Interesting about Chinese energy market is that in recent decades they’ve been investing heavily in solar power. Once they’ve figured out grid energy storage, running LLMs shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.
You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an “AI model training” season?
That would be possible, but seasonal production has some serious drawbacks.
Let’s say you have a steel mill with several production lines, solar powered arc furnaces, and enough batteries to keep production running through the night. During the summer you can continue production 24/7, but in the winter you’ll have to shut down completely, because there’s not enough energy to keep even a single production line running. This means that there will be wild fluctuations in a variety of things:
number of employees on site
rate of steel produced
demand for storage space for raw materials and steel products
demand for logistics
demand for maintenance
This means, that in order to deal with the fluctuations, you would need to have lots of spare capacity in pretty much everything: More machines, more people, more money. If you could keep the production steady throughout the year, you could do so with less. Also, what will the employees do during the winter? The skiing resorts can’t possibly employ all of them.
In the winter you’ll have plenty of time to fix anything that’s broken, but if there’s an unscheduled shutdown during the summer, you’re suddenly going to need lots of maintenance personnel and materials. Incidentally, those would be in short supply in the summer, because all the other factories would have the same problem. You would need to have lots of spare capacity in maintenance as well.
The AI industry should be fine, since you could train models when energy is cheap. Oh, but what if the summer isn’t long enough for you to update all your models? Simply just buy more computers so you have more spare capa… Oh, it’s the steel mill problem all over again. Oh, but what about the people who use the models during the winter? Maybe you could charge your customers double the price during the winter so that the traffic would be reduced to a reasonable level. Fortunately though, wind power and other renewables could help with the winters, but having more grid energy storage would make things run smoother.
Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity in a battery farm?
Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?
I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.
EDIT: I guess there’s a third factor which is transmission. We could build transmission cables between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, is it cheaper to build and maintain enormous HVDC (or even superconducting) cables than it is to do either of the two things above? And how do governments feel about being made so dependent on each other?
We can do a combination of all three of course, picking and choosing the optimal strategy for each situation, but like I said above I tend to think that one of those strategies will be disproportionately favorable over the others.
Honestly, this all seems like small potatoes. We’re trying to save our species from extinction here. We’re trying to maintain the standard of living that came with the Industrial Revolution without burning out planet to a cinder.
If doing so means our steel industry runs 10% less efficiently, I really don’t give a damn.
I don’t know exactly how bad would it be, but my guess is that it would have a significant impact on the prices consumer pay for everything. In the past few hundred years, we’ve taken all sorts of nasty shortcuts that have allowed us to produce things at very low prices. If you want to do things the right way, it’s going to cost much more.
Burning fossil fuels is just one of those unwise shortcuts that need to be reversed completely. In the long run, we’re going to have to bury all the carbon we’ve dug up, and that’s going to be incredibly expensive too.
Fortunately though, the downsides of intermittent energy production can still be mitigated with various grid energy storage technologies. The way I see it, investing into them is crucial.
Interesting about Chinese energy market is that in recent decades they’ve been investing heavily in solar power. Once they’ve figured out grid energy storage, running LLMs shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.
You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an “AI model training” season?
That would be possible, but seasonal production has some serious drawbacks.
Let’s say you have a steel mill with several production lines, solar powered arc furnaces, and enough batteries to keep production running through the night. During the summer you can continue production 24/7, but in the winter you’ll have to shut down completely, because there’s not enough energy to keep even a single production line running. This means that there will be wild fluctuations in a variety of things:
This means, that in order to deal with the fluctuations, you would need to have lots of spare capacity in pretty much everything: More machines, more people, more money. If you could keep the production steady throughout the year, you could do so with less. Also, what will the employees do during the winter? The skiing resorts can’t possibly employ all of them.
In the winter you’ll have plenty of time to fix anything that’s broken, but if there’s an unscheduled shutdown during the summer, you’re suddenly going to need lots of maintenance personnel and materials. Incidentally, those would be in short supply in the summer, because all the other factories would have the same problem. You would need to have lots of spare capacity in maintenance as well.
The AI industry should be fine, since you could train models when energy is cheap. Oh, but what if the summer isn’t long enough for you to update all your models? Simply just buy more computers so you have more spare capa… Oh, it’s the steel mill problem all over again. Oh, but what about the people who use the models during the winter? Maybe you could charge your customers double the price during the winter so that the traffic would be reduced to a reasonable level. Fortunately though, wind power and other renewables could help with the winters, but having more grid energy storage would make things run smoother.
At to end of the day it comes down to this:
Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity in a battery farm?
Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?
I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.
EDIT: I guess there’s a third factor which is transmission. We could build transmission cables between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, is it cheaper to build and maintain enormous HVDC (or even superconducting) cables than it is to do either of the two things above? And how do governments feel about being made so dependent on each other?
We can do a combination of all three of course, picking and choosing the optimal strategy for each situation, but like I said above I tend to think that one of those strategies will be disproportionately favorable over the others.
Honestly, this all seems like small potatoes. We’re trying to save our species from extinction here. We’re trying to maintain the standard of living that came with the Industrial Revolution without burning out planet to a cinder.
If doing so means our steel industry runs 10% less efficiently, I really don’t give a damn.
I don’t know exactly how bad would it be, but my guess is that it would have a significant impact on the prices consumer pay for everything. In the past few hundred years, we’ve taken all sorts of nasty shortcuts that have allowed us to produce things at very low prices. If you want to do things the right way, it’s going to cost much more.
Burning fossil fuels is just one of those unwise shortcuts that need to be reversed completely. In the long run, we’re going to have to bury all the carbon we’ve dug up, and that’s going to be incredibly expensive too.
Fortunately though, the downsides of intermittent energy production can still be mitigated with various grid energy storage technologies. The way I see it, investing into them is crucial.