4 comments
I think it's time to put data centers on a power budget. If they want to make more money, they need to become more efficient and eliminate AI fraud, waste, and abuse.
Do we really need to keep slamming the grid and killing the planet for pseudonymous casino chips?<p>Can someone please merge crypto with llm training/inference somehow?
This sounds like a good reason to have a lot of batteries.
A lot would probably be an understatement. Aren't most batteries in data centers designed to just hold load for seconds or a few minutes at a time while generators start up?
Yeah, different batteries, different purposes.<p>Keeping the data center up is completely different from keeping the grid up.<p>Not only are the batteries too small; they're also on the wrong side of the disconnect.
I'd rather see legislation banning crypto mining and AI data centers from the public grid entirely. No sense in forcing the broader public to subsidize them.
The problem with that is one of the best things we have to control pollution at power plants is the rules that go into place when connecting to the US grid (I know TX is different).<p>I really don’t want to incentivize private power plants that aren’t on grid. Or just running tons of industrial sized generators instead.<p>If we’re going to allow enough of this stuff to be built that it can destabilize things why not require they behave and don’t stop off like that? Some sort of organized draw down?<p>And if they don’t? Mandatory cutoff for X amount of time. Weeks/months.
If they weren't on the public grid, they would just slap in a bunch of gas turbines and run one of the noisier, more polluting sources of electricity. I think it would be better if we required them to replace the power they used, but do so on the grid so that it benefits everyone.
Didn’t Texas pretty much do the exact opposite thing recently?
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