Tag: climate
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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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How to use GenAI models if you care about the energy they consume
This is (was?) a short post, to collate some of the work I’ve been doing over the last few months, to better understand the environmental footprint of using various generative AI tools, particularly for coding. I’ve already written a little about the tension between AI the tool and AI the project – generative AI is…
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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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On conflating different kinds of AI in the climate context
I’ve found myself looking for this quote 3 times this month, and LinkedIn is a real pain to use to find it, so I’m posting it here. This quote from David Rolnick, one of the founders of the non-profit Climate Change AI is a useful one to have handy, because its coming from someone with…
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Will new models like DeepSeek reduce the direct environmental footprint of AI?
I’m in a chat at work, and recently this question came up: Are folks expecting a reduction in energy demands if DeepSeek-style models become dominant vs the ones you see from Open AI? I’ve paraphrased it slightly, but it’s an interesting question, so rather than obnoxiously share a long answer into that chat, I figured…
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Some notes from reading about the UK’s plan for clean power by 2030
For me at least, one of the most politically exciting things that happened this year was seeing the UK finally get rid of a conservative government and elect one that had to extremely ambitious climate promises in its manifesto. More specifically the goal to reach clean power by 2030 really caught my attention, and coincidentally…
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Why talk about monopoly in the context of climate change?
This came up in a recent conversation about sustainability in the digital sector, because the answer isn’t immediately obvious. To understand it, I think you need to understand why we have antitrust or competition laws in the first place. When they were first brought about bout in the first half of the 20th century, there…
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Does the EU AI Act really call for tracking inference as well as training in AI models?
I’m sharing this post as it I think it helped me realise something I hadn’t appreciated til today. I don’t build AI models, and to be honest, while I make sparing use of Github Co-pilot and Perplexity, I’m definitely not a power user. My interest in them is more linked to my day job, and…
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If you want greener energy, what’s the best way to get it?
I saw an interesting chart fly by recently from a tweet by Juliaen Jomaux, taken from the recent IEA Renewables report (page 57), What does this chart tell us? The key thing that attracted my attention was how in China, the use of fixed-tariffs / premiums, where anyone building a renewables project gets a fixed…
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Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability
To make sense of our world, we often form incomplete, yet still useful mental models of how it works. Most of the time these are helpful, but when we are dealing with complex systems, what might feel intuitively right, can lead to outcomes totally at odds with we were initially aiming to achieve. This post…