7 ms·

Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

127 points by ryanhn 7mo ago

shimman 7mo ago
Rather have the government tax these entities (great way to have the public support a VAT in this instance) than rely on their "benefactors" that have shown zero remorse in the societal destruction against the planet and humanity, but okay.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  Utilities do charge infrastructure projects for their interconnection costs. Maybe there was some hypothetical situation where some costs would have gone into a general budget, but utilities aren’t usually in the habit of doing large interconnection projects for free and sending the bills to consumers.
  - tw04 7mo ago
    So the interconnect costs cover the infrastructure buildout to generate the additional power demands, or that’s spread across all consumers in perpetuity? Because the interconnect itself is the cheap part afaik. And all of our rates go up to cover the costs of the additional generation whether it’s another solar farm or another ng plant. They don’t generally just have GW of power sitting idle for a rainy day (I’m not talking about the capacity they reserve for hot july days).
    - loeg 7mo ago
      Most of the increase seen in utility costs is for transmission, not generation. Generation is an important piece, but it's not the only piece.
unltdpower 7mo ago
"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
- measurablefunc 7mo ago
  The numbers must go up, there is no other way.
- epistasis 7mo ago
  Adding new electricity demand to the grid should not be viewed as breaking windows and robbing others. When I bought an EV, I increased my electricity demand a huge amount, but it's not like I'm stealing from my neighbors. No rules were broken. We just need to make sure that I pay enough for my additional demand. > AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. The error bars on this prediction are extremely large. It would represent a 5% increase in capacity in "the next several years" which is only a percent or two per year, but it could also only be 5GW over the next several years. 50GW represents about 1 year of actual grid additions. > All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed. I'm not building these things, and I think there should be AI critique, but this is far over the top. There's great value for all of humanity in these tools. The actual energy use of a typical user is not much more than a typical home appliance, because so many requests are batched together and processed in parallel. We should be ashamed of getting into our cars every day, that's a true harm to the environment. We should have built something better, allowed more transit. A daily commute of 30 miles is disastrous for the environment compared other any AI use that's really possible at the moment. Let's be cautious of AI but keep our critiques grounded in reality, so that we have enough powder left to fight the rest of things we need to change in society.
- Dylan16807 7mo ago
  > "Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." Buying electricity isn't inherently destructive. That's a very bad analogy. > These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed. I'm not arguing that they are efficient right now, but how would you measure that? What kind of output does it have to make per kWh of input to be acceptable? Keep in mind that the baseline of US power use is around 500GW and that currently AI is maybe 10.
- keeda 7mo ago
Aurornis 7mo ago
> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers. This is great, but do they have an actual example of something that would have been passed on to consumers? Or is it just a hypothetical? In the location I’m familiar with, large infrastructure projects have to pay their own interconnection costs. Utilities are diverse across the country so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences, but in general I doubt there are many situations where utilities were going to raise consumer’s monthly rates specifically to connect some large commercial infrastructure. Maybe someone more familiar with these locations can provide more details, but I think this public promise is rather easy to make.
- mysterydip 7mo ago
  North Carolina passed Senate Bill 266, changing how utilities can recover costs for projects under construction amid rising energy demand, particularly from data centers. Now Duke Energy wants a double digit price rate increase: https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-44c1-8152-cab95ee22062 https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-...
- pvab3 7mo ago
  Generally most distribution costs are socialized starting with the REA and such. My block needed a new transformer a few weeks ago and it will be paid for by every customer of that utility.
- wmf 7mo ago
  Putting aside interconnection costs, when electricity is auctioned increased demand can increase wholesale prices for everyone.
- epistasis 7mo ago
  There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses. However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacity-auction-data-center/808264/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit... A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices. And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.
Sytten 7mo ago
This is all good and well wishes as long as investors are willing to pour money into the bubble. When the music stops is where we will see the true colors. Corporations are optimized to make money, governments should be optimized to protect people.
bix6 7mo ago
> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. How does paying more monthly cover an infrastructure build out that requires up front capital?
- senectus1 7mo ago
  shrug as long as the cost of getting that upfront capital is also added to what they pay...
- wmf 7mo ago
  Financing.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
ed-209 7mo ago
> projects will create hundreds of permanent jobs See, the AI is gonna create jobs, not eliminate them lol. Now let us strip mine your hood G.
FpUser 7mo ago
Blah, blah, blah. prices will rise regardless and they know it
j45 7mo ago
Surprised local power generation isn’t in the radar. Whether it’s solar, natural gas or others.
exabrial 7mo ago
One of the potential upsides of AI in the USA is we'll bring down electrical prices compared to something like China. Power has to be abundantly plentiful and concentrated. Maybe then, we could afford to smelt an ingot of aluminum in the USA. Until then, I guess we're just sadly just burning coal to create cat memes. I hope Anthropic can lead the charge. Crypto was already a massive setback in terms of clean power, AI is already very dirty.
- actionfromafar 7mo ago
  How will that happen? China is building more generation as we speak. And I mean a lot. The gap is widening and the rate of change is even worse, thanks to "clean beautiful coal" or whatever Trump said.
  - pbmonster 7mo ago
    Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop. But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure). But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
  - clarionbell 7mo ago
    You are aware that China is building dozens of new coal power plants right? Just this year they have commissioned 50.[1] Granted, it's less than before, but still much more than other developed countries. [1] https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-coal-plants-despite-solar-wind-boom-129805102 https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-c...
    - actionfromafar 7mo ago
cranium 7mo ago
Electricity price is a weird beast. Everyone has to pay the price of the most expensive electricity source (generally gas plants) that was recruited to respond to the power demand. It means that during a spike the electricity price can double or triple. What I infer from Anthropic post is that they will estimate the energy price as if they weren't using it and pay the difference if their use upped the price.
- bob1029 7mo ago
  Gas plants are only the most expensive in the simple cycle configuration. Combined cycle plants are competitive with other forms of baseload generation. The trouble is the response time. With day ahead forecasting, we can try to turn that peak load into base load. Grid operations are a non trivial part in how this AI energy situation plays out.
  - pbmonster 7mo ago
    Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
    - conductr 7mo ago
      We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.
      - pbmonster 7mo ago
        disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out. First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries. They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.
rcarmo 7mo ago
I see this as another OPEX expenditure that has to be factored into Anthropic’s (hypothetical) profitability, and am intrigued as to what this means in an industry that is becoming rife with CAPEX sinks…
zombot 7mo ago
If you're going to ruin the climate and prices for all kinds of stuff, the least you can do is bring your own nuclear power plant.
DoctorOetker 7mo ago
Please do hang your datacenters in space so as not to piss away your waste heat in our rivers, soils or atmosphere. Go to the bathroom upstairs, don't use our ecosystem as your latrines if you can direct it straight to the CMB.
- DoctorOetker 7mo ago
  I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%. Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.
  - Rexxar 7mo ago
    Maybe because your tone is needlessly aggressive and lot's of people don't want HN turns into Reddit/Twitter. There is enough people raging on everything on all social networks maybe we are here hopping to have more civilised discussions.
    - DoctorOetker 7mo ago
      Or maybe because people don't know basic physics principles, and dislike "reality based communities" from forming in their midst?
  - quickthrowman 7mo ago
    > Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment. One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.
    - DoctorOetker 7mo ago
      >One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy. > Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason. Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...
4ndrewl 7mo ago
When they say "we" they're opposing this to "US ratepayers", not "our customers". Likely that this will appear on your Anthropic bill.
venk12 7mo ago
We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase. These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation. I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.
- xnx 7mo ago
  > sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens There's nothing particularly worse about money spent on AI vs. anything else. I don't feel guilty for having 6 shirts even though I can only wear one at a time.
- deaux 7mo ago
  > I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it. This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small compared to that. Let alone flying. Personally, even if my "AI emissions" are at 10x his estimated usage (they almost certainly aren't), the other sacrifices I make to reduce emissions have such an impact that I'd still be multiple times below the national average. Note how the above measures energy usage (kWh), not emissions. For anyone taking fossil fuel transit regularly, whether ICE car/taxi/airplane, AI usage is all but guaranteed to be meaningless compared to their transport emissions. One hamburger is at least 5x more emissions than his "median say with Claude Code", so there's another one. If you're feeling guilty, track how much beef you're eating, cut it down by 20% and use agents to your hearts content. Now of course, a different form of AI usage like image generation and especially video generation is incomparably more energy-intensive per query. We'd need separate math on that. [0] https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/ https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
daveshappy 7mo ago
I keep saying it, we need to ditch all the "old" styles of power generation YES ncluding green ones like Solar etc. We should all be pushing for SMRs!!!
bvan 7mo ago
Not a word about sustainable sources of energy or the long-term viability of this massive energy suck.
GregDavidson 7mo ago
Only train when the Sun shines.
kevin061 7mo ago
Wow, good job in doing the bare minimum? "We will cover the cost of upgrading the electricity grid so we can use more energy" yeah. Of course you will. What?

127 points by ryanhn 7mo ago

Rather have the government tax these entities (great way to have the public support a VAT in this instance) than rely on their "benefactors" that have shown zero remorse in the societal destruction against the planet and humanity, but okay.

Aurornis 7mo ago
Utilities do charge infrastructure projects for their interconnection costs. Maybe there was some hypothetical situation where some costs would have gone into a general budget, but utilities aren’t usually in the habit of doing large interconnection projects for free and sending the bills to consumers.
- tw04 7mo ago
  So the interconnect costs cover the infrastructure buildout to generate the additional power demands, or that’s spread across all consumers in perpetuity? Because the interconnect itself is the cheap part afaik. And all of our rates go up to cover the costs of the additional generation whether it’s another solar farm or another ng plant. They don’t generally just have GW of power sitting idle for a rainy day (I’m not talking about the capacity they reserve for hot july days).
  - loeg 7mo ago
    Most of the increase seen in utility costs is for transmission, not generation. Generation is an important piece, but it's not the only piece.

unltdpower 7mo ago

"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

measurablefunc 7mo ago
The numbers must go up, there is no other way.
epistasis 7mo ago
Adding new electricity demand to the grid should not be viewed as breaking windows and robbing others. When I bought an EV, I increased my electricity demand a huge amount, but it's not like I'm stealing from my neighbors. No rules were broken. We just need to make sure that I pay enough for my additional demand. > AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. The error bars on this prediction are extremely large. It would represent a 5% increase in capacity in "the next several years" which is only a percent or two per year, but it could also only be 5GW over the next several years. 50GW represents about 1 year of actual grid additions. > All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed. I'm not building these things, and I think there should be AI critique, but this is far over the top. There's great value for all of humanity in these tools. The actual energy use of a typical user is not much more than a typical home appliance, because so many requests are batched together and processed in parallel. We should be ashamed of getting into our cars every day, that's a true harm to the environment. We should have built something better, allowed more transit. A daily commute of 30 miles is disastrous for the environment compared other any AI use that's really possible at the moment. Let's be cautious of AI but keep our critiques grounded in reality, so that we have enough powder left to fight the rest of things we need to change in society.
Dylan16807 7mo ago
> "Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." Buying electricity isn't inherently destructive. That's a very bad analogy. > These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed. I'm not arguing that they are efficient right now, but how would you measure that? What kind of output does it have to make per kWh of input to be acceptable? Keep in mind that the baseline of US power use is around 500GW and that currently AI is maybe 10.
keeda 7mo ago

Aurornis 7mo ago

> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers. This is great, but do they have an actual example of something that would have been passed on to consumers? Or is it just a hypothetical? In the location I’m familiar with, large infrastructure projects have to pay their own interconnection costs. Utilities are diverse across the country so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences, but in general I doubt there are many situations where utilities were going to raise consumer’s monthly rates specifically to connect some large commercial infrastructure. Maybe someone more familiar with these locations can provide more details, but I think this public promise is rather easy to make.

mysterydip 7mo ago
North Carolina passed Senate Bill 266, changing how utilities can recover costs for projects under construction amid rising energy demand, particularly from data centers. Now Duke Energy wants a double digit price rate increase: https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-44c1-8152-cab95ee22062 https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-...
pvab3 7mo ago
Generally most distribution costs are socialized starting with the REA and such. My block needed a new transformer a few weeks ago and it will be paid for by every customer of that utility.
wmf 7mo ago
Putting aside interconnection costs, when electricity is auctioned increased demand can increase wholesale prices for everyone.
epistasis 7mo ago
There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses. However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacity-auction-data-center/808264/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit... A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices. And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.

Sytten 7mo ago

This is all good and well wishes as long as investors are willing to pour money into the bubble. When the music stops is where we will see the true colors. Corporations are optimized to make money, governments should be optimized to protect people.

bix6 7mo ago

> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. How does paying more monthly cover an infrastructure build out that requires up front capital?

senectus1 7mo ago
shrug as long as the cost of getting that upfront capital is also added to what they pay...
wmf 7mo ago
Financing.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

ed-209 7mo ago

> projects will create hundreds of permanent jobs See, the AI is gonna create jobs, not eliminate them lol. Now let us strip mine your hood G.

FpUser 7mo ago

Blah, blah, blah. prices will rise regardless and they know it

j45 7mo ago

Surprised local power generation isn’t in the radar. Whether it’s solar, natural gas or others.

exabrial 7mo ago

One of the potential upsides of AI in the USA is we'll bring down electrical prices compared to something like China. Power has to be abundantly plentiful and concentrated. Maybe then, we could afford to smelt an ingot of aluminum in the USA. Until then, I guess we're just sadly just burning coal to create cat memes. I hope Anthropic can lead the charge. Crypto was already a massive setback in terms of clean power, AI is already very dirty.

actionfromafar 7mo ago
How will that happen? China is building more generation as we speak. And I mean a lot. The gap is widening and the rate of change is even worse, thanks to "clean beautiful coal" or whatever Trump said.
- pbmonster 7mo ago
  Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop. But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure). But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
- clarionbell 7mo ago
  You are aware that China is building dozens of new coal power plants right? Just this year they have commissioned 50.[1] Granted, it's less than before, but still much more than other developed countries. [1] https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-coal-plants-despite-solar-wind-boom-129805102 https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-c...
  - actionfromafar 7mo ago

cranium 7mo ago

Electricity price is a weird beast. Everyone has to pay the price of the most expensive electricity source (generally gas plants) that was recruited to respond to the power demand. It means that during a spike the electricity price can double or triple. What I infer from Anthropic post is that they will estimate the energy price as if they weren't using it and pay the difference if their use upped the price.

bob1029 7mo ago
Gas plants are only the most expensive in the simple cycle configuration. Combined cycle plants are competitive with other forms of baseload generation. The trouble is the response time. With day ahead forecasting, we can try to turn that peak load into base load. Grid operations are a non trivial part in how this AI energy situation plays out.
- pbmonster 7mo ago
  Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
  - conductr 7mo ago
    We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.
    - pbmonster 7mo ago
      disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out. First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries. They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.

rcarmo 7mo ago

I see this as another OPEX expenditure that has to be factored into Anthropic’s (hypothetical) profitability, and am intrigued as to what this means in an industry that is becoming rife with CAPEX sinks…

zombot 7mo ago

If you're going to ruin the climate and prices for all kinds of stuff, the least you can do is bring your own nuclear power plant.

DoctorOetker 7mo ago

Please do hang your datacenters in space so as not to piss away your waste heat in our rivers, soils or atmosphere. Go to the bathroom upstairs, don't use our ecosystem as your latrines if you can direct it straight to the CMB.

DoctorOetker 7mo ago
I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%. Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.
- Rexxar 7mo ago
  Maybe because your tone is needlessly aggressive and lot's of people don't want HN turns into Reddit/Twitter. There is enough people raging on everything on all social networks maybe we are here hopping to have more civilised discussions.
  - DoctorOetker 7mo ago
    Or maybe because people don't know basic physics principles, and dislike "reality based communities" from forming in their midst?
- quickthrowman 7mo ago
  > Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment. One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.
  - DoctorOetker 7mo ago
    >One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy. > Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason. Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...

4ndrewl 7mo ago

When they say "we" they're opposing this to "US ratepayers", not "our customers". Likely that this will appear on your Anthropic bill.

venk12 7mo ago

We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase. These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation. I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.

xnx 7mo ago
> sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens There's nothing particularly worse about money spent on AI vs. anything else. I don't feel guilty for having 6 shirts even though I can only wear one at a time.
deaux 7mo ago
> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it. This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small compared to that. Let alone flying. Personally, even if my "AI emissions" are at 10x his estimated usage (they almost certainly aren't), the other sacrifices I make to reduce emissions have such an impact that I'd still be multiple times below the national average. Note how the above measures energy usage (kWh), not emissions. For anyone taking fossil fuel transit regularly, whether ICE car/taxi/airplane, AI usage is all but guaranteed to be meaningless compared to their transport emissions. One hamburger is at least 5x more emissions than his "median say with Claude Code", so there's another one. If you're feeling guilty, track how much beef you're eating, cut it down by 20% and use agents to your hearts content. Now of course, a different form of AI usage like image generation and especially video generation is incomparably more energy-intensive per query. We'd need separate math on that. [0] https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/ https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/

daveshappy 7mo ago

I keep saying it, we need to ditch all the "old" styles of power generation YES ncluding green ones like Solar etc. We should all be pushing for SMRs!!!

bvan 7mo ago

Not a word about sustainable sources of energy or the long-term viability of this massive energy suck.

GregDavidson 7mo ago

Only train when the Sun shines.

kevin061 7mo ago

Wow, good job in doing the bare minimum? "We will cover the cost of upgrading the electricity grid so we can use more energy" yeah. Of course you will. What?