AI is eating the planet. Enormous electrical and cooling demands.

[usonian]

Last edited Tue Sep 24, 2024, 09:39 AM - Edit history (1)

https://futurism.com/the-byte/environment-openai-chatgpt
The Environmental Toll of a Single ChatGPT Query Is Absolutely Wild

Say one out of every ten working Americans were using ChatGPT just once a week to write an email. In Ren's estimate, over a one year period that would mean ChatGPT would guzzle 435 million liters of water and burn 121,517 megawatt-hours of power, which translates into all the water drunk up by every household in Rhode Island for a day and a half and enough electricity to light up all the households in Washington DC for 20 days.

And that's just today's usage. With big tech so confident in the explosive potential of AI that Microsoft is looking to bring an entire nuclear plant back online to fuel its AI datacenters, those figures could come to look laughably low.

Thirst Traps
The reason ChatGPT consumes so much water is due to the fact that AI data centers emit tons of heat when running calculations. In order to cool these facilities, they require a tremendous amount of water to bring down the temperatures coming from these servers. In places where electricity is cheap or where there's water scarcity, AI data centers use electricity to run air conditioners to cool their servers.

That can be a burden on infrastructure. Places like Arizona and Iowa are already feeling the tension between serving the needs of the public and the insatiable water thirst and power hunger of AI data centers, which bring tax revenue and jobs to these locales.

Edited to focus only on the problem, not the problems with solutions to the problem.
Quite simply, the gigantic waste of energy to by definition replace human intelligence with machinery, is entirely avoidable. The grids are buckling under the load of air conditioning, and people die from the heat.

[Aussie105]

1. And then the gas runs out . . .

and the lights go out, and the AI factories shut down, and your AC stops working, and people will drop like flies . . .

And the lament will be . . . why didn't AI warn us about this?

[NNadir]

2. A comment on the Sierra Club "data."

The article cites "Sierra Club data," which apparently arises because at the Sierra Club, they seem to have discovered that dangerous natural gas is not clean energy.

As a default, our "but her emails" and "Joe Biden is too old" media refers to the Sierra Club as an "environmental organization." (They do the same for the ignorance promoters at Greenpeace.)

The Sierra Club was founded by John Muir to resist the industrialization of wilderness, specifically the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is now underwater because of a dam that today provides so called "renewable energy" (and water to San Francisco).

John Muir lost his battle.

This is similar to the Republican Party which was founded in the mid 19th century to fight - or at least limit - the embrace and expansion of racism. Now the Republican Party functions effectively as an arm of the Ku Klux Klan; there are no forms of bigotry the Republican Party fails to embrace.

The membership of the modern day Sierra Club has never seen a wilderness it didn't want to convert into an industrial park for wind and solar energy, a failed reactionary scheme that has done nothing to address the extreme global heating now being observed.

On the other hand, the Sierra Club actively opposes the only form of immediately scalable energy with a low environmental impact, nuclear energy.

Two peas in a pod in my view, organizations that have abandoned their founding principles to embrace the opposite principles.

If the membership of the Sierra Club wants to understand why dangerous natural gas plants are being planned, rather than count how many there are being planned, the use of a mirror would help elucidate the matter.

The problem is not so much data centers, including those running this website, and the Sierra Club's websites. The problem is selective attention piled on top of ignorance.

[ancianita]

3. Thanks for the history.

Relating to the environment, I'd also suggest an informative & relevant reading below. It reveals a lot of what Altman and other AI developer/owners are hiding -- that they run an extraction industry.

Theirs is the untold high and unsustainable cost of planetary degradation and human suffering worldwide, from mining areas to "ghost workers."
As San Francisco (with the highest homeless population in the 3rd largest country) has been built on gold mining, so Silicon Valley is now built on lithium, the new "gray gold."

One example from chap 1, on one of the materials AI is built with...
"Silver Peak, NV (pop. 150) is the site of the only operating lithium mine in the U.S. It was acquired from Rockwood Holdings, Inc by chem company Albemarle Corporation in 2014 for $6.2 billion.

Elon Musk and other tech tycoons gather their wealth from Silver Peak's and other lithium and precious metal mines in other countries.
There are roughly 6.4 billion smartphones on the planet; smartphone batteries contain 3/10 of an ounce of lithium.

Each Tesla Model S electric car needs about 130 pounds of lithium for its battery pack. And while lithium batteries are the only mass-market option, they have a limited lifespan; and so once degraded, they're discarded as waste.
Elon's Gigafactory, 200 mi north of Silver Peak, is the world's largest lithium battery plant. Tesla also is the #1 battery consumer in the world, purchasing them from Panasonic and Samsung and repackaging them it its cars and home chargers.

Tesla is estimated to use more than 28,000 tons of lithium hydroxide annually -- half the planet's total consumption. So Tesla could more accurately be described as a battery business..."

Lithium is only one example of what AI and Silicon Valley products are made of; 20 precious metals are mined worldwide to make electronic devices that are consumed and then dumped as waste.

Lithium is only one example example in a chapter that describes where and what (as previous gold mining polluted waterways and destroyed forests in the West) destroys whole ecosystems worldwide. AI history shows, like many entities of a democratic market economy, that while AI was once developed to do good, the unintended consequence today is that, so far, it's built for the power and profit of the few corporate owners in Silicon Valley at the expense of a) vast swaths of Earth and b) more humans than AI serves.
AI does have the potential to do greater good than harm, but humans have to apply the lessons of wealth "mining" -- an untold history -- and know its cost to Earth, humans, nations' social, economic, political relationships.
As it turns out, this is a worldwide problem that only a smart democratic administration of government can help with at scale.

Thanks for reading.




Throwing this in for perspective...

[NNadir]

4. I have been fairly prolific here detailing the material and thermodynamic costs of batteries. They are not...

...sustainable.

Regrettably, there remains a large subset of people who believe that batteries are the "cure" for the inherent unreliability of so called "renewable energy." Huge industrial scale battery farms are being built around the world, including but hardly limited to California.

In response to a "renewable energy will save us" person writing here about how beautiful Tesla Powerwalls would make the solar and wind scam "green," I wrote this post, which refers to how much cobalt would be required to cover a (then) recent "Dunkelflaute" event in Germany:

The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event.

An excerpt from that post::

Here are the specifications of Tesla Powerwalls®: Specifications of Powerwalls®.

It is claimed they have a useable capacity of 13.5 kWh after being charged with 14 kWh of electricity, presumably at 25°C, with a putative thermodynamic efficiency - should you choose to believe it - of 96%. The maximum continuous power output is said to be 5 kW. The power requirements to match the combined coal and gas average continuous power of combined German coal and gas over the last 30 days, 44.4 GW would require 8,880,000 million Powerwalls®, to cover each day of Dunkelflaute; for 30 days, given that the wind wasn't blowing that much over that period, 266,400,000 Powerwalls®.

The specifications say that each Powerwall® weighs 114 kg, meaning that 30,369,600,000 kg of Powerwalls® would be required just for Germany.

According to Forbes, 15% of the weight of a Tesla Powerwall is cobalt, mined by Elon's happy Congolese slaves, meaning that the happy Congolese cobalt slaves would be required to mine and isolate 4,555,400 metric tons of cobalt to make Powerwalls® to cover this instance of Dunkleflaute with batteries.

This is 31.63 times as large as the world production of cobalt in 2021 according to the US Geological Survey

I'm sorry!!! I forgot to use "percent talk!" The demand for cobalt to cover month long Dunkleflaute in Germany observed in Nov-Dec 2022 would be 3163% the demand for all the world cobalt supply in 2021.

The calculations are strictly "back of the envelope" but doing calculations of this type can, in my opinion, eliminate the risk of mouthing insane wishful thinking rhetoric.

The belief that storing energy, which always involves a thermodynamic loss, is the same as having clean primary energy is a very toxic urban myth. It's killing us.

As for data centers, here's what I had to say in a recent post in another thread:

Like anything, data science can be used or abused. As a person working in the sciences, I am mostly involved with...

...the good, not the bad.

In particular, the understanding of the ongoing disaster of extreme global heating, which is clearly to my mind an outgrowth of the coddling of fossil fuels with so called "renewable energy" lipstick on the pig, is very much involved in data processing.

To the extent power is used to power porn sites for the "family values" Republican candidate for Governor of North Carolina; I regard this simply as a part of the price we pay for the abuse of otherwise good technology. Crypto may be another case; I don't follow it.

In the field of molecular biology, in which much of my professional work is involved, a key to understanding human disease, data processing is very important; a mass spectrometer generates huge amounts of data which would be impossible to analyze with a pencil and paper. A computer can now do in five minutes what would have taken graduate students years of work, and a full thesis, to do less than 30 years ago.

This website requires energy. It doesn't run only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. I regard DU as a positive resource.

I am hoping that this trend, refurbishing and restarting nuclear reactors will come closer to my home, refurbishing and restarting Oyster Creek. That reactor, a gift from my father's generation to mine, might prove to be a gift from my generation to that of my children if we restore it and bring it back.

If we are save what is left to save, and to restore what can be restored it should be unambiguously clear that we need reliable and clean energy, which nuclear, and only nuclear, can provide.

Thanks for your reference. I may not find the time to access it, but from what I can see, there would be much with which I am likely to agree.

[ancianita]

5. Thank you for this. To one of your points, we are paying the price for compute power, and killing ourselves, indeed.

I'd point out that one reason restoring reactors is trending is to power AI development.
It's a "gift" that has done good and can restore cleaner energy at scale, but it's also being converted to corporate AI use. Any benefit humans get seems more like a consolation prize.
These guys need to think beyond consumer/national good, and much more toward worldwide unintended consequences of AI to humanity's future.
Amazon
Anthropic
Databricks
Google
Google DeepMind
Hugging Face
IBM
Imbue
Inflection
Microsoft
OpenAI
Palantir
RAND

[NNadir]

6. To my mind, restoring old reactors and building new ones is connected with the unintended consequences of fossil fuels.

One of these is extreme global heating. The other is the massive death toll resulting from air pollution. The unintended consequences of the use of fossil fuels is enormous, perhaps the greatest problem facing humanity. Nuclear energy is not risk free, nor is it without consequences, but that said, it is vastly superior to all other options and we ignore this clear reality at extreme danger to ourselves and future generations.

A problem that the nuclear industry has faced is the elevation of potential risks, and observed risks, over the massive benefits of clean energy it might provide. I believe firmly, and will not be dissuaded after decades of consideration, that the maintenance and building of nuclear reactors is the last best hope we have of saving what is left to save, and restoring what can be restored.

The use of energy is hardly limited to the use of computers or high end computational systems. We all use energy, and do so irrespective of the social and economic systems in which we live. Our conversation right now is energy intensive. Without energy neither you nor I would know what the other thinks.

It is unrealistic, and I think, unwise, to condemn any technology because it can be, or even is, abused. The question is ethical, not technical.

I agree that ethics are complicated in a culture which values money above all other values, but that said, I'm not about to become a luddite. I believe we need to be aware of both the risks and rewards of any technology and, as a society, choose to embrace the good while rejecting, or at least minimizing the bad. This of course, is not easy, and will not be addressed by any glib commentary I, or anyone else, might offer.

I have been involved in the use of high technology that has been used to save human lives. I would be equally capable of working on technology that could cost human lives. I have made a choice of which path to follow by virtue of my ethical training. I do believe that all engineering and science education should involve ethical training, but sadly it often doesn't.

This said, almost any high technology will involve people harmed by it, even if the overall benefit to society as a whole is huge.

There was a time at DU when the likes of Elon Musk was seen as a hero because of his stupid electric car. I remember this period here with some jaundiced amusement.

Now of course, he's been recognized as a racist thug, something he always was. He didn't morph into a racist thug. He started as one, a child of apartheid South Africa who did not make any effort to reject his upbringing.

The belief that electric cars are clean is at best dubious, as I've noted:

A paper addressing the idea that electric cars are "green."

Nevertheless the belief was and is widely held on the left because we haven't looked into the details. In technology, the details matter a great deal.

Thanks for your comment.

[ancianita]

7. Thank you for all the information, your energy outlook, and your wise words.

Folks need to bookmark this for future reference. Too much important DU information is not bookmarked, then is too often forgotten and has to be re-learned when these topics resurface on the main page.

Hopefully we'll build collective human capacity here to better deal with questions that affect future humans.