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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 […]
National Archives at College Park – Archives II (College Park, MD) 1979
By Jo Nova
The ferocious demand for gas power to feed US Datacenters has triggered a global shortage
Such is the cashed up desire for gas turbines in the US, that all around the world other people are struggling to get gas turbines. Manufacturers have ramped up production, but waiting times have blown out to more than five years. In sheer desperation, companies are converting jet engines into small gas turbines.
Wow – this graph from the latest IEA report
The demand for gas power in “US captive data centers” is so large it is bigger than the investment in gas power in any other country except for the investment in grid connected datacentres, also in the USA.
Anyone who thinks they can just add a gas turbine here and there to patch up a gap in their renewable transition could be in for a nasty surprise.
“It only takes 30 -45 days to convert a Boeing 737 Jet Engine….”
Soaring Electricity Demand Meets Gas Turbine Shortage
By Irene Slav, OilPrice
Turbine makers like Siemens, GE Vernova, and Mitsubishi are ramping […]
By Jo Nova
Australia is supposed to be going hell for leather to install renewables in order to pretend it has a chance of making Labor’s 82% reduction in emissions target by 2030. Instead investors are running away:
Investors desert Australia’s renewable rollout at ‘critical juncture’
Mike Foley and Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
Investment in renewable projects collapsed by 50 per cent over the past year, wiping out $4 billion in spending on the rollout, compromising the Albanese government’s clean energy targets and spurring industry warnings that the delays could raise electricity bills.
It’s always a critical juncture for renewables isn’t it? It’s like that for things that serve no useful purpose and levitate on subsidies. Investors must bet on which way the political wind will blow, and last year, after the Trump win, renewable energy took a hit.
Financial commitments for new renewable generation projects fell to a 10-year low in 2025 of $4.4 billion, half the value of projects that reached financial close in 2024, according to the Clean Energy Council’s annual report, published on Tuesday.
Investors are fleeing because of all the usual reasons not to invest — there’s […]
By Jo Nova
Google was going carbon free by 2030 right up until it needed reliable hard energy itself, then the Net Zero goals were dropped in a hole. Even though The Goolag has been censoring skeptics and lecturing the public for ten (or twenty) years about the dangers of fossil fuels, now that it wants more power, Google chooses “gas”. Never mind the families that can’t afford dinner …
Google didn’t just promise to use more renewables—it promised to run on carbon-free power every hour of every day. “Climate Change is an urgent threat to humanity,” said Google in 2020. But now Google wants to build a 933MW gas plant in Texas, and is exploring building another huge gas plant in Nebraska.
Google was a key part of the marketing and election campaign to crush fossil fuels and promote the renewables industry, and it’s not even pretending that solar and wind power are the answer any more.
Google to tap into gas plant for AI datacenter in sharp turn from climate goals
— by Dara Kerr, The Guardian,
Michael Thomas, the founder of Cleanview and author of the report [on Google’s new gas […]
AI eats energy for breakfast.
By Jo Nova
AI hunger for reliable baseload power is insatiable
Consider the situation in the UK. More than 140 data center projects have applied for a grid connection in the UK. If they all get connected they could draw 50 gigawatts of electricity, which is more than the rest of Great Britain uses in a single peak day.
Thanks to Paul at Notalotofpeopleknowthat:
AI data centres risk doubling Britain’s energy use and pushing up bills
By Matthew Field ( Telegraph)
The data centres being built to power Labour’s AI ambitions will use more electricity than the rest of the country put together, the energy regulator has admitted.
Ofgem has disclosed that more than 140 data centre projects have come forward seeking grid connections, with requests for more than 50 gigawatts (GW) of capacity.
If these projects were all built and operating at full capacity, they would require more power than Britain’s peak daily energy demand this month of around 45GW.
The energy watchdog said the UK power network was facing “rapidly growing demand queues” and “unprecedented large-load connection requests”.
Ofgem […]
By Jo Nova
New AI Data Centers need so much energy, so fast, they’re are going off-grid
Such is the blistering race to get ahead in the global AI battle, that the industry is not waiting for the bureaucrats to build new power plants anymore, they are doing it themselves. And the leading edge of data engineers are not choosing the clean green wind or solar power of the future — they’re building gas plants. The sun and wind are free, but the battery back up, high voltage lines, long approvals, and unreliable supply cost the Earth.
What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants
Dylan Baddour, Arcelia Martin, Ars Technica
The plant would be big enough to power a major city, with 1,200 megawatts of planned generation capacity fueled by West Texas shale gas. It will only supply the new data center, and possibly other large data centers recently proposed, down the road.
The project is one of many others like it proposed in Texas, where a frantic race to boot up energy-hungry data centers has led many developers to plan their own gas-fired power plants rather […]
By Jo Nova
The winds of change are howling through electricity grids
Since 2022, AI -related firms have stormed the S&P 500 market — growing by $12 trillion dollars.
The IEA just posted a whole report dedicated to AI. The demand from data-centers is so large in some places it is already rivaling the kind of monster consumption we are used to seeing from aluminum smelters. There are six states in the United States where data centers already consume over 10% of the electricity supply. In Ireland, data centers swallow about 20% of the electricity.
Currently, a normal data center consumes the same amount of electricity as 100,000 houses. But the new gargantuan data centers under construction will consume 20 times as much — equivalent to adding 2 million homes to the grid.
Data centers of the world are not spread evenly. In Virginia, the largest conglomeration of industrial data, their demand for power pulls in a quarter of the state’s electricity.
Australia is being left behind, because we won’t build coal plants in case we offend the UN, and we banned nuclear power as a fashion statement in 1998. The AI global race is on, but digital machines […]
By Jo Nova
Trump switches on the giant dormant coal infrastructure of the US
In the last twenty years 770 coal turbines have been switched off in the US, and Donald Trump wants to turn as many back on as he can.
Any moment now President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that will boost coal mining, keep old coal power stations running and restart shuttered coal plants. The word is that the US government will define coal as a “mineral” which allows him to use presidential wartime authority to speed up approvals for coal mines, and to bypass environmental red tape and even prioritize exploration and mining on federal lands.
US agencies will be told to rescind any policies that aim to “transition away from coal” or “otherwise establish preferences against using fossil fuels”. The country with the largest known coal reserves in the world is now planning to increase coal exports.
Furthermore Trump will ask the Energy Department to consider whether coal should be listed as a ‘critical mineral’ — something described as a ‘coveted status’ which activates even more emergency powers.
Shares of coal companies in the US are up 11 to 18%, and […]
By Jo Nova
The insatiable hunger for electricity
The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did […]
By Jo Nova
This will slow down the parasites
The most exciting thing I heard today was that AI was used to find all the nasty surprises secreted away in the 1,500 pages of US legislation that was being pumped through Congress in the days before Christmas. Legal aides must have spent all year stacking the deck with tricks to enrich the political class. No human could unpack the fine print overnight, but AI could. Then, free speech saved the day, the Capitol Pork was exposed when Elon Musk spread the word to his 208 million readers.
As Elon Musk says: I’m suspicious of laws that are longer than The Lord of the Rings.
Huge implications for the use of AI. They used AI to “read” all 1,574 pages of that monstrosity and pull out the graft and corruption. This is a game changer. They can’t hide things in multi-thousand page bills anymore.
— DJ Jones (@sgtdaviddjjones) December 19, 2024
No matter how corrupt you think Big-government is, it’s worse:
Posters on X exposed some of the hidden surprises which included a payrise for Congress, funding for Bill Gates mosquito games, bioweapons research, vaccine […]
By Jo Nova
Like a sabre:
This is amazing 😂 pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024
“I am the ultimate diversity hire, I’m both a woman and a person of color, so if you criticize anything I say, you’re both a sexist and a racist”
AI will destroy jobs… (hopefully one in particular).
But both sides can use this tool — to construct a narrative, as well as to destroy it.
Reality may become very hard to find with unmarked Deepfake voices “on the loose” — especially if there is no shared public forum to hammer out the truth. That seems like a brilliant but dangerous game. The thing about great satire, as opposed to deepfake lies, is that when it’s done well, and it speaks the truth (in a fake voice), the target wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by denying they said it.
But perhaps we need an AI watermark…
h/t Stephen Neil
9.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings
By Jo Nova
As Western grids are teetering, people are suddenly realizing demand for electricity is about to skyrocket
Unstoppable demands are about to meet immovable rocks. A year ago the grid managers thought they had their five year plans figured out, but now the same experts think we are going to need to add twice as much generation as they did then. The watt-hogs have arrived to chew on some gigawatt hours.
The usual slow grid planning processes are getting upended. Take the US State of Georgia for example. They have scored lots of new electric vehicle and battery factories, a few large “clean energy” manufacturing projects, and have attracted a bunch of energy-sucking data centers, but all of these things add massive loads to the grid.
In the last 22 years demand for electricity hasn’t growth much, so in 2022 Georgia Power were expecting to close their coal fired plants pretty soon, and not even put forward a new plan til 2025. Instead Georgia Power are knocking on the state regulators door to let it expand generation. They’re now expecting winter demand will grow 17 times faster than their previous plan, and summer use will explode to […]
By Jo Nova
This paper shows exactly how good “Peer Review” is
It’s not just that a clever AI image slipped through peer review, it’s that it was garishly fake in a supersize kind of way. Scientifically everything about it was radioactive satire and yet it still got through “peer review”. The words are gibberish. The editors didn’t even run a spell checker on it before publishing it, let alone the gaze of a single trained biologist in the field.
The paper has been retracted thanks to the real peer review which happened on social media. This was a case of X (formerly Twitter) saves the day. Where normal peer review can take up to two years (if you are an unpopular skeptic) it was only three days from the X review to retraction.
The Telegraph sums it up:
A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.
The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, […]
By Jo Nova
So this is a fun game for a change with a search engine, a browser, and an AI chatbot called Gippr, which aren’t obviously rigged to hide reality. Gipper was, of course a nickname for Ronald Reagan.
“”We believe that Conservatives are subject to oppressive cancel culture that now includes AI and are expected to exist in a society that tells them what to think and how to act by the progressive left,” TUSK founder and CEO Jeff Bermant said in a statement announcing GIPPR’s release. Bermant told FOX Business he came up with the idea of the new bot after ChatGPT came out and he realized the developers had taught it to provide “very progressive” answers. — FoxBusiness.com
So that’s five months from go to whoa? Wow.
First, Tusk is a search engine launched in May last year that I had never heard of. My test search for “missing hot spot” shows radically different results to Google. Nice! It’s like the good ol’ days on Google before the results were rigged…
But now, with crazy speed, the same team has compiled Gippr — the Chatbot AI.
Meet GIPPR, the First Conservative AI
By Jo Nova
We’re on the cusp of the Quickening in Artificial Intelligence
Jordan Peterson wonders if we have thought through how fast things are evolving:
They’re not building autonomous cars ….they’re building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots, and each of them will be able to teach the other, because their nervous system will be the same. And when there is 10 million of them, and one of them learns something, all ten million of them learns it at the same time. So they’re not going to have to be very bright before they’re very very very smart.
We’re not connected wirelessly with the same platform. But robots, they are.
Once they get a little bit smart, they’re not going to stop at being a little bit smart for very long. They’re going to be unbelievably smart, like overnight. …
Armed robots are frightening, but so is an artificial “best friend”
Homo Sapiens is a gregarious species. It’s hardwired. What happens when the scams, politics or fake romances are served up by a machine with infinite patience? When the machine knows our full history, our quirks and how we score […]
By Jo Nova
Imagine we taught a generation to obey authority, question nothing, and ran one-sided prophesies of doom for their whole lifetime. Then in a mass experiment, we let loose AI Chat-bots designed to be popular, somewhat addictive, and sounding convincingly human — “to see what happened”?
What could possibly go wrong? The Chat-bots appear to be trained on the same unskeptical material that vulnerable people are, which would make the bots a perfect way to amplify their fears. If only they had heard the other half of the story…
One particular Belgian father of two in his thirties had used an AI Chatbot for two years, but became obsessive about global warming and the chatbot in the last six weeks.
As well as a dire warning of the dangers of AI, he is, in part, another victim of the Climate Religion, and the one-sided media propaganda:
Married father kills himself after talking to AI chatbot for six weeks about his climate change fears
Christian Oliver, Daily Mail
The man, who was in his thirties, reportedly found comfort in talking to the AI chatbot named ‘Eliza’ about his worries for the world. He […]
by Jo Nova Another Great Disrupter?
What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more. ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex.
Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better?
It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow.
…
Right […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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