I do play factorio. Complexity is the point…
However, these power plants don’t need or use the oil refineries you’re referring to. They are natural gas power plants, and thus need natural gas refineries, which are MUCH simpler and cheaper because it’s mostly just a cleaning step. Alberta already refines and consumes about 50-60% of it’s natural gas production.
You really will throw every single possible infraction against AI, no mattery how tiny. You’re now blaming AI for a contractor disposing of wastewater during construction that ended up having some higher levels of a bacteria in it? How is that in any way the fault of AI? The construction of datacenters isn’t somehow different such that it’s more likely to generate bacteria wastewater. This is possible in any construction project.
Where the fuck did you get your numbers? Alberta has almost 25 GW of installed capacity right now, and peak demand of something in the neighborhood of 13-14 GW
In 2024, they installed about 1.4GW of Solar and Wind alone.
It will create some long term jobs, while it’s not like an office with hundreds of people inside of every day it it still requires significant physical upkeep and management.
It’s not like there’s a lack of space in the area and this will take away from higher density offices.
If they’re building massive data centers, and power plants, why not build refineries too?
This is both accurate and understating the issue. People can’t be downright hostile to new ideas even if it makes their life easier.
It actually makes more sense to build them in Alberta than most of the US to be honest. If these things are going to be run off fossil fuels anyway, it is more efficient to build them local to the fuel rather than building pipelines to ship it elsewhere then burning it there to run those data centers.
The article says itself that the data center is planned to be closed loop water (so effectively no water use) but then assumes that the natural gas power plant WILL be consuming water, when those too can be built with closed loop water systems.
Personally I’d like to see all datacenters require 100% renewable power going forward, but that’s not realistically happening.
A billion people in the world are vegetarians, and yet 15% of the world’s energy is going to Meat production. They didn’t ask for meat production but there it is.
You also misunderstand what “push to exist” really boils down to. AI is being used by companies because it saves them money, people are buying the products from these companies. They could choose more expensive options that do not use AI, but they are not actually doing that.
By that same logic, people aren’t responsible for the transportation and energy use for any industry, but without customers those industries would not exist and therefore their energy use wouldn’t happen.
That’s why it’s individual responsibility that is causing this disaster, and people putting their head in the sand and blaming billionaires does not help that.
It’s in my comment history. Feel free to pretend I didn’t do it, but it doesn’t change reality.
Based on the last time I did the math a few months ago, and the projections of AI datacenter builds, they’re expected to reach maybe 0.5% of total global energy use by 2030. HALF OF A PERCENT.
I don’t know how even spreading that out matters at all. It’s simply not a concern we should be focusing on until we solve things like meat production (15% of global energy use), transportation (something like 20% of global use), and more efficiency on systems like home and building heating (another 20-25%).
Go do the math on Datacenter energy use. How much of Global Energy use do they account for (include all datacenters even).
I’ve done that math. It’s fucking nothing at the scale of total human use. They are not the issue.
Everyone can change if pushed hard enough. Would you just die if a natural disaster wiped out your entire city/state and you were forced to relocate elsewhere? No, you would not. So it’s clearly possible.
Are you kidding me? This was a University Prof, doing a proper study, published in the Cambridge University Press, and involving 1700 participants.
Did you not even bother to look up the source before jumping down my throat?
This is even further evidence of why we’re fucking doomed. Your feelings about this headline override any reasonability you have to the point where you won’t even look at the source.
What math? Nobody else has posted math on my comments except me.
People down voting a study. Hilarious.
Feels over reals. We’re fucking doomed.
The world will burn until people realize that simply blaming others does not fix the issue.
That article is trash. It implies that the carbon emitted by the companies they own is caused by the billionaires.
Amazon’s carbon use is from the people buying shit, not from bezos himself.
You think bezos is somehow responsible for the plane emissions to fly that piece of shit plastic toy from China to your house?
Give your head a shake.
Go ahead, but it won’t matter. As I said, they don’t make up the bulk of the pollution.
It’s not. A billionaire could have 50,000x the use of the average and it still would be tiny. There are only about 4000 billionaires in the world.
4000 x 50000 = 200 million people worth
They would have to each be using 2 million times the average to even be half of the world usage.
Objectively they are not doing that.
And what does that have to do with construction water treatment by a specific contractor?
I too can dump contaminated water just doing renovations on my home by leaving it out or not following proper procedures for disposing of it.
There isn’t a special AI related cause to it. It’s a relatively rare bacteria that primarily impacts immunosuppressed patients when it shows up (which is rare) and there’s only four known fatalities, and they mostly picked it up in hospitals while being treated for other things.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971226000780 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5684090/
The contamination from the construction happened while they were doing flush and fill on the pipes at the facility, just like what would happen with any new building that contains plumbing. It can easily be cleaned with standard options like bleach if it’s known to be an issue.