their bit to strengthen” the energy grid, asserting that operators will be required to underwrite new renewable power and fund their own connectivity so the massive spike in energy demand does not become a strain on consumers.
But the grid operator found that by 2030 a single fault near western Sydney could knock out about 1500 megawatts of data-centre power in milliseconds. It cautioned that data centres clustered around Sydney and Melbourne could disconnect across multiple locations as a result of an ordinary voltage dip, raising a new risk for the operation of the grid.
And the lie perpetuates.
Data centre giant Airtrunk estimates that, for every additional gigawatt of data centre demand, Australia will likely need around 3 to 4 gigawatts of new renewable generation capacity to support 24/7 operations.
It doesn’t matter how many renewables anyone installs, it will never support 24/7 electricity without a monster load of storage.
*PS: The internet is out here. I thought I could not write but I managed to rig up a drip feed miracle through a phone, “yay”.
Those data centres will be needed inorder to store and analyses the data of the great Australian public and monitor what you are getting up to.
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How many Australian jobs will these datacentres provide.?
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Aa per my posts yesterday, not even AI thinks it’s a good idea to run itself on wind or solar.
Gulag AI (fully woke) said:
Grok AI (not so woke) said:
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That picture at the top of the article reminded me of the Anglo saxon poem The Ruin.
It is about the gradual decay and collapse of Roman Bath and how the skills of the ancients are beyond the skills of those who followed them.
What will people of 300 years hence think when these data centres lay in ruin, perhaps impoverished and living simply due to lack of energy sustaining the high civilisation we currently enjoy
“The Ruin
These wall-stones are wondrous —
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.
Ice at the joints has unroofed the barred-gates, sheared
the scarred storm-walls have disappeared—
the years have gnawed them from beneath. A grave-grip holds
the master-crafters, decrepit and departed, in the ground’s harsh
grasp, until one hundred generations of human-nations have
trod past. Subsequently this wall, lichen-grey and rust-stained,
often experiencing one kingdom after another,
standing still under storms, high and wide—
it failed—
The wine-halls moulder still, hewn as if by weapons,
penetrated [XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX] savagely pulverized [XXXXXXXXXXXXXX] [XXXX] shined [XXXXXXXXXX] [XXXX] adroit ancient edifice [XXXXX] [XXXXXXX] bowed with crusted-mud —
The strong-purposed mind was urged to a keen-minded desire
in concentric circles; the stout-hearted bound
wall-roots wondrously together with wire. The halls of the city
once were bright: there were many bath-houses,
a lofty treasury of peaked roofs, many troop-roads, many mead-halls
filled with human-joys until that terrible chance changed all that.”
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Or how about Epitaph for a Lost Civilisation by Paul Martin Freeman.
https://www.classicalpoets.org/epitaph-for-a-lost-civilisation-a-poem-by-paul-martin-freeman/
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At this point in time there’s really no point in AI or any other business to set up business in Australia because it’s no longer an attractive place to do business due to high taxes and regulations, feral unions, high energy prices, high property prices etc.. The only reason to set up businesses is to harvest taxpayer-funded subsidies or harvest other government taxpayer-funded largesse like useless public works projects such as Naarmistan train tunnels or Snowy Hydro 2.
Government will certainly want AI for itself as an aid to tracing, tracking and controlling those who express unapproved thoughts like saying there are only two genders or who are critical of anthropogenic global warming propaganda. They will probably have a dedicated power station for that.
Subsidies for grifters to harvest for AI include:
And here is a list of Australian Government “expectations”.
They just don’t have a clue. AI data centres are hugely energy intensive by their very nature.
Landauer’s principle (1961) is the fundamental physical principle tying computation to energy use and heat dissipation. It establishes a lower theoretical limit on the energy cost of irreversible information processing and arises from the second law of thermodynamics.
A single modern server CPU or GPU performs trillions of operations per second. Hyperscale data centers run millions of such devices 24/7 for AI training/inference, data processing, storage and networking. So even with a tiny per-bit cost of bit-manipulation in a computer operation, the total system energy cost multiplies enormously.
Plus real hardware operates many orders of magnitude above the Landauer limit, typically millions of times more energy per operation due to voltage swings, resistive losses (Joule heating), leakage currents, and charging/discharging capacitances. Most electrical energy ultimately becomes waste heat.
So… due to all that waste heat you have a massive cooling overhead. The heat from computation must be removed to keep hardware reliable. Cooling (air or liquid) often accounts for 30–40%+ of total data centre energy use. Higher-density AI workloads using GPUs generate even more heat than standard server CPUs.
So huge amounts of inexpensive, reliable energy are required to do this. What’s needed is coal, gas, nuclear or real hydro power (not SH2). Solar and wind are entirely unsuitable for the task.
And in Australia high level science and engineering decisions are being made by politicians who are barely literate or numerate and likely avoided any science, or reason-based subjects at “school”.
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If you are a prospective data centre owner or developer wouldn’t you just pit each state against each other in order to get the best electricity and water deal.
In Victoria you might actually bypass the government altogether and go straight to ENGIE or owners of the other coal generators.
In Victoria we have both the Newport and Laverton gas generator sitting mostly idle, maybe used occasionally for “peaking”, whatever that means. Basically they’e sitting there gathering dust. What a shameful waste. Worse still when the state has oodles of gas. Newport is owned by EnergyAustralia (Hong Kong-based CLP Group) so the boys in Honkers would probably love to make a buck. All you need is to put a bit of heat on the government and bureacrats and anything is possible.
The whole climate change scare is a house of cards. Pull one of the cards out, the whole lot comes crashing down.
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