this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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So households will pay higher prices because of this shortage. It's time to separate markets and prices between vital and non vital stuff and make the non vital market bear the costs of these higher prices. That makes it more fair.
Also why can't these datacenters be in the desert? Use daytime solar and wind down at night. Follow the sun.
The study this cites has data centre (so not just AI but all internet stuff) rising to 300TWh by 2030. Two years ago the USA's power usage was 4000TWh a year. So in about 6 years time they estimate that data centres will be using about 8% of 2022's electricity usage, up from currently about 4%. An increase sure, but hardly one that's going to move electricity prices significantly.
That not how prices work in a shortage.
I didn't say anything about how prices work in a shortage, but I also sincerely doubt a 4% increase in 6 years (so 0.7% annually) is going to cause any shortages.
So, you have other information you are basing that on? Because the source is one of the top 3 consulting firms in the world.
I'm sure they will happily provide consultancy to the energy sector to avoid this issue, but I'm kinda surprised when random Lemmy accounts think they know better than a leading company like this.
Energy is a pretty tight market where supply and demand are tightly intertwined. So a big boom on the use side as AI is threatening has a good potential to outpace the capacity of the supply side to scale up.. thus creating scarcity, driving up prices.
Youve missread that article, it is saying rising demand generally may cause shortages, and that there is also predictions of growing demand fron datacentres, not that the later is the main cause of the former. I fact they suggest growth in electricty demand of a quarter in 2 years, vastly more than the 4% in 6 years growth in datacentre demand.