You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
If there was an oil refinery that looked exactly the same as a turbine from the outside, I would bet that he would love how those would look. The root cause is something else. Hmmm...
That's true, but it's bipartisan policy. The Trump admin obviously is fighting wind, though solar is just too useful to be able to be stopped even by them. But it's also popular among environmentalists to fight solar projects https://v2.courthousenews.com/greens-fight-mojave-desert-sol...
And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...
So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.
The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
In the Innovation Adoption Curve, we are absolutely beyond the Early Adopters phase and possibly the Early Majority. The growth rates necessarily have to start trending down because there’s no one left to sell to.
I'm not sure if the classic adoption curve applies. Has there ever been a product that vendors were shoving down customer's throats as relentlessly as AI?
I doubt it. We're less than six months in to really good coding agents, and they keep improving. Software will eat a lot more of the business world when it's this much cheaper and faster to produce.
I don't think Anthropic are doing that because they don't have enough compute capacity. If we had 100* more datacentres the message would still be the same - they're focusing on selling Fable access to enterprise users because that's what makes them more money.
Either the cost to serve this larger model is so high that they cannot offer any reasonable usage quota for it at subscription prices, or they really do not have the capacity.
I think that it might well be true. The Opus models had capacity issues on many occasions too. Can the larger model even be served on all of the hardware they have, or only a subset?
It would not surprise me if growing enterprise demand threatens capacity, making it impossible for Anthropic to offer the model in subscriptions at this time, even though they could do so at a profit.
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
Unit economics for renewables coupled with storage are excellent. I agree we should reform nuclear regulation to allow new nuclear plants to pencil out. I disagree that we should discount the value of renewables.
Solar and wind take up a bunch of space and generate a bunch of waste after the panels are decommissioned, plus the wind generators are ruining every single landscape we have. With 5 nuclear stations per country you could cleanup so much of Europe.
The environmental damage caused by "clean" power sources is done mostly in countries which are far from Europe, so it's not much discussed in Europe.
Like:
Copper. "As the world shifts to wind energy and electric cars, demand for the conductive metal has increased. But mining copper brings its own environmental hazards"
Not to mention completely subjective, I personally love the look of windmills, and I live in the Netherlands in a location where I see windmills (and I don't mean the old-timey ones, the big power generating kind) everywhere around me for miles. It's certainly prettier to watch than smoke stacks.
TFA isn’t about consumer usage, it is about training the next generation models. An interesting thought I heard recently is that a SOTA model has about the same parameters as the number of synapses in a Golden Retriever’s brain that are not dedicated to biological processes like breathing. Most of that should be wrapped in double quotes, don’t take it literally! But that number is about 100x lower than the same synapses in a human brain.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.
just wait. the current gold rush has left any consideration of efficiency or price-performance at the side of the road. the entire enterprise is structured as a 'whoever can spend the most money wins the game for all time'. if we can get past that and invest more in theory and systems at a natural pace it'll just keep getting more affordable over time.
Cheap ubiquitous distributed power systems will change the world in many weird ways. Watch small modular nuclear offer home installation for ~$reasonable and getting cheaper every year.
Fast forward 20 years from the advent of essentially infinite energy results in WWIII and a new “Great Detente” but only after all the assholes have wreaked all the havoc they can.
There are dark days ahead but ultimately a brighter future. Sucks to live through that transition phase though.
There were some crazy ideas for nuclear powered cars, but there are hard physical limits how small you can make a nuclear reactor.
1. Smaller the nuclear reactor is more neutron leakage you get. Each neutron which escapes a nuclear reactor is a neutron which can not be used to sustain the chain reactor. To compensate this you have to put more fissionable U-235 isotope into the reactor and as a result you need higher enriched nuclear fuel. A nuclear reactor in nuclear submarine can have the size of a dining table but it's running on nuclear fuel enriched to a weapon grade enrichment.
2. Even a small nuclear reactor with few kW thermal output needs a thick and heavy radiation shielding. This is not problem for power plant, or nuclear powered submarine, or nuclear powered ship. But the shielding requirement were problem for nuclear powered airplanes or trains.
In case of the mobile ML-1 experimental nuclear reactor, built as part of the US Army Nuclear Power Program, extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation.
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first artificial nuclear reactor, didn't have shielding. But, to keep the dose of ionizing radiation for the staff within reasonable limits, it operated only for very short time periods and the total output of CP-1 was only few Watts.
Question for the experts: does the power crunch mean that AI hyperscalers will turn off previous generation GPU datacenters to free up power for their new Vera Rubin GPUs?
This is part of why the AI bubble will burst. The only way to make the profit numbers backing the loans to AI companies is to get increased capacity, and the capacity requires energy, and the energy won't arrive in time, only partly due to all the factors here, and partly because building transmission and generation is speculative and can fail for a number of reasons.
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.
Both are questionable. Tidal power is super neat in theory but we really struggle to make it viable in practice. GPUs in space are probably the lower risk option, but with even more questionable economics
My preferred outlandish idea would be to put the data centers next to solar farms in the Sahara. I just don't know yet how we are going to make the batteries to power that through the night
Yep, sounds like a fantastic idea. Let's litter Earth's orbit even more with the sole intention of messing about with one of the single most fundamental (and natural) processes of the planet: the day and night cycle.
I don’t see how that generates anywhere near enough power, think about the potential energy of a bucket of water going up and down that amount over the course of a day.
Neat how? Tidal power never made economic sense. There are only a limited number of places with enough tidal flow to even potentially make it viable. Any moving parts in the marine environment require frequent expensive maintenance due to growths and corrosion. Environmentalists will file lawsuits against anything that causes any damage anywhere, even if it would be a net environmental benefit compared to alternatives.
Ocean waves aren't going to stop at night or on a cloudy day, and don't care if the wind is blowing. Yes, tidal power has its own set of problems, but it doesn't have those ones. The more amazing power source I heard about though is the enhanced geothermal power that Fervo is doing.
Are you really saying that in 2026, a year when only the nuts are still trying to claim climate change isn’t a thing, the most intelligent approach to the problem of powering data centres that are mostly being built for the purpose of juicing share prices is gas turbines at an industrial scale? The most intelligent approach is to not build the things. The next most intelligent approach is solar and batteries nearby. Way down the bottom of the list is burning gas to power them.
The natural gas is already being flared off to protect the environment (CH4 is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2).
The key with this project is that instead of wasting the thermal energy from this unused gas, we feed it into power plants that are constructed nearby, eliminating the need for new pipeline infrastructure and providing some actual value.
You could go on to argue the oil fields themselves should cease production. This is the only way to actually stop the methane coming out of the ground. Even then it wouldn't happen overnight.
A data center might not have murdered his family but the constant AI hype is super tiresome.
PR heads are raging over the amazing shit that AI does and how everything is going to change and just WOWZA BAZINGA.
Yet in my daily life I use it for years and it’s wrong _all_ the time, I end up having to yell at it because it keeps being lazy and gaslighting me, the data centers boil the oceans and rich assholes beg my government to throw billions of good money after bad to build more of this shit. What the fuck? I want to live in the future and all they gave me was some shitty Fisher’s price AI.
And that's precisely why this is all happening: people aiming for the future and forgetting about the present. You using AI every day for years is exactly what started boiling the oceans (even more) and giving the rich assholes even more power than they already had.
With these things, as with most things, you vote with your wallet. If people were to stop buying into the AI fantasy, the AI gooners would have no one to sell their wet dreams to.
At least in California it is felt really among people who have private power providers that need to both turn a profit and appease shareholders while also paying out various lawsuits and penalties from causing wildfires with poorly maintained equipment. Compare those rates to what you'd get under a municipal power company like LADWP and the difference is dramatic.
It doesn’t really matter if, at the end of the day, our current usage is too high and consumers see EVs as a pro-social purchase. I don’t really think they’re a problem, personally, but it IS the topic of this comment thread, so it’s an appropriate place to complain about this particular issue.
Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.
The price of electricity in Seattle has effectively dropped - we went from a flat 13.4c/kWh to an opt-in time of use system with an overnight rate of 8c/kWh. My bill dropped by a third.
The article discusses how the biggest problem is peak demand, but that midday electric prices have fallen as solar has grown. EVs are perfect for charging during solar peak and making use of energy that would have had to be curtailed, they can even feed back into the grid helping during peak demand.
From the headline:
>the problem is getting it where it's needed.
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.
Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
How many is enough is a complicated thing though. You don't need there to be as many pumps as cars because there is enough everywhere that you know with certainty that you can find one any given time within 15 minutes and be refueled in 5.
If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty.
If you have some small number of chargers at work do you know that you are going to be able to charge? Are you going to go into work park at the charging spot for 30 minutes then play musical chairs with your coworkers instead of working or are you going to park for 9 hours then leave at approx the same time as others ensuring that exactly 5 cars get charged per week despite being able to theoretically charge 336 per week in 3O minute blocks.
Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week? I haven't this month and even so you can't be sure that one of a small number of spots are actually available.
Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
We could just look at countries like Norway where the internal combustion car is extinct and see how they do it. If you are going to nitpick that Norway has a lot of houses and is rich enough to install chargers in every apartment parking spot, then we can look at Hong Kong, or China, or Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or any of the countries that have mass EV adoption and a variety of conditions including incredible density.
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car. The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
Do you live in any extremely poor and rural area this isn't the experience for 99.9% of Americans where stations are plentiful and waits are 0-2 minutes
This math is bad and shouldn't be used as a justification. It presumes that every charger is always available, that variable battery conditions and traffic conditions make reaching that charger every time, and that drivers have time to drive to the fast charger and spend 30 minutes there every time their car has low battery.
I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an in-home charger is a massive pain even with Superchargers within 20 minutes drive and a 300 mile range.
A trip to the super charger takes about 1.5 hours assuming its available when I arrive, I can only make the trip when the car needs charging or I am wasting time and energy. The exact time I will need to make this 1.5 hour trip work is variable. It depends on battery conditions, traffic conditions, and what I need to do. I cannot assume that the car will be charged when I need it to be - if I need to depart on Friday evening, or unexpectedly needed to get groceries during the week - I am obliged to spend the 1.5 hours at that moment.
To avoid these problems, I generally need to charge the car when it has ~30-40% and for battery protection I can only charge to 80%. Turning a car rated for 310 miles range into one with ~100-120 miles of usable range and a 1.5 hour weekly maintenance schedule. That range could be further reduced to 50-70 miles in winter conditions. The stalls at charging station charge by the minute, so you can't exactly wonder off.
With a reliable home charger, these problems mostly go away even a slow 5kw charger should charge the car overnight - and a typical tesla installation delivers 11kw. A renter with no ability to plugin and charge overnight will have a tough time with an EV compared to a gas car.
Sounds like lack of a good network of fast chargers is a real issue for you. I can understand why you're so frustrated.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
I live in the SF Bay Area and the local shopping centers closest to me have zero EV chargers. California is supposedly going to mandate that all new vehicles be electric in 2035 but that's obviously a ridiculous fantasy; the deadline will be pushed back or eliminated.
Which is why I'm advocating for them to get built.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
I don’t have a garage, as is common in my country. Charging my car off a regular socket would thus require leaving a ground floor window open all night (undesirable from both a security and wildlife intrusion perspective) or installing a socket outdoors (at which point why not just get a charger?)
Sounds like my suggestion to use a high speed public charger is perfect for you since that's a solution that scales and makes it so people that don't have a garage can use EVs and keep their windows closed at night.
There are so many different options, it's confusing. But a "proper" 7 kW charger can cost over £2000 to install if your house isn't wired in a convenient way, while installing an ordinary socket outside might cost about a tenth of that and give you 2.3 kW. You might get about 4.5 miles per kWh, so potentially more than 80 miles from an 8-hour overnight charge from an ordinary 230 V socket, which can deliver 10 A for a long time if it's a modern one and properly installed though you need to be a bit careful because it's not normal to take that much current from an ordinary socket and you'd be doing this at night so you should worry a bit about something overheating and catching fire. Worth getting someone competent to take a look at the wiring, I'd say.
Basically, as far as I can tell, you can take 10 amps off lots of places in an ordinary modern house, but to get 32 amps for a "proper" EV charger you probably need to go back to where the power supply enters the house and start there afresh with new and rather more expensive equipment and cables.
(US readers note that I'm talking about GB where domestic wiring is all 230 V.)
Sure there are lights. It will cost me somewhere around 3000$ (Eastern Europe btw) just for the work, wiring and meter. And I will need to get approval of the home owners, and I will need to pay out of pocket for the whole building complex insurance difference, because apparently it will increase from a default "all ICE parking" to a "shared ICE and EV parking" and the latter costs more. I didn't even ask yet, there are 200 parking spots in a contiguous space, I imagine costs would be prohibitive.
I'm actually considering EV as my next car, and due to some legal BS and my own mistakes I will likely need to quickly sell my ICE car at a loss next year and buy something in replacement, which I otherwise wouldn't do for at least five to ten more years, my car is just fine for me. But without ability to charge my car at home, EV is an absolute non-starter and out of the question, I will likely get a hybrid Corolla instead. Taking vacations at a gas station or walking for an hour there and back or paying for an expensive public transport twice for every charging is not my dream really.
I still don't understand. So you do have an EV charger at home? Just a slow one? The issue with EVs is that a majority of people doesn't have any EV charger at home at all. These is almost no one who would willingly downgrade from a convenient car to a car which requires driving to some far away gas station and sit there for hours in a parking lot in a cold or in a heat, if it's even working in the first place which they often aren't.
Owning an EV doesn't necessitate spending a few grand to have a fast charger installed. They charge fine from a regular 110v US wall outlet -- they just do it slowly.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
Even people who have a round trip commute of 30 miles drive other places than work on average days and have days when they drive 2 and 3x as much as normal days every time enough greater than average days line up you have to contend with finding a charger which gets more contentious as more electric cars exist AND as they age in the hands of people who cannot afford to just replace car or battery.
Doesn’t matter, go to a charging station once every two weeks if/when charging gets behind. If you’re determined to fail instead of succeed there’s always more excuses to be made.
There’s a good tech connections series on this.
Slow home charging has been doable for quite a while.
It's doable for single family detached housing for users with a modest daily drive and relatively flat usage patterns so long as they can afford to pay a premium on the car and replace it in a timely fashion when the battery gets sufficiently old that its capacity continues to match peaks in usage with the understanding that failure to keep up means you don't get to work on time or can't get home.
Which is exactly why techbros think its obvious and most regular people aren't buying.
Ew apartment buildings have them where I live, though a limited number so I can imagine that their use fluctuates. Someone who can’t reserve an open charger can’t move in. Someone who can’t get the floor plan they want is less likely to sign a lease even if a charger is available.
I think this is usually done with idle fees and the like. I was recently apartment hunting and we tested out the EV chargers -- in this case it was a Tesla destination charger, but I didn't realize those now had smarts built into them to provide for billing and idle fees just like superchargers have.
We ended up in an apartment without any way to charge, so for now we're dealing with supercharging -- and just recently found a nearby condo complex (1/3mi walk) with 19 completely free chargepoints. But yeah, this is Menlo Park, so we have 5 superchargers within a few miles.
Well, when there were no cars using gasoline, there were no gas stations, what a surprise!
Sure, there might sometime be a chicken-and-egg problem initially, but saying a new but proven technology is totally unusable because it does not have infrastructure everywhere seems kinda weird to me. The infrastructure will catch up as usage grows.
All three employers I've had over the last ten years now offer free charging at work. New houses everywhere have been putting in extra circuits for charging for years. Apartment buildings are commonly built with chargers now, and older ones are starting to see retrofits.
Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
I think you may need to reset some of your assumptions. :)
I think Elon Musk would have happily built gas turbines on high-rises if we let him build them in the middle of the city to power those electric cars. I don't think that's a good idea, though.
Yeah seemingly this is not a problem with data centers. I am sure it was astroturfing all along. Also you never hear about climate change even though that's the cause of the heat wave in Europe and the US
Totally agree. One thing the AI bros believe though is that growth == useful. If you strongly believe that the larger the model the smarter it is then you think through growth we get AGI which implicitly is useful because reasons.
My stance is more that compute isn’t the limiting factor anymore. These models are useful if you’re a software dev. What we need is time to integrate these models in ways that are useful to normal people. I do not share the belief that if we keep expanding we’ll hit some magical limit where it’ll suddenly be a god and solve our problems.
The politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.
This should include the AI companies trying to sell their product to the government, suggesting it is a strategic asset in need of protectionism, and playing the PR game of "our product will let us own the world, we're so awesome you should be scared and invest."
Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.
Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.
Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.
Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.
The problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities.
The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity.
The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource.
The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.
The retardation has mostly been a case of AI companies fearmongering, lobbying the govt and the govt not reassuming people against job losses. Local governments passing moratoriums is just common sense populism.
I wonder how public works funding would look if 90% of the nation wasn’t painfully far behind in maintenance.
But also, AI data centers have been around for like 3 years. It’s not surprising they haven’t reached a high level of efficiency yet.
IMO they are not an argument against excessive power use (I know this is not your argument, just a common one), but rather and argument FOR better (read: nuclear) power generation.
I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear. The actual position is that we need a mix of both nuclear and renewables while ramping down non-renewable sources as fast as possible, because you need both intermittent cheap generation and reliable baseload that doesn't care if the wind stops blowing or clouds roll over the panels.
The pricing story remains unconvincing to me. LCOE comparisons measure the cost of producing a unit of electricity, but they don't account for what it costs to actually integrate that electricity into a working grid. Solar and wind are cheap on paper, but they still need storage or backup generation to cover the hours they're not producing, and that cost gets left out of the simple dollar per MWh number. Once you factor in grid balancing and storage, the gap closes a lot, and in some studies it disappears entirely depending on the region's wind and solar resources. Obviously things have to be considered in the context of where we're putting these power plants, Norwegians can probably afford to rely a lot more on offshore wind and hydro than a place like Serbia could.
Nuclear plants will obviously be expensive to build, and will likely always be more expensive than renewables to initially build just due to the sheer complexity involved when compared to renewable sources, but I can't think of a better use of that money personally, especially compared to how much gets spent on far worse things like chucking a billion dollars worth of missiles at Iran[0].
Also, already built and paid off nuclear plants are consistently some of the cheapest electricity around, often profitable without any subsidy at all. 70%(!!!!) of France's electricity comes from nuclear. They exported more electricity last year than countries like Belgium consumes in an entire year. They enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in the region because of their historical nuclear fleet, and had people had the same attitude back in the day (looking at you, German "green" party), that fleet would've never gotten built. Letting your offspring enjoy the shade of the tree you plant today and all that stuff, it'll always be too expensive until we actually hunker down and just build the bloody things.
And yeah, new builds like Flamanville have been a mess on cost and timeline, that's a fair criticism of new construction, but it doesn't erase what a mature nuclear fleet does for a grid once it's actually built, and can generally be applied to pretty much any infrastructure project anywhere in the world.
>Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs?
>I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear.
I didn't interpret the other post to imply only nuclear. I interpreted to mean "why do so many people think nuclear is better than battery". My understanding is that LCOS+LCOE for batt+solar is quite close to nuclear cost and will only go down further, plus it has the advantage of being safer in the catastrophic case.
How could you possibly know the cost and pollution levels of batteries not-yet invented? The pollution from a nuclear power plant is one 55-gallon barrel of waste per reactor per year, and ZERO batteries are that clean. Like, what are you even thinking here?
This ignores the pollution to make that fuel and the pollution to build the plan (both of which you are already counting on the battery side). Plus the pollution of all the backup generators that they require and must test regularly.
There is significant pollution created while digging up the rare earth materials which are needed to make solar panels, and batteries are some of the dirtiest things we make.
There is virtually zero pollution in a generator which does not typically run. The only waste is the need to occasionally change out the fuel. It’s a rounding error at worst.
This is also ignoring how much safer nuclear is than any other form of power generation, and pollution concerns are ostensibly, at least in part, about improving health and lives of humans.
To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.
Putting aside the actual subsidies, there’s the uncomfortable truth that nuclear operators are not on the hook for long tail risks and costs. The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning if the company goes under, and it will foot the bill for accidents.
To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
> To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.
Care to elaborate on what you find funny?
France's energy regulator (CRE) puts the actual cost of running its nuclear fleet at about ~€61/MWh for 2026-2028. EDF's (Électricité de France) own revenue estimate for 2026 nuclear generation is around €66/MWh. They are currently earning a profit on their power generation, the fleet pulls in over €5 billion annually just from selling the surplus to its neighbors. If that's the punchline of your joke I'm not seeing it.
French industrial electricity runs about €69/MWh vs £168/MWh in the UK, as an example.
> The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning
What better use is there of taxes than the running and decommissioning of power plants, nuclear or not? I'd much rather my tax money go to covering all the costs involved with nuclear, from initial construction and everything else involved than pretty much anything else most gov'ts waste their money on.
Who should be paying for it, in your mind?
> To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
Again, I fail to see how or why this is actually a problem. Power generation is probably the poster child for what governments should be handling and backstopping with tax money. You're also talking as if the large majority of power plants, and I mean coal, natural gas and even renewables aren't also covered by the exact same kind of government backstop.
In the US, nuclear's liability for an accident is capped around $16.3 Billion under the Price-Anderson Act, split across private insurance and an industry-funded pool.
Offshore oil liability is capped by law at $75 million (Yes, only MILLION) per incident, funded by a tiny per-barrel tax, and cleanup costs blow through that number constantly, which is why e.g. Deepwater Horizon needed a special one-off arrangement to handle at all. TVA's 2008 coal ash spill cost over a billion dollars to clean up and got passed straight onto ratepayers because TVA hit its own debt ceiling. And right now, in 2026, the EPA is actively proposing to weaken coal ash cleanup rules, meaning the backstop on coal's mess is getting worse, not better, while it's still being burned at scale.
So no, nuclear doesn't get some unique golden treatment here. Every energy source with real catastrophic tail risk gets a government backstop, because no private insurer on earth prices genuinely catastrophic low-probability events without one. The only difference is nuclear's cap is a known, bounded number attached to an industry with an extremely good actual safety record in reality, while coal's backstop is open-ended and attached to something that poisons rivers and drinking water on a rolling basis without needing a single accident to do it.
In US at least much of the high cost is completely self inflicted, driven by Byzantine bureaucratic processes mostly unrelated to the actual engineering requirements necessary for building a safe reactor.
Why do people create this false narrative that renewables and nuclear somehow aren’t the same thing? Why do people pretend that nuclear is not a solution to our energy needs? Why do they seem addicted to pretending the absolute worst alternatives, like solar and wind, are going to be the solution?
The only forms of power generation worth a shit are hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Geothermal and hydro are geographically bound to certain locations.
Solar sucks dick unless you magically invent a new battery (and if you think we haven’t been trying, you’re crazy). I mean, MAYBE we’ll have a major scientific breakthrough and it’ll be possible to utilize them, but relying largely on an energy source most scarce when you need it most is obviously dumb.
Wind is completely unpredictable and once again, if it’s not, it’s geographically bound.
At least have an argument that doesn’t look stupid as shit. “This thing we haven’t been investing in for 50 years is ESSPENSIV!! Also what’s fusion idk prolly dumb stuff guyz”
Because our battery tech sucks shit. The entire solar industry is predicated on the idea that we will invent a magical battery MANY MANY times better than what currently exists, without being dirtier than everything north of coal.
Come on, I’m begging you to come up with an actual argument rather than one answered millions of times already.
"AI data centers" are so non-central and located in places so data-sparse (yet rich in cheap electricity) I consider them more likely fronts for crypto mining.
> But if AI is a race with national security implications, they won’t be fast enough.
I really don't think this is the case. As far as I can tell there are two national security things where LLMs have some utility; mass surveilance (ick!!!) or software security. To me that does not justify a huge infrastructure buildout considering the implications of said infrastructure.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 72.1 ms ] threadAnd the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
What isn't "purely political?"
Everything is political in the world, unfortunately.
The current US admin:
Trump’s Multi-Pronged Attack on Renewable Energy https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?par...
but they are slowly being beaten back:
Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges - https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admin-abandons...
The Trumpian adventures in Iran have wrong footed his fossil fuel buddies and slowed his Don Quixote roll against giant scary windmills for now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
If you look at the overall picture, it's clear that he opposes anything not carbon based. And cost isn't a rational reason for it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-appro...
And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...
So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
Anthropic is removing these larger models from personal plans at the end of the week to focus on selling it to enterprise users.
Putting these more intelligent new models into the hands of more people seems very worthwhile to me.
I think that it might well be true. The Opus models had capacity issues on many occasions too. Can the larger model even be served on all of the hardware they have, or only a subset?
It would not surprise me if growing enterprise demand threatens capacity, making it impossible for Anthropic to offer the model in subscriptions at this time, even though they could do so at a profit.
I am not even sure if API prices are actually profitable, but they certainly aren't as unprofitable as the subscription plan users.
Either way, that's why you don't have access. It has nothing to do with capacity constraints.
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
Like:
Copper. "As the world shifts to wind energy and electric cars, demand for the conductive metal has increased. But mining copper brings its own environmental hazards"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
Impacts of lithium mining on water stressed regions in Chile
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/01/c...
Impacts of rare earth refining in China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...
silicon tetrachloride from solar production
https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=831
Europe should not outsource it's ecological impact to developing countries.
Comparisons should be made for replacements.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.
Fast forward 20 years from the advent of essentially infinite energy results in WWIII and a new “Great Detente” but only after all the assholes have wreaked all the havoc they can.
There are dark days ahead but ultimately a brighter future. Sucks to live through that transition phase though.
1. Smaller the nuclear reactor is more neutron leakage you get. Each neutron which escapes a nuclear reactor is a neutron which can not be used to sustain the chain reactor. To compensate this you have to put more fissionable U-235 isotope into the reactor and as a result you need higher enriched nuclear fuel. A nuclear reactor in nuclear submarine can have the size of a dining table but it's running on nuclear fuel enriched to a weapon grade enrichment.
2. Even a small nuclear reactor with few kW thermal output needs a thick and heavy radiation shielding. This is not problem for power plant, or nuclear powered submarine, or nuclear powered ship. But the shielding requirement were problem for nuclear powered airplanes or trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft
In case of the mobile ML-1 experimental nuclear reactor, built as part of the US Army Nuclear Power Program, extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first artificial nuclear reactor, didn't have shielding. But, to keep the dose of ionizing radiation for the staff within reasonable limits, it operated only for very short time periods and the total output of CP-1 was only few Watts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-ye...
The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.
My preferred outlandish idea would be to put the data centers next to solar farms in the Sahara. I just don't know yet how we are going to make the batteries to power that through the night
https://youtube.com/shorts/9ltVH8RQYFk
But this project is still moving energy- it's just moving natural gas instead of electricity!
What are you, some kind of a Luddite? (/s)
The key with this project is that instead of wasting the thermal energy from this unused gas, we feed it into power plants that are constructed nearby, eliminating the need for new pipeline infrastructure and providing some actual value.
You could go on to argue the oil fields themselves should cease production. This is the only way to actually stop the methane coming out of the ground. Even then it wouldn't happen overnight.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that "we're already flaring off the gas", but increasing dependency on the process is the wrong direction all the same.
2. Companies realising that they are burning half million to get nowhere
3. Circular investment scaring investors
4. And more recently, companies hiring people back coz the AI aimed to replace humans, created more problems than solved them
5. Memory cartel falling apart, again, they did the same thing during 2000s
6. China is making good ML free, supply and demand, destroying the US tech token business model
7. Even META has too much computer power and no enough use for them.
Those are the main reasons why AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart faster than expected.
Premise perverted, FUD averted, false-victimhood denied.
A datacenter did not murder your family.
PR heads are raging over the amazing shit that AI does and how everything is going to change and just WOWZA BAZINGA.
Yet in my daily life I use it for years and it’s wrong _all_ the time, I end up having to yell at it because it keeps being lazy and gaslighting me, the data centers boil the oceans and rich assholes beg my government to throw billions of good money after bad to build more of this shit. What the fuck? I want to live in the future and all they gave me was some shitty Fisher’s price AI.
And that's precisely why this is all happening: people aiming for the future and forgetting about the present. You using AI every day for years is exactly what started boiling the oceans (even more) and giving the rich assholes even more power than they already had.
With these things, as with most things, you vote with your wallet. If people were to stop buying into the AI fantasy, the AI gooners would have no one to sell their wet dreams to.
The real "AI" success story will be the person that makes an IRL backrooms theme park in the husk of a datacenter.
Or: laser tag park, the vests you wear are in part old tpu/gpu components.
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to prompt!”
That's with only about 5% of cars being electric.
We've consumed nearly all of the slack in transmission capacity.
I'm expecting transmission costs to balloon.
Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty.
If you have some small number of chargers at work do you know that you are going to be able to charge? Are you going to go into work park at the charging spot for 30 minutes then play musical chairs with your coworkers instead of working or are you going to park for 9 hours then leave at approx the same time as others ensuring that exactly 5 cars get charged per week despite being able to theoretically charge 336 per week in 3O minute blocks.
Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week? I haven't this month and even so you can't be sure that one of a small number of spots are actually available.
Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car. The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an in-home charger is a massive pain even with Superchargers within 20 minutes drive and a 300 mile range.
A trip to the super charger takes about 1.5 hours assuming its available when I arrive, I can only make the trip when the car needs charging or I am wasting time and energy. The exact time I will need to make this 1.5 hour trip work is variable. It depends on battery conditions, traffic conditions, and what I need to do. I cannot assume that the car will be charged when I need it to be - if I need to depart on Friday evening, or unexpectedly needed to get groceries during the week - I am obliged to spend the 1.5 hours at that moment.
To avoid these problems, I generally need to charge the car when it has ~30-40% and for battery protection I can only charge to 80%. Turning a car rated for 310 miles range into one with ~100-120 miles of usable range and a 1.5 hour weekly maintenance schedule. That range could be further reduced to 50-70 miles in winter conditions. The stalls at charging station charge by the minute, so you can't exactly wonder off.
With a reliable home charger, these problems mostly go away even a slow 5kw charger should charge the car overnight - and a typical tesla installation delivers 11kw. A renter with no ability to plugin and charge overnight will have a tough time with an EV compared to a gas car.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
Basically, as far as I can tell, you can take 10 amps off lots of places in an ordinary modern house, but to get 32 amps for a "proper" EV charger you probably need to go back to where the power supply enters the house and start there afresh with new and rather more expensive equipment and cables.
(US readers note that I'm talking about GB where domestic wiring is all 230 V.)
> After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine.
Wait, did you tell that you were using EV charger at home actually? I'm confused by the wording.
240v medium charging often needs a wall mount charger, though can plug into a dryer/oven outlet. More expensive but meets the needs of everyone.
Shortsighted defeatism is not compelling.
I'm actually considering EV as my next car, and due to some legal BS and my own mistakes I will likely need to quickly sell my ICE car at a loss next year and buy something in replacement, which I otherwise wouldn't do for at least five to ten more years, my car is just fine for me. But without ability to charge my car at home, EV is an absolute non-starter and out of the question, I will likely get a hybrid Corolla instead. Taking vacations at a gas station or walking for an hour there and back or paying for an expensive public transport twice for every charging is not my dream really.
If you have a good fast charger network available you don’t really need to have a 240v charger or even a charger at all.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
There’s a good tech connections series on this. Slow home charging has been doable for quite a while.
Which is exactly why techbros think its obvious and most regular people aren't buying.
This is in the Bay Area, fwiw.
We ended up in an apartment without any way to charge, so for now we're dealing with supercharging -- and just recently found a nearby condo complex (1/3mi walk) with 19 completely free chargepoints. But yeah, this is Menlo Park, so we have 5 superchargers within a few miles.
Sure, there might sometime be a chicken-and-egg problem initially, but saying a new but proven technology is totally unusable because it does not have infrastructure everywhere seems kinda weird to me. The infrastructure will catch up as usage grows.
Until free/at cost car charging is provided at work when the sun shines you're just moving the place where combustion happens.
This may be a worth while trade in downtowns where the main form of car pollution is engine exhaust at an average of 20mph.
Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
I think you may need to reset some of your assumptions. :)
The future is not evenly distributed and the outliers matter little.
We put the cart before the horse, lets stop talking about growth and focus on making it useful first lmao
You have to a fucking moron to think Claude is not "useful".
Wow. Just fucking wow.
This should include the AI companies trying to sell their product to the government, suggesting it is a strategic asset in need of protectionism, and playing the PR game of "our product will let us own the world, we're so awesome you should be scared and invest."
Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.
Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.
Of the items on this chart, I would say AI data centers are providing by far the least value for % of GDP spent.
But also, AI data centers have been around for like 3 years. It’s not surprising they haven’t reached a high level of efficiency yet.
IMO they are not an argument against excessive power use (I know this is not your argument, just a common one), but rather and argument FOR better (read: nuclear) power generation.
The pricing story remains unconvincing to me. LCOE comparisons measure the cost of producing a unit of electricity, but they don't account for what it costs to actually integrate that electricity into a working grid. Solar and wind are cheap on paper, but they still need storage or backup generation to cover the hours they're not producing, and that cost gets left out of the simple dollar per MWh number. Once you factor in grid balancing and storage, the gap closes a lot, and in some studies it disappears entirely depending on the region's wind and solar resources. Obviously things have to be considered in the context of where we're putting these power plants, Norwegians can probably afford to rely a lot more on offshore wind and hydro than a place like Serbia could.
Nuclear plants will obviously be expensive to build, and will likely always be more expensive than renewables to initially build just due to the sheer complexity involved when compared to renewable sources, but I can't think of a better use of that money personally, especially compared to how much gets spent on far worse things like chucking a billion dollars worth of missiles at Iran[0].
Also, already built and paid off nuclear plants are consistently some of the cheapest electricity around, often profitable without any subsidy at all. 70%(!!!!) of France's electricity comes from nuclear. They exported more electricity last year than countries like Belgium consumes in an entire year. They enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in the region because of their historical nuclear fleet, and had people had the same attitude back in the day (looking at you, German "green" party), that fleet would've never gotten built. Letting your offspring enjoy the shade of the tree you plant today and all that stuff, it'll always be too expensive until we actually hunker down and just build the bloody things.
And yeah, new builds like Flamanville have been a mess on cost and timeline, that's a fair criticism of new construction, but it doesn't erase what a mature nuclear fleet does for a grid once it's actually built, and can generally be applied to pretty much any infrastructure project anywhere in the world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845514 - US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers
>I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear.
I didn't interpret the other post to imply only nuclear. I interpreted to mean "why do so many people think nuclear is better than battery". My understanding is that LCOS+LCOE for batt+solar is quite close to nuclear cost and will only go down further, plus it has the advantage of being safer in the catastrophic case.
There is virtually zero pollution in a generator which does not typically run. The only waste is the need to occasionally change out the fuel. It’s a rounding error at worst.
This is also ignoring how much safer nuclear is than any other form of power generation, and pollution concerns are ostensibly, at least in part, about improving health and lives of humans.
Bro come on lol.
Putting aside the actual subsidies, there’s the uncomfortable truth that nuclear operators are not on the hook for long tail risks and costs. The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning if the company goes under, and it will foot the bill for accidents.
To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
Care to elaborate on what you find funny?
France's energy regulator (CRE) puts the actual cost of running its nuclear fleet at about ~€61/MWh for 2026-2028. EDF's (Électricité de France) own revenue estimate for 2026 nuclear generation is around €66/MWh. They are currently earning a profit on their power generation, the fleet pulls in over €5 billion annually just from selling the surplus to its neighbors. If that's the punchline of your joke I'm not seeing it.
French industrial electricity runs about €69/MWh vs £168/MWh in the UK, as an example.
> The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning
What better use is there of taxes than the running and decommissioning of power plants, nuclear or not? I'd much rather my tax money go to covering all the costs involved with nuclear, from initial construction and everything else involved than pretty much anything else most gov'ts waste their money on.
Who should be paying for it, in your mind?
> To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
Again, I fail to see how or why this is actually a problem. Power generation is probably the poster child for what governments should be handling and backstopping with tax money. You're also talking as if the large majority of power plants, and I mean coal, natural gas and even renewables aren't also covered by the exact same kind of government backstop.
In the US, nuclear's liability for an accident is capped around $16.3 Billion under the Price-Anderson Act, split across private insurance and an industry-funded pool.
Offshore oil liability is capped by law at $75 million (Yes, only MILLION) per incident, funded by a tiny per-barrel tax, and cleanup costs blow through that number constantly, which is why e.g. Deepwater Horizon needed a special one-off arrangement to handle at all. TVA's 2008 coal ash spill cost over a billion dollars to clean up and got passed straight onto ratepayers because TVA hit its own debt ceiling. And right now, in 2026, the EPA is actively proposing to weaken coal ash cleanup rules, meaning the backstop on coal's mess is getting worse, not better, while it's still being burned at scale.
So no, nuclear doesn't get some unique golden treatment here. Every energy source with real catastrophic tail risk gets a government backstop, because no private insurer on earth prices genuinely catastrophic low-probability events without one. The only difference is nuclear's cap is a known, bounded number attached to an industry with an extremely good actual safety record in reality, while coal's backstop is open-ended and attached to something that poisons rivers and drinking water on a rolling basis without needing a single accident to do it.
The only forms of power generation worth a shit are hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Geothermal and hydro are geographically bound to certain locations.
Solar sucks dick unless you magically invent a new battery (and if you think we haven’t been trying, you’re crazy). I mean, MAYBE we’ll have a major scientific breakthrough and it’ll be possible to utilize them, but relying largely on an energy source most scarce when you need it most is obviously dumb.
Wind is completely unpredictable and once again, if it’s not, it’s geographically bound.
At least have an argument that doesn’t look stupid as shit. “This thing we haven’t been investing in for 50 years is ESSPENSIV!! Also what’s fusion idk prolly dumb stuff guyz”
Come on, I’m begging you to come up with an actual argument rather than one answered millions of times already.
This is a self-inflicted cost for a state
I really don't think this is the case. As far as I can tell there are two national security things where LLMs have some utility; mass surveilance (ick!!!) or software security. To me that does not justify a huge infrastructure buildout considering the implications of said infrastructure.