Category: asides
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On using solar & batteries to provide 90% of the world population with 90% of their electricity demand for below 90 €/MWh
I came across this wild stat today, from an energy modelling friend, Tom Brown, who had another modeller refine it to provide the 90/90/90 framing, that I want more people to know about. Basically, at at 2030 prices, solar and batteries can provide 90% of the world population with 90% of their electricity demand for…
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Is this EnergyNet thing legit?
The other week I learned about the existence of the EnergyNet project. It’s essentially a project to, in the words of David Roberts in a recent podcast, “Make the electricity grid work like the internet”. I’m jotting a few notes here for others as it took a bit of searching to find them, and having…
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How I think of decarbonising the energy used by datacentres on the grid
At work, we’re rethinking how we represent the steps organisations take to transition away from fossil fuels powering the datacentres they use. One thing making it more complicated is that the current way of recognising people using clean energy has all kinds of issues, so there is a new, more rigourous approach being developed. These…
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Even with proprietary GenAI models, you can influence the environmental impact of use through supplier choice
I came across an interesting paper, How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference via a post on social media by a friend of mine, Asim Hussein, and one of the details surprised me enough to want to capture it here. What was worth writing down then? It’s on page…
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Google’s expenditure on AI is eye watering
Before I saw this chart, I knew that the hyperscalers had been spending huge amounts on datacentre infrastructure, but I had some vague idea that Amazon was spending the most, followed by Microsoft, then and Google. Boy was I wrong. Google has been outspending the other huge hyperscalers since 2018 This chart is from an…
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AI the tool vs AI the project
It’s the weekend, I’m trying to close down a bunch of tabs, and one tab I hadn’t realised I had open was this piece by Andy Masley about AI-generated images he’s been creating with Midjourney. Before it disappears into the either, I figured it was worth jotting a few thoughts down. Here’s the quote(s) that…
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A few notes on the quest for £1/kg H2, and relating it to fossil free datacentres
This post from Rivan, a hydrogen startup, makes a few key points that I think are really interesting in the context of the research into fossil-free molecules you might need for aviation, shipping, all year round power generation, and a fossil free internet. I’ve mainly written for my future self as much as anyone else,…
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Things you forget to ask when doing a podcast about AI power spikes and hardware standards
I’m sharing this here to come back to later, as I host a podcast called Environment Variables and I recently did an interview with some folks who are working on getting a standards group off the ground focussed on how datacentre hardware and software work together. There was one claim that during the interview I didn’t…
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Sustainability *via* tech, vs sustainability *of* tech
I’m sharing this post here, because I’ve found this diagram useful in clarifying recent discussions about green IT, or sustainability in the tech sector recently. Here’s the diagram I’ve been using in a few talks and to support discussions. Sustainability via tech / sustainability via IT These are the sustainability benefits you can acheive by…
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Why some people in Virginia get miffed about datacentres
Every year, there is an absolutely stellar deck from Nat Bullard, the former chief content officer of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, about climate, and this year, one of the slides caught my eye enough to share here – slide 169, which I’ve added below. We’ve heard stories about datacentres using around 20% of all the…