It’s still nonsensical, this idea that any savings at all are pointless particularly when you’re talking about small impact spread across 350 million americans and 400 million europeans, it adds up to far more than any data centre could ever hope
Take solar panels for example and the impact they have had:
We’re now emitting 5-8 million LESS tons of co2 per month and regularly have oversupply because there’s too much renewables in the grid:
We now have a booming battery rebate because we need far more storage than solar:
Since the launch of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program on July 1, roughly 161MW of home battery power has been added to the grid per month. At the current pace, the amount added in about 18 months will match the output of Eraring power station – Australia’s biggest coal-fired power plant
And still globally the fraction of renewables in electricity gen, and even primary energy consumption (counting renewable elec gen as “primary”), remains pretty steadfast at the levels of the 1990s. The basic reason is that they’re subsidising electricity, making it cheaper and people ( and I count both final consumers and intermediate producers as “people”) are using more of it. The only meaningful hiatuses in the growth of demand was the major recessions in 2008 and 2020, but consumption largely bounced back after those.
Savings are not totally pointless, but reducing prices of something does tend to increase consumption, and erode a notable amount (but granted probably not all) of savings. The earth’s human economy is largely set up to extract and use resources, give it more resources and it grows and extracts and uses more. We’re not going to let large amounts of cheap (or subsidised) resources sit there and go unexploited.
Adding new generation capacity has some similarity to adding a new lane to a busy highway. Induced demand.
From a Europe/EEC point of view It has been major restriction on coal generation (LCPD, IED, and to a minimal extent the EU-ETS) - that has reduced coal use in generation. Renewables doesn’t directly drive out fossil fuel gen , I think it has to be regulated out. Same will be with transport, if you don’t ban petrol, and just subsidise electric transport, there’ll be more trips you wont reduce petrol consumption. And even if you could ban petrol in cars, someone somewhere will start finding a way to use all that cheap fuel for something. The only saving grace for transport is that electric mass transit is way more efficient , than personal transport, and at least China knows what its doing on that front. But I’d be very worried for the planet as more and more people in India continue to start getting cars - I think they’ll easily become a market for any petrol saved by EVs elsewhere…
And still globally the fraction of renewables in electricity gen, and even primary energy consumption (counting renewable elec gen as “primary”), remains pretty steadfast at the levels of the 1990s
I think this might be out of date info, renewables (thanks mainly to china tbh) are now the cheapest form of power and surging with installations:
World surpasses 40% clean power as renewables see record rise
Adding new generation capacity has some similarity to adding a new lane to a busy highway. Induced demand.
I don’t agree with this, yes there is an increase in energy usage, I am technically using more electricity than ever from thanks to cheap solar because I fill up my car with 40kw worth of electricity every few weeks, but at the same time I now use 0L of petrol and no gas at all so it’s not exactly adding a lane to the highway if I’ve reduced my energy use elsewhere and added it on to renewables, it’s the same number of lanes but now I’m 100% renewable
We also have visible signs it’s eating into fossil fuels:
Closure of Spain’s biggest coal plant makes way for massive wind power development
The Australian Energy Market Operator is predicting that the country’s remaining coal fired generators are likely to close much quicker than expected, saying they are becoming less reliable, more difficult to maintain and less able to compete with the growing share of renewables.
AEMO’s draft 2024 Integrated System Plan, the latest version of its 30-year planning blueprint, suggests coal fired generation will be gone from Queensland and Victoria within a decade – by 2033/34 – and that the last coal unit will close in NSW by 2038.
Same will be with transport, if you don’t ban petrol, and just subsidise electric transport, there’ll be more trips you wont reduce petrol consumption
This doesn’t make sense to me, if you were talking about cheaper petrol then sure, but if I replace my petrol car with an EV, even if I do more trips it’s still electricity, petrol usage has dropped to 0 despite an increase in trips
And we’re still in the very early years with EV’s, we have only just started pushing out electric trucks and buses, speaking of: Brisbane just got our first electric buses earlier in the year!
Onboard the new Brisbane Metro (now with added Chilli)
tldr: I think your premise is that electricity usage is increasing and renewables are supplying it but not eating into fossil fuels and I don’t think this is true, the last few years solar, EV and battery innovation has been leaps and bounds
OK, I’ll wait til the 2024 and 2025 data are out and see the radical change - but the past 30 years pretty much support my “outdated” view. I don’t accept that you putting no petrol in your car means petrol consumption is lower - someone else can (and almost certainly will) still use it somewhere somehow in some vehicle or other. Unless you’re still buying it and burying in the ground somewhere no one can find it.
In short - top line goes up faster than the renewables wedge grows —> global warming increases.
In fact the fossil fuel wedges also grow as much or more than renewables.
Maybe this will become more than a blip - maybe. But realistically I look at the graph above and 2008, 2020 are the things that stand out as a lesson.
People need fewer datacentres not more, wherever they’re located. I think people just need to take a long hard look at themselves and see whether they can survive by jerking off to 360p or 720p porn - it is just about exactly as hollow and unfulfilling as jerking off to 4K AI generated porn.
I wouldn’t use datacenters if I could get a static ip address, or even just ipv6, but those are more expensive than just renting a vm in a far away place
it is just about exactly as hollow and unfulfilling as jerking off to 4K AI generated porn.
gasp I can’t believe you said that in front of my 4k ai girlfriend!
top line goes up faster than the renewables wedge grows —> global warming
Yeah but there’s two parts here, one is that it’s not us or the data centres:
In contrast, India recorded the highest absolute increase in emissions, adding 164.8 Mt CO2eq compared to 2023, a 3.9% rise. Indonesia saw the most significant relative increase at 5%, followed by Russia (+2.4%) and China (+0.8%). The US and Brazil had relatively stable emissions with minor increases.
India adding 164 million tons of co2 more than it did the year before, that’s a shitload of data centres
The EU and US and Australia/NZ/UK all have emissions trending down, we’re playing our part, this place beats itself up a lot when if the rest of the world was like us we’d be well on our way down
Non-comparable! In say California there is severe water restrictions even limits shower lengths at times yet pools can still be filled… If the rich weren’t allowed to take up inorbitant amounts of resources say for bezos private airspace tourism or megajacts then there would be a lot more left to us…
But lets talk about personal impact too! Imagine if instead of leaving it to up you to maybe change something the country made the investment? Like it could from the subsidies provided for the solar panels in most countries ( know for a fact thats the case in the us, Germany and Hungary)! And then then the change wouldn’t be a few percentage points, it would actually be considerable!
The Houston Advanced Research Center, an independent nonprofit research organization focusing on sustainability solutions, estimates that existing data centers in Texas will consume approximately 25 billion gallons of water, or 0.4% of the state’s total water use in 2025.
Does it? If everyone in America reduced the amount of water they used would data centres and yachts use it all up? Do you believe this?
Yes, because the price of water would drop due to lower demand from the public, and so they could steal even more for data centers.
Yes. Oh my god they have said they want this. They didn’t have to say, but they have.
He didn’t mean water literally (yet, as we are running out of non-salt water…)
But we have (and likely will) if it were to come to rationing their pools would be prioritized our bath or even drinking water
They waste so much more on data centers. They literally send used water to sewer; cheaper than cooling it for recirculation. This is standard.
It’s still nonsensical, this idea that any savings at all are pointless particularly when you’re talking about small impact spread across 350 million americans and 400 million europeans, it adds up to far more than any data centre could ever hope
Take solar panels for example and the impact they have had:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all&interval=1M&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed
We’re now emitting 5-8 million LESS tons of co2 per month and regularly have oversupply because there’s too much renewables in the grid:
We now have a booming battery rebate because we need far more storage than solar:
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/battery-rebate-to-deliver-a-coal-plant-of-power-in-18-months/
This is just from regular people like you or I making a small contribution that benefits themselves and the environment
https://reneweconomy.com.au/remarkable-record-day-of-wind-and-solar-curtailment-as-renewables-surge-and-rooftop-pv-holds-sway/
Same with mushy straws but tbh we don’t even really do that anymore do you guys not have something like
https://planetpak.com.au/
They’re basically a drop in for plastic straws you wouldn’t know the difference
And still globally the fraction of renewables in electricity gen, and even primary energy consumption (counting renewable elec gen as “primary”), remains pretty steadfast at the levels of the 1990s. The basic reason is that they’re subsidising electricity, making it cheaper and people ( and I count both final consumers and intermediate producers as “people”) are using more of it. The only meaningful hiatuses in the growth of demand was the major recessions in 2008 and 2020, but consumption largely bounced back after those.
Savings are not totally pointless, but reducing prices of something does tend to increase consumption, and erode a notable amount (but granted probably not all) of savings. The earth’s human economy is largely set up to extract and use resources, give it more resources and it grows and extracts and uses more. We’re not going to let large amounts of cheap (or subsidised) resources sit there and go unexploited.
Adding new generation capacity has some similarity to adding a new lane to a busy highway. Induced demand.
From a Europe/EEC point of view It has been major restriction on coal generation (LCPD, IED, and to a minimal extent the EU-ETS) - that has reduced coal use in generation. Renewables doesn’t directly drive out fossil fuel gen , I think it has to be regulated out. Same will be with transport, if you don’t ban petrol, and just subsidise electric transport, there’ll be more trips you wont reduce petrol consumption. And even if you could ban petrol in cars, someone somewhere will start finding a way to use all that cheap fuel for something. The only saving grace for transport is that electric mass transit is way more efficient , than personal transport, and at least China knows what its doing on that front. But I’d be very worried for the planet as more and more people in India continue to start getting cars - I think they’ll easily become a market for any petrol saved by EVs elsewhere…
I think this might be out of date info, renewables (thanks mainly to china tbh) are now the cheapest form of power and surging with installations:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2025/#executive-summary
Good old Jevons
I don’t agree with this, yes there is an increase in energy usage, I am technically using more electricity than ever from thanks to cheap solar because I fill up my car with 40kw worth of electricity every few weeks, but at the same time I now use 0L of petrol and no gas at all so it’s not exactly adding a lane to the highway if I’ve reduced my energy use elsewhere and added it on to renewables, it’s the same number of lanes but now I’m 100% renewable
We also have visible signs it’s eating into fossil fuels:
https://beyondfossilfuels.org/2023/08/22/closure-of-spains-biggest-coal-plant-makes-way-for-massive-wind-power-development/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o
https://reneweconomy.com.au/aemos-jaw-dropping-prediction-for-coal-power-all-but-gone-from-the-grid-in-a-decade/
This doesn’t make sense to me, if you were talking about cheaper petrol then sure, but if I replace my petrol car with an EV, even if I do more trips it’s still electricity, petrol usage has dropped to 0 despite an increase in trips
And we’re still in the very early years with EV’s, we have only just started pushing out electric trucks and buses, speaking of: Brisbane just got our first electric buses earlier in the year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oWDE4zh2FA
They are so quiet it’s crazy!
tldr: I think your premise is that electricity usage is increasing and renewables are supplying it but not eating into fossil fuels and I don’t think this is true, the last few years solar, EV and battery innovation has been leaps and bounds
As an example I bought this in Jan 2023 for 14k: https://sonnen.com.au/sonnenbatterie-evo/
10kw
Today for 5.5k I can get 40kw:
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/922035
OK, I’ll wait til the 2024 and 2025 data are out and see the radical change - but the past 30 years pretty much support my “outdated” view. I don’t accept that you putting no petrol in your car means petrol consumption is lower - someone else can (and almost certainly will) still use it somewhere somehow in some vehicle or other. Unless you’re still buying it and burying in the ground somewhere no one can find it.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-statistics-data-browser?country=WORLD&fuel=Energy+supply&indicator=TESbySource
In short - top line goes up faster than the renewables wedge grows —> global warming increases. In fact the fossil fuel wedges also grow as much or more than renewables. Maybe this will become more than a blip - maybe. But realistically I look at the graph above and 2008, 2020 are the things that stand out as a lesson.
People need fewer datacentres not more, wherever they’re located. I think people just need to take a long hard look at themselves and see whether they can survive by jerking off to 360p or 720p porn - it is just about exactly as hollow and unfulfilling as jerking off to 4K AI generated porn.
I wouldn’t use datacenters if I could get a static ip address, or even just ipv6, but those are more expensive than just renting a vm in a far away place
gasp I can’t believe you said that in front of my 4k ai girlfriend!
Yeah but there’s two parts here, one is that it’s not us or the data centres:
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-hit-a-record-high-in-2024/197979/
India adding 164 million tons of co2 more than it did the year before, that’s a shitload of data centres
The EU and US and Australia/NZ/UK all have emissions trending down, we’re playing our part, this place beats itself up a lot when if the rest of the world was like us we’d be well on our way down
Non-comparable! In say California there is severe water restrictions even limits shower lengths at times yet pools can still be filled… If the rich weren’t allowed to take up inorbitant amounts of resources say for bezos private airspace tourism or megajacts then there would be a lot more left to us…
But lets talk about personal impact too! Imagine if instead of leaving it to up you to maybe change something the country made the investment? Like it could from the subsidies provided for the solar panels in most countries ( know for a fact thats the case in the us, Germany and Hungary)! And then then the change wouldn’t be a few percentage points, it would actually be considerable!
Do you believe this? Texas residents asked to conserve water while AI data centers use millions of gallons
No
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-water-use/