I would hope there aren't too many large utility jurisdictions which would curtail citizen consumers in favour of industrial users in the event of a demand surge.
On a related note. It's worrying to me how quickly we've accepted that we're going to boost electricity consumption massively prior to achieving anything close to the carbon intensity reduction targets which would mitigate the worst of climate change effects. It's all driven by a market force which cannot be effectively regulated on a global scale for multinational tech firms who can shop around for the next data centre location with near total freedom. And with advances in over the top fibre networks etc... a tonne of AI demand can be met by a compute cluster on the other side of the world (especially during model training) so the externalities related to the computing infrastructure can theoretically be completely dumped somewhere far away from the paying customer.
>But electricity consumption is a minority of energy consumption.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_energy_consumptio...
If your standard is "I won't do anything unless it's the majority of energy consumption," you're really just saying don't do anything period.
>It was always true that decarbonization was going to massively increase the use of electricity.
A process everybody else calls "demand response" as well. It's a longstanding practice between power utilities and big customers.
For the little people, in some hot cities you can agree to use a utility-supplied thermostat that automatically curtails your AC during peak load and get a discount in exchange.
I think AI wants large centralized data center with really good internal network.
In North America, the US has committed to natural gas turbines and petroleum forever. Not because of any good and evil stooges in politics... but because they have rejected the energy density of nuclear power for whatever reasons decades ago. which was then and now ONLY other comparable energy source on the table.
It will backfire. AI people (like Musk who went big sensibly with natural gas turbines in Memphis)is being targeted and chased because of them. And AI is NOT the (direct, local) job creator it was promised to be.
What it's actually doing is conflating the two. People will react to turbine fumes from AI plants today, to a greater extent than they would even react to a natural gas electric power plant on the same property.
So AI plants will be chased away from cities, relocate near existing power plants, then they will be attacked again by people forcing them to buy 'carbon credits' directly. Most cannot relocate near a nuclear plant because there will be no nuclear growth in the short term and AI lives in the short term.
So AI [plants] will be chased away from people, and then into orbit.
Is everyone okay with that?
In my opinion, AI companies should be required to generate a sufficient percentage of their energy themselves from renewable sources.
In the end AI still gets chased into orbit. It needs to launch itself into orbit and bypass years of bad road.
https://www.devsustainability.com/p/if-only-data-centers-wou...
It's extremely rare for a DC to put an entire community's grid at risk, and they are usually working closely with the upstream power providers during any storm, increased demand, etc.
I think there is a lot of hand wringing from folks who have never worked in DC operations.