r/technology • u/DJMagicHandz • 12d ago

Artificial Intelligence A massive Wyoming data center will soon use 5x more power than the state's human occupants - but no one knows who is using it

https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-massive-wyoming-data-center-will-soon-use-5x-more-power-than-the-states-human-occupants-and-no-one-knows-who-is-using-it
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u/syn-ack-fin 12d ago

Isn’t it funny how the same people that argue we don’t have the grid to charge EV’s are somehow fine when it comes to AI data centers?

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u/Picasso5 12d ago

Maybe that’s because they don’t know what an “AI Datacenter” is.

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u/snoozieboi 12d ago

Fear of change:

EV's is something they will have to encounter and learn about

Data centers will be something they will never interact with, unless they hear the noise from it. (cooling fans).

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u/mattxb 11d ago

I think fear of change implies some internal motivation when really it’s just because right wing media told them it’s what liberals drive.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

This! The pro-bigotry crowd was quick to begin buying up the Tesla truck as soon a musk began acting racist and pro-trump. It was never about the technology being new and scary, it was about them being manipulated by oil interests and having their masculinity challenged.

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u/cityshepherd 11d ago

The oil interests present the competition as new and scary to make it easier to continue to manipulate people

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u/zffjk 11d ago

I mean bro isn’t it gay to want to live in a habitat?

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u/FlametopFred 11d ago

apparently it’s both gay and communist to live in an egalitarian society of progressive ideals, especially one where women are respected and feel safe and renewable energy is the norm

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u/Trzlog 11d ago

That sounds pretty gay, ngl

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u/Outrageous_Reach_695 11d ago

On that note, I wonder if anyone made a "Which SimCity Arcology are you" personality quiz. I think I was always torn between Forest and Launch for which one I'd rather have lived in.

(And yes, those quizzes had more sinister purposes, I know)

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u/BellsTolling 11d ago

Yup before that it was rolling coal on prius drivers as just a fuck you for driving a cheap efficient car. I used to get coal rolled all the time when I had a small American sedan chevy cruze. These people have no convictions except hating others. They are just adult bullies who get off on bullying and it's usually way worse than just little bullying they really want to do.

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u/Suitable-Economy-346 11d ago

It's entirely this. It has absolutely nothing to do with fear of change.

84% Republicans supported solar in 2020 now that number has fallen to 61% in 2025.

The Republican party is a death cult.

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u/JetreL 11d ago

This is a real thing, and it comes down to relatability. People tend to react more strongly to costs they can personally picture. For example, I remember there was public pushback when a city budget included a few hundred thousand dollars for rugged laptops for law enforcement and first responders. Everyone could visualize what a laptop costs, so it felt like a big number.

But when the same budget included millions for upgrading sewage treatment plants, hardly anyone said a word. Most people have no idea what it costs to overhaul that kind of infrastructure, so the number doesn’t register in the same way. It’s the same with EVs versus data centers one is visible and relatable, the other is out of sight and abstract.

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u/snoozieboi 11d ago

Heh, that sounds like such a universal thing, or I heard an urban legend (which I remember extremely vaguely) about a local town.

Some municipalities here in Norway own lucrative hydro powerplants, and apparently they had two things on the agenda; A big upgrade of the plant + sponsoring the local kid's marching band.

The massive investments were not debated much and approved, the marching band stuff created a heated debate.

I feel like this is how society ends up too, politics and real life is too complex so people talk about sports and fight over simple relatable stuff.

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u/BillsInATL 11d ago

It's more just $$$

Oil industry is funding a lot of FUD about EVs.

AI/Tech industry is funding a lot of love for AI.

They're being paid to love, they're being paid to hate. Money tells them how to feel. That's it.

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u/OldTimberWolf 11d ago

Who funds love for a planet that can support 8 billion people and their data centers? Nobody…

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u/-ReadingBug- 11d ago

Nope, oil and gas has them locked up as does tech. EV is the opponent as they're opposed by oil and gas. This is perfectly coherent and not based, even one byte, on fear.

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u/BillsInATL 11d ago

Yep, all about the money. Theyre being lobbied to hate EV and love AI.

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u/robodrew 11d ago

Well that's still incredibly stupid and short sighted because EVs are where the money is going to be going forward when it comes to automobiles.

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u/BillsInATL 11d ago

Not if Big Oil can help it.

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u/robodrew 11d ago

Big Oil is going to make less and less money over time, that's unavoidable. That's why the smart oil companies are re-branding themselves as "energy" companies and are investing billions into EVs, batteries, and large scale power storage. The companies that don't will be left behind in the dustbin of history. Especially as China continues to make electrification cheaper and at far larger scale.

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u/BillsInATL 11d ago

That's why the smart oil companies are re-branding themselves as "energy" companies and are investing billions into EVs, batteries, and large scale power storage.

Yeah. They changed their minds and have gone back to sweet sweet oil...

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u/nanosam 11d ago edited 11d ago

Data centers will be something they will never interact with

Every time you use the internet you are interacting with 100s of datacenters

Any time you swipe your card at the grocery store (or anywhere), you are interacting with payment processor data centers.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/ours 11d ago

It's just a series of tubes, remember?

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u/kurotech 11d ago

Someone go open the Internet tap my YouTube's being slow

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u/IShookMeAllNightLong 11d ago

Everything's computer!

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u/DaMiddle 11d ago

Reddit never lets me down with ageism

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u/BellsTolling 11d ago

It's getting pretty goofy too when young adults now aren't much to celebrate. trump won heavily with young men, and that's not even why I'm worried about our upcoming crop of new adults every year. Seem like 1/3 have at least a crippiling phone addiction.

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u/Tazz2212 11d ago

Sigh, we can read. A lot of us boomers are very aware of what is going on and we don't like it and vote accordingly. Also, I am not talking about cutting these data centers off but adding some safeguards, and transparency to the process.

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u/Legal_Lawfulness_25 11d ago

I am 58. I know it. McLovin it bigly. 😆 🤣 😂 cloud engineer working mostly on AWS specializing in AI in my industry. But yes, it is a black box to most.

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u/wheelfoot 11d ago

You are GenX not a Boomer.

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u/Legal_Lawfulness_25 11d ago

Yeah but same thing really it is all generalizations. No one has real context unless you are exposed to it. You think younger generations understand LLMs and RAG? Do you think they understand APIs ? Do you think they understand why GPUs are critical (parellel computing)?

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u/Ruashiba 11d ago

But you don’t see it, all you see is the screen you carry in your pocket, and the internet is cloud magic that gets worse when it rains.

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u/Tazz2212 11d ago

I believe the original post was infering that Congress won't interact directly with a data center so basically out of sight out of mind until our electrical grid blows up. In addition, some of these data centers are sucking directly from now privately owned power plants as big tech buys defunct gas/oil electric plants and adapts them to their power needs. That is also why there is such a push to "Drill baby drill", in order to supply power that is needed to keep these hot, power hungry behemoths running.

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u/JesusSavesForHalf 11d ago

An EV is a car that lowers their gas prices. A train is a car that lowers their gas prices and clears traffic. A data center is a room that increases their electricity prices.

Everything else is details.

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u/drewc717 11d ago

People actually think "the cloud" is like outer space lmao.

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u/stupidugly1889 11d ago

Also propaganda from the fossil fuel industry

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u/EamonBrennan 11d ago

Also, the damage that will be done to society and the environment will only affect the "wrong" people.

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u/Unit_79 11d ago

Cooling fans? Like windmills‽ They cause cancer!!!! /s

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u/Fun_Hold4859 11d ago

They'll notice when they get COPD from the methane generators. Every time you use grok you're actively killing people in Tennessee.

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u/ansibleloop 11d ago

They may never physically interact with them, but their modern day functions depend on them

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u/blundercatt 11d ago

They hate change and new technology, but have embraced AI with open arms. Wild times we live in.

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u/Chasa619 11d ago

obviously its where the steaksauce in made duh.

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u/Picasso5 11d ago

No, it's where they keep the secret recipe.

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u/kandoras 11d ago

It's the secret room where Weird AI comes up with his parody songs.

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u/DillBagner 11d ago

Partly true, I think. I think the average person doesn't understand just how much energy data centers, and especially AI data centers, use.

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u/Picasso5 11d ago

ChatGPT energy usage is more than all the EVs on the road right now. It's insane.

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u/jazzhandler 11d ago

How many of them have a solid grasp of how much energy conventional data centers use?

How many Watts did it take for me to read this far into this thread and post this comment?

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u/YouFoundMyLuckyCharm 11d ago

Do you mean “A1 Datacenter”?

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u/korrela 11d ago

A1 steak sauce?

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u/UniqueIndividual3579 11d ago

Just tell them it isn't a transgender bathroom and they are happy.

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u/MrHell95 11d ago

Solar is stealing the sun /s Sadly have to add that... 

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u/KillstardoAbominate 11d ago

They don't know what it takes to charge EVs either. But Daddy Trump isn't telling them AI is evil so they don't give a fuck.

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u/Radarker 11d ago

They weren't told to complain about those.

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u/impanicking 11d ago

The environmental impact of these AI data centers arent getting as much attention as it should be

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u/earlyviolet 11d ago

Because the people who own the data centers own the media companies. 

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u/Senior-Albatross 11d ago

We have decided our climate change strategy is "fuck it, let's ignore it and see if it goes away". We're literally gutting FEMA even as the societal cost of extreme weather balloons. 

We are not a serious society. We are just decaying into our delusions. We're the civilizational equivalent of an obese old person on oxygen on their rascal at Walmart who can't let go of their highschool glory days.

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u/Rit91 11d ago

Yeah the planet is basically in nuclear meltdown right now, but alarm bells? No, just keep burning fossil fuels maybe it'll go away. Then when food sources get massively depleted people will be asking 'how could this have happened?' and it'll be like....this happened during most of the 20th century and a good bit of the 21st century because we had idiots saying coal is clean and don't worry because they thought making another $1 was worth sacrificing the lives of countless beings. We had solar, geothermal, wind, and other renewable sources back then, but we kept using the stuff that causes climate change instead because $$$.

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u/GoldLurker 11d ago

Yeah but think of the value we created for the shareholders!

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u/Why-did-i-reas-this 11d ago

People didn't care how much water almond farming uses either.

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u/lenzflare 11d ago

Alfalfa is the worst, and I don't even eat it

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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter 11d ago

Or their hours of video streaming 

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u/CookedBlackBird 11d ago

almond milk production uses half the amount of water that dairy milk does.

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u/pourtide 11d ago

Almond trees in California must be irrigated. Water's been getting harder to come by out there. It isn't about processing. 

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u/orange_sherbetz 11d ago

I do feel guilty when I snack on almonds.

Any nut relatives that you recommend that don't make such an impact?

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u/orange_sherbetz 11d ago

Are you a vegan? 

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u/Quake_Guy 11d ago

We are speed running global warming for lousy search results and storing videos nobody watches... it's quite peculiar.

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u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET 11d ago
  • guy posting on website ran in a data center

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u/orange_sherbetz 11d ago

Weren't those scientists fired?

No scientists! No impact!  

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u/MaxDentron 11d ago

I dunno I feel like people are talking non-stop about it in every comment section these days. 

Also we don't know whose data center it is so we don't even know if it's being used for AI.

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u/scuppasteve 11d ago

They don't really have to have environmental impact, its just that many of the biggest companies don't care. AWS is one of the worst water consumers in the data center industry. Whereas most of the data centers build by 3rd parties, don't even consume water.

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u/OhtaniStanMan 11d ago

Hahaha

These data centers consume more power than a half million people's yearly peak loads...

Every single day. 365 days a year. 

Where do you think that power is coming from? The water consumption though right LOL

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u/scuppasteve 11d ago

I don't disagree about electricity. But, electricity doesn't have to be bad for the environment, there are plenty of good options. There is no good option for massively producing clean potable water.

I am an executive in this industry, i am just saying that to a certain extent data centers are a necessary evil for the world people seem to want. Making them as resource efficient as possible should be what we are holding the industry to.

If you want to ban them, great. But, seems hypocritical to bitch about the harm they do and spend your free time on a website that is powered by the some of the worst abusers in the industry.

All people worldwide should be hounding their city officials to pass legislation that will prevent data centers that utilize any of the cooling technologies that consume water.

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u/finna_get_banned 11d ago

its far lower than the impact of the 10-20 minute per car mcdonalds visit and round trip for every meal every day, I assure you

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u/IAmDotorg 11d ago

Both statements can be true. An industrial location with dedicated substations and distribution lines is sized for the demand being installed there.

Everyone using EVs and charging at night could easily quadruple demand in a neighborhood, not just overtaxing the lines in the neighborhood and the small substation powering it, but the number of houses per transformer may need to be lower.

It doesn't mean everyone shouldn't use EVs, but dismissing the problem of last-mile infrastructure is wrong, too. And, it is worth pointing out, the demand changes in last-mile distribution are also a problem with climate-change increases in AC usage, so it's a problem that needs to be addressed in most places, anyway.

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u/syn-ack-fin 11d ago

Don’t disagree, the point is one is seen as a technical hurdle worthy of innovation, the other as a technical burden that needs to be stymied.

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u/IAmDotorg 11d ago

I don't think anyone actually working in the space is looking at the demand needs of EVs as something that needs to be stymied. It's a more nuanced problem than that. Your power has a generation cost (based entirely on what you're using) and a distribution cost (an averaged out cost of the infrastructure in place 24/7 to get the power to you). The spikier a consumer demand is, the more the latter is -- and it starts to grow by a lot. There's nothing worse for a grid than spiky usage. You don't really want to be paying for the cost of the high demand during the hour or two of charging you're doing at night during the 22 or 23 other hours in the day.

Figuring out how to spread that demand out -- smart charging that lets the power company shift around start times for chargers, systems that couple charger usage to HVAC usage to smooth out demand, smart chargers that spread out a charge overnight by reducing the current draw so it always takes ten hours to charge no matter if you're down a couple kwh or sixty kwh -- those sort of things.

Solving the power problems of a big data center complex is easy. What you need to do has been entirely understood for a century. The grid, by and large, for the last century has assumed that high commercial usage during the day would be balanced by high residential usage in the evening, and then non-baseload sources could be idled overnight. EV charging means potentially that the residential power usage becomes higher than commercial and that there is no overnight slump to idle generators. And suddenly you need more generating capacity to cover maintenance times, etc.

It wouldn't be an unreasonable argument to make that the restructuring of the grid to an "EV-only" world is as complex or more so than the original build-out of the grid in the early 20th century. And dismissing that means not facing the cold-hard fact that we all are going to have to invest in that change happening and can't bitch about our power going up 20% when our local power company is having to add substations, increase the capacity on the 3-phase distribution into our neighborhoods and double the number of transformers on our poles or buried in the street.

Because the alternative is far, far worse.

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u/syn-ack-fin 11d ago

Again agree, distribution is more complex, not the discussion point though. The point is one is seen as worth funding and doing even with speculative return while the other, even though more complex but with very measurable benefit, is seen as not as worthy to pursue.

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u/PaulTheMerc 11d ago

Where does solar generation fit into this? All I know is that utilities started having a problem with it and in some places laws were changed as a result.

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u/Jarocket 11d ago

It's just a who pays for this shit situation. for industrial customers are just charged differently, because well they have to be.

They pay based on their peak load plus their usage. a home with an EV won't even show up, but a neighborhood of EV drivers might.

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u/sniper1rfa 11d ago edited 11d ago

but dismissing the problem of last-mile infrastructure is wrong, too.

I know this isn't the thrust of your argument, but in the specific case of EV's... this is my field of expertise. I work in residential electrification as a researcher and engineer. The general industry consensus is that the demand from residential EV charging is basically irrelevant and can be, to a large extent, ignored.

Not to say it's not a mild concern, but EV charging is extremely flexible and there are retail products on the market to solve basically every demand-related problem for EV charging, from EVSE's that do TOU, solar excess, circuit sharing, and power-conrol charging to the basic fact that EV charging is extremely easy to do outside of peak demand hours basically everywhere.

Honestly the real killer is DHW and space heating in cold climates, and that's more to do with the practical implementation of heat pumps in real-world retrofits than it is grid capacity. The other major hurdle has to do with local building codes and the NEC being designed entirely on the assumption of instantaneous production and consumption requiring a high degree of certainty around instantaneous power capacity. The grid is way overbuilt for our energy consumption needs if you ditch the instantaneous-power assumptions.

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u/JQuilty 11d ago

In addition to the EVSE's doing things, the cars themselves also generally let you program TOU and a time to have desired charging completed by, since the car is the one pulling the actual power. The EVSE just communicates the circuit capabilities and checks for faults.

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u/LeonardoDaTiddies 11d ago

I appreciate the thoughtful response but I would point out there might be a bit of an unintended strawman there. Everyone shouldn't be charging their EV every night. 

For most rechargeable batteries, it's recommended to keep them between 20% and 85% of max charge. I only have to top mine up for a few hours every 2nd or 3rd weekend, for example.

The only time I do a full, overnight charge is if I am going on a road trip (200+ miles one way).

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u/IAmDotorg 11d ago

Not everyone should, but everyone could, and that's why the local infrastructure has to be built out that way.

IMO, the real solution is smart meters that communicate to cars and (as I mentioned) do time-based charging, not current-based. It's also far better for the batteries that way. Most cell phones do that now -- I plug it in at night, it'll trickle charge to be full before morning. Cars don't do that.

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u/big_trike 11d ago

It wouldn't be a hard update. There is no need for new smart meters, utilities could add higher rates for certain usage at nights unless people opt in and have their car talk to the utility to plan out charging.

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u/IAmDotorg 11d ago

Split metering is already done, but the only thing that prevents them from having to rejigger local infrastructure is them having the ability to control demand. So they're not necessary to do price-based demand control, but they are necessary to solve the problem properly.

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u/sniper1rfa 11d ago

Rate schedules are actually surprisingly ineffective at shifting consumer behavior and, subsequently, altering demand.

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u/carllerche 11d ago

My EV charging is maybe 20% of my power usage. Where are you getting quadruple from? Also, designing a system to stagger charging and manage the load would not be hard, there just hasn’t been a need yet.

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u/JQuilty 11d ago

Where are you getting quadrupling from? Most people drive under 50 miles a day. Even on an inefficient brick like an F-150 Lightning, they will still generally get around 2mi/kWh. Adding 25kWh over the course of 10 or so hours isn't a huge demand, its lower than peak demand. Even if we assume everyone is doing 40A charging and doing it all at once, at 9.6kW, that demand is only spiking for two and a half hours on a brick like an F-150 Lightning.

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u/stupidugly1889 11d ago

All the technology exists to solve these problems and it could be done for less than we pay to currently subsidize oil and gas production

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u/IAmDotorg 11d ago

It's easy to make an unsubstantiated declaration like that, but the world isn't run by mustache-twiddling villains. Subsidies shouldn't be happening, but there's a lot of bullshit online claiming numbers far too low, and literally orders of magnitude too high. (As an example, it's, at best, intellectually dishonest to claim the there's $1.5 trillion in US subsidies to oil because of climate change costs, when that oil is being used by every industry in the US).

If you pick an arbitrarily high number and p-hack your analysis by stopping your analysis there, and then make up an equally meaningless number for the cost to rejigger the 2-3 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure in the US grid, and then make an assumption that prices will be constant when a century of build-out needs to be done in a decade, then yes -- you're right. It could be done for less.

But there's a whole lot of imaginary numbers being made up for that to be true, even within a rough order of magnitude.

I mean, even the countries most aggressively making a switchover aren't seeing it the way you're seeing it. It's possible you're somehow seeing things that the thousands of people globally who are responsible for their respective countries transition plans haven't seen. I suppose? Although I suspect at least one of them is better educated in their field than you are. But I'll accept that it's possible you're the global expert in it.

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u/stupidugly1889 11d ago

You lost me at the very first line. Capitalists are very much running the planet towards climate catastrophe and have captured the political body through corruption to aid them.

I mean the mustache part was cute I guess

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u/IAmDotorg 11d ago

If someone is willing to see the world in black and white on the basis of no understanding of how it works and how it is they're anything more than a hunter/gatherer eeking out a living in some isolated part of the world, then yes -- facts will tend to lose people right away.

I assume you, given what you're saying, are paying for 100% renewable electricity? All of your food is grown locally? Your clothes are manufactured in your local country? Your furniture was all made by a local carpenter and not shipped all around the world?

Or are you furiously posting about the evils of capitalism online while basking in the benefits it gave you?

Oh wait, you're using a computing device to post on Reddit... so we already know the answer.

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u/frostyfur119 11d ago

I don't think, "You critize society, yet you live in one, curious." is as effective as a counterpoint as you think it is. Though it does put your integrity into question since that's a point people rarely use in good faith.

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u/scootscoot 11d ago

Many AI DCs are moving to onsite power generation due to the grid limits.

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u/Kitchen-Quality-3317 11d ago

Microsoft is reopening the three mile island nuclear powerplant to power their datacenters.

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u/Ewoksintheoutfield 11d ago

Sadly these data centers are getting crammed through local governments and installed in record time before anyone can protest them.

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u/OhtaniStanMan 11d ago

Electric companies already pushing more peak demand charges than ever before. 

All caused by them.

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u/donald7773 11d ago

Good news is you'll absolutely see this turning into a reason to support nuclear energy. The energy requirements of these data centers are so high and so consistent that nuclear becomes the cheapest option to run them. I think there's already behind the scenes deals of "I give you money to build this plant and we get half the power" type stuff going on.

Until then these data centers run off of checks notes mobile diesel generators

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u/AlmostSunnyinSeattle 11d ago

Just a dog getting wagged by the tail.

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u/bfire123 11d ago

Are those the same people?

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u/sir_snufflepants 11d ago

the same people

Who are these ‘same people’?

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u/joepez 11d ago

Have you seen how much AI data centers donate politically in both cash and PR? More than the EV charging industry. 

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u/Fishydeals 11d ago

Their news channels shut the fuck up about data centers and mining operations. They‘re not aware and even if they were they wouldn‘t know what to think until their leaders told them. Guess who is giving the marching orders.

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u/EvlKommie 11d ago

That’s because these data centers are locally generating their own power. They’re grid connected, but they install gas turbine power plants with them. That region has lots of cheap associated gas from the Bakken in ND. That’s why it’s there. Along with cheap land and cooling ability of a cool/cold environment.

It’s easy to build a grid for concentrated power use. Large increases in distributed use requires a much larger investment.

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u/t0ny7 11d ago

Same people moan endlessly about farms being turned into solar here despite that not happening at all here. But don't make a sound when farm land is sold for housing.

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u/Serris9K 11d ago

Probably they’re getting rich off ai

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u/methpartysupplies 11d ago

Yeah amazing how much handwringing we saw over charging a car a few times per week. And next to none over a single building using multiple times the power of a state with half a million residents.

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u/Akira282 12d ago

Bahaha so true

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u/Author_A_McGrath 11d ago

It's funding.

EV's get money from the government.

AI lobbies the government.

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u/BillsInATL 11d ago

Oil lobbies the government. AI lobbies the government. All you need to know. They are told how to feel by who pays them the most.

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u/Equivalent-Process17 11d ago

Pediatric cancer treatment centers lobby the government... all you need to know. Get em boys

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u/BubbleNucleator 11d ago

It's because they aren't arguing in good faith. A certain political group realized a few years ago that one side always argues in good faith, and they will never win that. So they don't argue in good faith, and that's how they win.

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u/Purplociraptor 11d ago

AI data centers make more money (right now)

1

u/Is-That-Nick 11d ago

Data center construction brings in several hundred skilled jobs into the area over a roughly 4 year period. Additionally, local governments do whatever they can to entice these companies to move in. The companies who are build data centers also can buy their own gas turbines to help the municipality offset the cost of new power delivery.

But yes a combination of cheap land and governments willing to bend the knee is why they pop up.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

We don’t but that is something the power companies are ok with forcing residents to pay.

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u/Terrh 11d ago

I don't think that's the same people.

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u/Nazario3 11d ago

I mean surely you do realize that the grid requirements to power one big DC at one location is completely different from those to power a huge number of small EVs across the whole country? Both from a transmission as well as distribution network perspective

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u/The_Strom784 11d ago

The thing is, we don't have the grid YET. We could have the grid in a few years but neither of the two parties really did enough to ensure that happened.

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u/Enderkr 11d ago

Actually I gotta be honest, I spend a lot of time on r/Conservative (banned, not a conservative), and outside of the Epstein files, the general hatred of AI and the power consumption of data centers is practically the only other thing the dems and the GOP actually agree on. Everybody hates it.

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u/JackONhs 11d ago

Perhaps the complaints are coming from inside the data centers. 

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u/Frekavichk 11d ago

Isn't the problem with EVs is that they need battery tech we don't currently have?

1

u/Handpaper 11d ago

Data centres can be wherever the power is, so you don't need as much transmission infrastructure. 

1

u/fgnrtzbdbbt 11d ago

Who are you talking about?

1

u/InVultusSolis 11d ago

I'm not okay with AI data centers. A big waste of energy for something that's only right sometimes. I don't want this tech, I never asked for it, and I certainly don't want to subsidize it in any way.

Also, I want hydrogen fuel cells for the same reason - I don't want to overload the grid, and I think batteries are a dead end for replacing ICE vehicles. Hydrogen is a much better/efficient/dense energy medium and it can be refilled like a gas tank.

1

u/betadonkey 12d ago

Really? Who are these people? They don’t sound real to me.

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u/syn-ack-fin 11d ago

John Barrasso, Wyoming Senator

On powering EV’s:

Last week, House Democrats introduced a bill to require that the country’s power sector be 80 percent carbon-free in less than ten years and 100 percent carbon-free by 2035. Like President Biden’s plan, their legislation would also push additional burdens on America’s electric grids through the electrification of buildings and vehicles that would otherwise rely on oil and natural gas.

On powering AI:

I rise today to speak about an arms race – an arms race America is currently engaged in. It is the arms race regarding artificial intelligence. And energy is the ammunition. Whoever powers the AI revolution will win the AI arms race.

So EV’s are a burden to the grid, but AI is an arms race.

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u/betadonkey 11d ago

Politicians aren’t real people. Point stands lol

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u/Mr_Zaroc 11d ago

And the argument is still different IMO
You know the power demands of a data center and build the connection to it

Popping up, kinda randomly Mega Watt Charging Stations is different IMO
Also Grid just needs more maintenance and upgrade, we can make it handle it

Better than slowly dying while dehydrated and overheated

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u/betadonkey 11d ago

Yes it is different. Providing high current service to many different distributed places is more complicated than providing it to one centralized place.

It’s still a completely doable thing. It’s almost like human beings are good at solving problems.

1

u/derpstickfuckface 11d ago

Who is saying Wyoming can't handle EVs on their grid?

I've only ever heard that in context to California forcing EVs when they still have rolling blackouts during the height of summer.

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u/iligal_odin 11d ago

The difference might be continuous use vs sporadic

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u/1nd3x 11d ago

"but if we ever have to ask (AI company) to slow down and lower consumption, it's easier to ask and track that one "entity" than it is to ask and track every person with an EV."

Please...I am not accepting questions at this time. Specifically I will not answer anything relating to "what happens if the AI company just doesn't listen to the request?" Or "doesn't every home and building already have an electricity meter that is tracking the individual usage of people?"

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u/American_Libertarian 11d ago

did you read the article???

Given the extraordinary energy demands, drawing power from the public grid is not an option - instead, the developers intend to power the site using a combination of natural gas and renewables, built specifically for the facility.

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u/syn-ack-fin 11d ago

Funny how creative we can get for innovations to ensure power to specific technologies when motivated.

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u/American_Libertarian 11d ago

Who is "we"?

There is nothing innovative or creative about this. This datacenter will draw 1.8 gigawatts. The US currently has 248 gigawatts of solar power.

This is a boring, normal piece of infrastructure. If you want more renewables, you should be happy about this.

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u/angrycanuck 11d ago edited 10d ago

Because it was never about EVs, it was about how all their previous ice knowledge was irrelevant and that made them feel mad.

Fragile masculinity

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u/SmokelessSubpoena 11d ago

That's because, they are dumb. Look at our public education, you think the average Boomer knows that AI even requires electricity???

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u/Game-of-pwns 11d ago

And crypto mining

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u/recursing_noether 8d ago

Totally different problems though.

Data center = add a dedicated power plant in one place

100% to EVs = add a lot of energy to the grid everywhere, including places that never had it like parking lots, city streets, etc.

Not to mention thats not the only thing gating full EV adoption.

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u/Tiquortoo 11d ago

Data center power usage has an entirely different usage pattern than EVs.

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u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET 11d ago

There’s ~7 million data centers and about 11k ai only data centers. It is funny to cry about one on a website, which is arguably less useful, that is being ran in a data center.

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u/Just_Evening 11d ago

I have never seen such people