"power plants do annual maintenance in April. That takes thousands of megawatts offline, making it harder for the grid to handle a burst of heat..."
It wasn't particularly hot in Texas in April, but the electricity grid was strained.. "Thanks to crypto mining, data centers, electric vehicles, manufacturing, and more people moving to the state," plus global warming.
I'm trying very hard to avoid getting sucked into the AI fad. It reminds me a lot of Crypto and Reactjs irrational exuberance.
Gonna wait til things calm down to resume my research.
It looks like my country will be forced to act as a giant battery for these global gibberish generators. Like it wasn't bad enough with crypto farms left and right.
@gerrymcgovern I deleted 79,125 'promotional' emails from my Gmail account yesterday.
Didn't think I really needed them.
Didn't think they were useful.
Why do I get so many of these completely useless messages?
Why is so much time and energy expended on these hopeless things that most people completely ignore?
And why should we keep storing them, year after year?
Using AI to oversee dynamic fusion machines is a hot area of research. It doesn't mean generative AI like ChatGPT. It's old-school AI, where you train a machine to recognize patterns in complex real-world data then let it make decisions.
#AI#GenerativeAI#Energy#DataCenters: "The rapid growth of the technology industry and the increasing reliance on cloud computing and artificial intelligence have led to a boom in the construction of data centers across the United States. Electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and the smart grid are particularly reliant on data centers to optimize energy utilization. These facilities house thousands of servers that require constant cooling to prevent overheating and ensure optimal performance.
Unfortunately, many data centers rely on water-intensive cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of potable (“drinking”) water annually. A single data center can consume up to 3 million to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough to supply thousands of households or farms.
The increasing use and training of AI models has further exacerbated the water consumption challenges faced by data centers."
While touring #Andalusia in #Spain, I spotted a gleaming tower. Intrigued, I looked it up and found out it was the #Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant which can supply power to 27,500 homes and uses molten salt heat storage technology to keep generating power when there's no sun. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemasolar_Thermosolar_Plant - Perhaps #Italy could do with a few similar plants. #energy
Researchers use reflectors underneath solar panels to boost solar power by 4.5%
"The University of Ottawa in collaboration with National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed an add-on to solar panels that increases their energy output by 4.5%"
In a nation where many revere cows, the animals' waste has become an energy resource.
BBC News reports: "Indian cattle produce around three-million tonnes of cow dung a day. ... The government wants more of that dung, and other agriculture waste, to be made into methane."