Then we should prioritize renewable non destructive production of energy over mediocre stasis?

Because we have other uses for the scaled infrastructure. There’s a lot more demand for electrification from logistics than AI.

Except bitcoin had no practical value. I think only the most jaded think AI has no practical value. Most lucid observers recognize there’s immediate value and the future is either “a lot of value” or “mind boggling amounts of value,” or some middle ground. Most lucid observers of crypto realize its primary value is in sanctions evasion, money laundering, and other illegal transactions. Not saying no one finds practical value in that but it’s not broadly useful to society.

> they should be prioritized according to their benefit to society

The fact that they have the capability to pay for and consume this power is the strongest signal that they are indeed providing value to society. The money comes from somewhere. If that turns out not to be the case, they have the strongest incentive to stop.

But this sort of rationing at the hands of some regulatory body has historically proven to be a far more deadly cure than whatever the presumptive disease was.

>delivery to residential customers and essential services should always be prioritized over industrial bulk purchasers.

This is not how the grid works in the US. Industrial is very frequently critical and gets higher priority over residential. Outages at major industrial operations can cost millions in lost revenue and can cause direct damage to hardware.

The grid absolutely is a market and should be. Reliable power at fixed prices is a thing you can try to buy from it, but that’s by no means guaranteed.

Charge them more until it's worth it.

And sure, tell them they get disconnected first when there's a shortage. But a hard block is worse than taking their money and using it for improvements.

And how do you plan to measure their benefit to society without using money as a signal?

A lot of the AI companies are also the major cloud providers, i.e. existing large consumers of electricity.

Google could entice someone to invest in generation capacity for a new AI datacenter by agreeing to buy their output for a few years, or building their own generation. Then if the AI thing doesn't work out, use that power for their existing data center uses, i.e. move the existing servers into the AI data center. That would be essentially shifting the risk to the power company in the location where the existing data center is, even if that's not the same one they have the power purchase agreement with.

> Part of the problem is the AI companies are unwilling to sign long-term power purchase agreements.

That may also be circumstantial evidence that they don't quite believe all their own hype.

> there is a lot of money behind AI, but i have yet to see any of them actually get us a use case which work reliably.

Classic HN. You personally can't see the value of X therefore the entire market for X is wrong.

this is actually a major problem in the netherlands at the moment.

a part of the energy grid cannot handle the load being generated by all the solar being deployed, and upgrading the grid takes years. In the meantime, bussinesses and even households simply are not getting a new power connection unless they are deemed of enough importance.

They will just go somewhere else where this isn't a limitation. Somewhere that actually has a functioning power grid.

If the power grid regularly can't handle the customers it has them it isn't a functioning power grid.

They do contract for capacity in advance, which enables suppliers to plan for demand.

AI jerks will just start putting big red crosses on their buildings, open one 10'x10' space in their facility with some barely passed the exams to get a license type of doctor and claim it to be a medical facility of some sort. Just like other hospitals, they'll have a shortage of beds.

I'm only half joking as from what I've seen of those involved, I would not put this type of consideration past them.

> France would like your phone number

I think there is a small matter of national/international politics (running nuclear as renewables backup), a lack of focus within EDF and perhaps a dash of French industrial action (at least a go slow on the refuelling outages).

Project Hercules was meant to solve the latter https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/ceo-of-edf-defe... but this never happened.

On them positive side their nuclear generation is recovering a bit, albeit from a low base. https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...

Knowing how and being politically prevented from doing so are entirely different things.

It’s nuclear or fossil fuels until an order of magnitude change in chemical storage.

No one is going to be building enough gas peaker plants sitting idle 360 days a year to achieve the reliability of the grid most consumers and modern civilization require. So it’s burn more gas or coal on a regular basis or enjoy power outages if you want what we have today.

I love solar. I plan to have a week or so worth of battery at an off grid home someday soon. It’s both entirely financially impractical (yay disposable tech income) and I will still back it with an expensive propane generator since I live over here in reality.

> Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.

I feel sure Ontario does not have nuclear weapons ambitions.

> If you round trip solar and wind via hydrogen

Do you have any examples of this at commercial scale (hundreds of MW) and their costings?

Where are you going to build a 1GW solar installation with multiple days of storage capacity in the northeast?

long transmission lines significantly reduce efficiency and add massive costs as well as creating easy targets for terrorism.

Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time? That would be a pretty interesting pitch deck.

That’s a pretty damn low utilization rate. The cost per Mwh would make the Texas polar vortex incident look downright cheap. Or you’ll be having the government build and operate idled natural gas (or coal!) plants via taxpayer money since investors are generally not quite that poor at math. An idle plant still needs the same number of staffing and engineering as one operating at 90% capacity factors, before you even begin to look at capex.

Perhaps that will happen. Running your baseload generation balls to the wall at 100% seems to be a far better use of capital to me, and have your cheap intermittent power sources fill in for those peak loads that don’t require reliability.

I can come up with all sorts of great ideas on how to utilize spare solar capacity. None are financially practical in the scale of a human lifetime at a societal level, even with a magic wand to instantly enable the political will to do so.

Humans continue to amaze me with their inability to account for tail risk. The same political magic wand makes nuclear viable within a decade or two, accounting for said tail risk within it.

That said, the current unserious political climate gives me zero hope any solution will be found, so I’m simply preparing for semi regular power outages becoming a thing within my lifetime.

Having lived in a country where only lucky few had personal cars, I would not agree at all. Social fabric of a society where people can expect some privacy and personal autonomy in their commute is certainly a better one.

The jury has deliberated and demands that you pay my legal fees.

Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.

Jerry: How is it a write-off?

Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.

Jerry: Write it off what?

Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

Jerry: You don't even know what a write-off is.

Cosmo Kramer: Do you?

Jerry: No, I don't.

Cosmo Kramer: But they do. And they're the ones writing it off.

This certainly the model that basically all VC funded tech companies use. Though OpenAI is notable, because I don’t think we’ve seen another company burn this much money this fast.

Not a value statement on whether is this is right or wrong.

all inventions are accretive from day one, in the majority of historical bubbles the speculation was built on top of already profitable technologies but there was always one or two firms that were profitable to begin with. Modern bubbles (AI, Metaverse,Crypto) are speculative from the word go, there isn’t a single company that’s profitable in those verticals.

That's not right, either.

They're paying $2.35 in hopes that the $1/year customer sticks around for more than a few months.

That's what they were doing when money was free. Money is no longer free, unless you're an AI company.

> They burn through the investors' money (because who cares its not their personal money) until they get a foothold.

Otherwise known as investing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. And the last 20 years has been chockfull of excesses absolutely. But Uber is profitable these days, and has genuinely transformed how people get around. It looked like a negative unit margin dog until it didn't.

After all, you can't make an omelet without breaking the bank on some eggs.

If you can find a way to sell billions of dollars of eggs, even at a loss, people will invest. At scale you can increase the price of eggs, make the eggs cheaper, etc. Obviously the fact your eggs are artificially cheap is helping you sell them, but that won't be all there is to you as a seller.

People underestimate how hard it is to sell things: you could have the cure to cancer in your hands today and still need to lose mllions to get anywhere with it.

> Turning off the data center for 2/3rds of the year when the sun isn't shining sure is an idea. reply

The logical thing is to place the solar panels where sun shines for more than 1/3 of the year. Additional considerations: DCs are never at 100% utilization,and the hyperscalers won't keep up with their current pace of investment in AI for the next 5-10 years - they will gladly push the power generation CapEx risk onto someone else (existing utilities), and let the taxpayers take the fall.

In case you forgot, the sun is always shining on the planet, 24 hours a day, every day. The location varies. A global transmission network will fix the availability issue.

The point is that difficulty is adjusted in accordance with network saturation to prevent a 51% attack. The network is not inherently inefficient unless you're attempting to monopolize it - you are still rewarded for using more efficient mining methods than your competitors.

Which leads us to the GPUs. For a while everyone said ASICs (and the courageous ones, FPGAs) were the future of mining because they were inherently more efficient than GPU hardware could ever be. But it turns out that it's the other way around - mass-manufactured GPUs have access to more efficient silicon than any FPGA on the market could hope for. Similarly, AI chips that want to beat Nvidia on efficiency terms first have to climb a mountain of power usage that is inherent to their exponentially less-dense hardware.

the first thing that comes to mind is that you need a big ultimate heat sink for a reactor. The efficiency of a power plant increases the colder you can get the condenser because of the rakine cycle.

Nuclear plants pair well with big water infrastrucure projects. Forced convection is just a really effective form of heat transfer

You are all over the place. In any case, nuclear fission energy doesn't work without a river providing steady cold water for cooling. There is no such water in the desert.

Sorry, you are correct. It was controversial.

What I meant to say was that the AI bubble is feels different in that there seems to be relatively more skeptics versus railroad mania or the dot com bubble (but this could just be skewed by my own experiences).

Whether or not this suggests a flawed value prop for AI is another story.

Are you kidding me, it's already cheap and it's going to get cheaper. I, a one-income person, can get up and use power throughout the day, every day at a fraction of my income. That's cheap. And I'm one of millions, if not billions. I think you're thinking free. Free is not going to happen anytime soon but cheaper than today is coming.