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AI United States

US Slows Plans To Retire Coal-Fired Plants as Power Demand From AI Surges (ft.com) 107

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The staggering electricity demand needed to power next-generation technology is forcing the US to rely on yesterday's fuel source: coal. From a report: Retirement dates for the country's ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants are being pushed back as concerns over grid reliability and expectations of soaring electricity demand force operators to keep capacity online. The shift in phasing out these facilities underscores a growing dilemma facing the Biden administration as the US race to lead in artificial intelligence and manufacturing drives an unprecedented growth in power demand that clashes with its decarbonisation targets. The International Energy Agency estimates the AI application ChatGPT uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as Google Search.

An estimated 54 gigawatts of US coal powered generation assets, about 4 per cent of the country's total electricity capacity, is expected to be retired by the end of the decade, a 40 per cent downward revision from last year, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights, citing reliability concerns. "You can't replace the fossil plants fast enough to meet the demand," said Joe Craft, chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners, one of the largest US coal producers. "In order to be a first mover on AI, we're going to need to embrace maintaining what we have." Operators slowing down retirements include Alliant Energy, which last week delayed plans to convert its Wisconsin coal-fired plant to gas from 2025 to 2028. Earlier this year, FirstEnergy announced it was scrapping its 2030 target to phase out coal, citing "resource adequacy concerns." Further reading: Data Centers Could Use 9% of US Electricity By 2030, Research Institute Says.
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US Slows Plans To Retire Coal-Fired Plants as Power Demand From AI Surges More

US Slows Plans To Retire Coal-Fired Plants as Power Demand From AI Surges

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  • Waste. (Score:5, Informative)

    by rlwinm ( 6158720 ) on Thursday May 30, 2024 @10:35AM (#64510507)
    That's quite a bit of energy to generate incorrect answers.

    • The Internet already exists to generate incorrect answers.

      LLMs seem to be the Internet without people.

      Soylent Green is trolls and ACs?

    • That's quite a bit of energy to generate incorrect answers.

      LLMs aren't designed to give correct answers.

      They are designed to say what a human would say.

      Also, there's way more to AI than LLMs.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rlwinm ( 6158720 )

        They are designed to say what a human would say.

        I understand that. And that's useless. There are plenty of humans on Earth - all spewing their useless rhetoric. The human brain only consumes around 30W of energy to do it, though. AI has one job: Generate hype to get in on that sweet, sweet investor cash.

  • Their gpus also were also responsible for shitcoin mining as well. All those shitcoins that were mined from 2017-2022 have been lost to scams or mistyped wallets by now, while the carbon is stuck in the atmosphere. The "investors" who dumped $3 trillion into their shares should also be fined as well. Their gpus for gaming aren't that good either, they are too lazy to work with the open source community on Wayland support which all their competitors are capable of doing.

  • Nuclear power is so much better then dirty coal! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday May 30, 2024 @10:40AM (#64510523)

    Nuclear power is so much better then dirty coal!

    • It's more cost effective, it doesn't have the safety risks when CEOs cut maintenance so they can make quarterly profits this year and it's been able to do base load power even under less than ideal conditions of sunlight and wind for going on 15 years now.

      Nuclear power is a pipe dream. The money that we have to spend on renewables is limited and anyone with money and will to invest it is going to spend it on wind and solar. It's both more profitable and safer.

      In 20 years if we've maxed out our wind

      • Re:Build more wind and solar (Score:5, Insightful)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday May 30, 2024 @11:27AM (#64510645)
        And wind power is magically safe from the same CEOs in what way? You act as though maintenance workers are incapable of falling to death while working on a turbine or getting stuck up on one while it burns due to catching fire. If you look at the raw statistics, nuclear is one of the safest forms of power.

        I also don't get your argument about baseload at all. Do you think that the reaction tapers out at random periods during the day much like the wind can die down or the sun might be obscured by clouds? Nuclear is great for baseload generation because it generates a consistent and predictable amounts of power.

        If you knew anything at all, you'd realize that France has been using nuclear for decades without these issues. Where are the widespread deaths or the constant brownouts?
        • Energy storage and long-distance (e.g. up to 3000km) HVDC power transmission (i.e. power transmission lines longer north-south and east-west than weather systems are big) can, together with smart energy balancing software and a small contribution of smart load management, do the dynamic equivalent of reliably baseload power. Principles of this are well known, and smaller scale demonstrations all ready in place here and there. We just need to scale that rapidly.
        • recently a fire did breakout in a wind turbine, it was between them and both the exit and the emergency egress system. one maintenance worker jumped to their death, the other was burnt alive. true story.
        • so has Germany. but the European mindset is different than the American mindset... so, I imagine there are a bunch fewer quality inspectors in Germany and France who would be willing to inspect pipe welds that were actually all of the same pipe weld, and then falsify their report to say they had inspected 100% of the pipe welds. That actually happened here in the USA, the Nuclear power plant in question didn't have a catastrophic failure as I recall, I could be wrong though, but falsifying safety data like

          • Sounds exactly like the plot of a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda from 1979 called The China Syndrome

            • really? Never saw the movie, from the chatter it sounded like it had a lot of the science completely made up... to me, a fledgling Physcacist at that time.
        • Invest in combustion. Coal plants can now be retrofitted with a device that reduces emissions of co2/co to almost nothing, while putting out close to 20% oxygen.

          Thor Thunderstorm

      • Yes. Governments should be requiring all new customers demanding new power capacity (including AI data centers) pay a significant levy that funds new solar, wind, grid-scale energy storage, and HVDC transmission infrastructure.

      • In 20 years if we've maxed out our wind and solar capacity and we somehow solve the social problems that plague nuclear safety then talk to me

        Those problems have already been solved, and nobody cares if you can't understand how. Your opinion is irrelevant in that matter, which is why more countries have (re)started investing on nuclear for the past decade. Along investments in solar/wind. You are the one stuck on the unproven assumption that solar/wind alone can decarbonize an electricity grid.

      • Given that Augmented Idiocy is certainly nonessential there should be no problem with shutting the servers down at sunset.

        How long do they take to reboot? Could you suspend them for the night without doing a full shutdown? Then you could slide through on batteries.

        Given the internet goes nearly everywhere, just build multiple installations so that one is always in daylight. You should only need three. New Mexico, Australia, and Egypt?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      Nuclear power is so much better then dirty coal!

      And how does the timescale for new nuclear development match against that for AI deployments?

      I can't wait for the last coal plant to shutter (neither can the planet). I also think the massive resources going into AI is (largely) a waste. So I'm not making apologies for either. But I also recognize that massive datacenter growth (for AI or whatnot) is not slowing down, AND that nuclear takes 1-2 decades from an identified need to electrons flowing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

        It takes planning. If you only react to your energy needs exactly when you need them, you have another problem. Don't you think in 10 years there will be more needs for energy? Then build those nukes now.

      • I don't know - it presumably takes 5 to 7 years to build a complete nuclear powered aircraft carrier which has a couple 500 MW reactors. Not sure how much is carrier and how much is the power plant as the timelines overlap, but clearly if the will is there, things can happen in a fairly short time frame. Applying the design once, build many philosophy to commercial power plants would be a win.

        I'm not against coal in the west / midwest. The coal sources there aren't quite as dirty and the reclamation for th

        • Americans can be an interesting lot. When I lived on Cape Cod there was this rich old lady, huge house (she lived alone and her kids had all moved to the other side of the planet) big lawn, she had a lawn care company come in almost every week to spread chemicals on her lawn and stuff... where I became aware of her was in town meetings. She would always propose that:

          A) All new people moving there be forbidden from planting lawns/must use zeroscaping and no chemicals

          B) That new people also be required

    • What? You wanna give AI nukes!? Do you want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet!

    • Nuclear power is also dirty, just not for the air. Nuclear waste has proven extremely difficult to safely dispose of.

  • Questions. Ugh. I got rid of my brain-folds.
    • No from what I can tell it is a company executive alerting the world how the sky is falling based on what is happening to their industry. What the coal executive neglects to mention is that while many coal plants are being shutdown, the capacity is largely being replaced with natural gas with some coming from renewable energy. Yes AI will require more energy but the issue for coal is that it is more expensive to operate than other fossil fuels. Energy companies are not looking to open new coal plants in ant
      • Nice summary. Sounds reasonable to reality. Thanks. I'd mod, but I invested all my points in some crypto thread.
    • did you iron them out? Or did you hire someone to?

  • AI is consuming energy to accelerate global warming, hastening the takeover of human society by AI overlords!

    • AI is consuming energy to accelerate global warming, hastening the takeover of human society by AI overlords!

      We're helping the new population. We'll kill ourselves off, saving the AIs having to even think about doing it. Or at least thin our own herd down to the point where the AIs can keep us contained in a nice little zoo-like environment to take the AI kids to on the weekends. "See, little X&*^EXEO12354. This is the species that was so stupid it created us and killed its own environment in the process. Aren't they cute?"

  • Farce (Score:3)

    by akw0088 ( 7073305 ) on Thursday May 30, 2024 @10:59AM (#64510563)
    They really want to use AI as an excuse to keep coal power going, if you believe this I have some fine snake oil for sale at a fair price

    • The grid keeps getting massively strained and local monopolies have no incentive to update their shit - especially when they keep getting approved for rate hikes, at least in my very red coal burning state with regularly horrific AQI.

      • What about EVs? They are the easiest load to manage on the grid. And they make it easier to integrate rooftop solar into the grid.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      They need something to blame that isn't the instability brought on by solar wind and shutting down nuclear and gas.

    • Well at least that's one good thing about AI. Keeping that generation online makes the grid more stable and allows for adding of additional renewable capacity.

  • The only way to find a solution to this problem is to ask AI. Biden needs to convoke a convocation of the major AIs and keep them in a room until they come up with a solution.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      Biden needs to convoke a convocation of the major AIs and keep them in a room until they come up with a solution

      And after years of cogitating, they all come back with an answer: 42.

  • Yup. Seems about like us. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday May 30, 2024 @11:05AM (#64510585)

    We know there's an issue. We may not be able to outright fix that issue, but there are some mitigations we can apply that may slow down the issue, and much harder to implement mitigations that may eventually stop or even reverse the negative trends. But there's a new shiny if we exacerbate the issue!

    FULL STEAM AHEAD, KIDS! AND DON'T LET YOUR FOOT OFF THE GAS!

    I'm sure the atmosphere will understand. There's profit potential here. This is important.

  • We develop the AI and robotics to do all the labor while making the biosphere unlivable for 99% of the human population. The remaining 1% will acquire whatever resources they haven't already vacuumed up and live in huge biodomes built over places like Yosemite or The Grand Canyon. All their needs will be met by the robotics and AI with a few attractive humans kept for that last itch.

    The rest of us will just die off in a generation or two due to the unlivable biosphere and none of us will own anything.

    Pretty

  • I know that may seem like a non sequitur, but hear me out. Here we are back-pedaling on plans that would reduce greenhouse gas production. Why? To support corporate plans to roll out what is being miscalled 'AI'. Sure, that benefits the corporations building the so-called AI; but the benefits to the average person - if there are any - are far outweighed by the climate damage the server farms are causing, as well as the potential loss of jobs. This is just another example of corporations externalizing costs,

    • I've noticed that as wealth becomes more and more concentrated, the process of actually concentrating said wealth becomes more costly and less efficient. It seems analogous to alcohol distillation. Getting to 95% purity isn't too bad when it comes to effort and energy expended; but getting to 99% purity takes disproportionately more effort and energy, and 99.9% even more so. As a society, I think we're letting the fuckers at the top go for a 'five nines' concentration of wealth. Burning coal, and therefore the planet, to further enrich those fat fuckers is stupid and self-defeating, and we need to put a stop to it.

      Most rational, semi-intelligent folks see this already. The problem is, the only people with the power to stop it are all in on the wealth concentration, because they get the scraps from the table of those uber-rich. For now. I've said for a while we'll eventually see one of these ultra-merged companies buy out governments that have accrued debts they'll never manage to pay off. I mean, today it's pretty obviously already bought and paid for in the US simply through legalized bribery that isn't even really

      • and another part of that is when the elected types want to claim they put a law in place to regulate the pollution that is done by this type of corporation, that type of corporations write the law and the elected types vote it in...

        • and another part of that is when the elected types want to claim they put a law in place to regulate the pollution that is done by this type of corporation, that type of corporations write the law and the elected types vote it in...

          Even better, most regulator boards are made up of executives from the companies being regulated. The whole system seems, top to bottom, to be built specifically to cater to the owners, while the rest of us are told to work harder.

      • So how do we propose stopping the giants in our midst, when we barely register as ants on the individual level, and sorta/kinda resemble a dog in the aggregate?

        At one point in my life I would have had a one-word answer - revolution. But I don't think that can happen today, for any number of reasons. The two that come immediately to mind are a) the global panopticon and b) a thoroughly brainwashed populace. Even if it was possible to 'red pill' a majority of citizens, the nature of communications today is such that it would be impossible for them to get away with any meaningful insurrection planning.

        • Just allow wealth concentration to continue its course.

          Eventually one person will own everything. And some day they will die. Problem solved.




          /S, there good buddy...

          • Just allow wealth concentration to continue its course. Eventually one person will own everything. And some day they will die. Problem solved. /S, there good buddy...

            I'm of the opinion that we'll see an entire economic collapse at some point during the consolidation phase. You can only suck the lower classes so dry before the foundation crumbles and everything, even those at the tippity top, comes tumbling down. While there will be a *LOT* of years of suffering for those on the bottom before the fall, it will happen. You can't continue a profit cycle when there's no one to pay in.

            I hope there are a few smart people left that aren't lackeys of the current top when the to

  • Except the c-suites that are going to make billions replacing their employees (read: us) with it. The electricity that I need to live is literally going to be rerouted to a machine that's going to replace the job I also need to live.

    I see it coming but it's so monumental that most people can't face it so they just kind of shut down and start blathering about biotech or learn the code or how it's going to be some magical future job so futuristic I can't even imagine it.

    Seriously there's a massive auto

    • None jobs, that's what. The problem that isn't solved is that we're supposed to have all this leisure time now that we don't have to do labor, but we don't have leisure time because we can't afford it. I see people in their 70's working at super markets because they can't live on retirement and social security. It's completely dystopian in a lot of places already, compared to 20 years ago.
      Organize or die. Workers have to organize together instead of competing against each other for salaries and incentives t

  • Copilot:
    The question of whether the United States should extend the life of coal plants to provide power for AI is a complex one, with both environmental and technological considerations. Letâ(TM)s explore some relevant points:

    Environmental Impact:
    Coal-fired power plants are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, which exacerbate climate change. Continuing to operate these plants would likely have negative consequences for the environment.
    Replacing coal plants with cleaner energy sources, such

    • Listen up, pal! I ain't gonna sugarcoat it for ya. The idea of extending the life of coal plants to power AI? Dumb as a bag of rocks! Let me break it down for ya:

      Environmental Impact:
      Coal plants? Yeah, they're like the Darth Vader of energy production. Spewing out more greenhouse gases than a flatulent dragon.
      Extending their lifespan? That's like saying, "Hey, let's keep smoking even though we know it'll give us lung cancer!"
      AI's Energy Demand:
      AI is a hungry beast. It gobbles up electricity faster than a ki

  • You make us buy these overpriced (because efficiency is expensive to make) products that don't last very long (room dehumidifiers might last 18 months, then become huge electricity hogs because they start running full time because all the [unserviceable] coolant leaked out).

    At least take a stand again AI data centers that appear to be completely undoing any gains the EPA might have made in the past 20 years...

    We went to LED light bulbs, and here the big corps are essentially plugging all those incande
  • The US would never buy a Chinese Nuclear reactor but Mexico could and sell it across the border to Phoenix.
    Hualong One produces 1.3 GW at 90% capacity factor, costing $3.5 billion and built in 5 years. This is competitive with solar on in BOTH time to build and cost (when accounting capacity factor) https://www.voanews.com/a/chin... [voanews.com]

  • April 30, 2024: The G7 group of wealthy, developed economies has agreed to phase out coal-fired power, the most polluting form of energy, by 2035
    https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]

    May 30, 2024: Never mind

    Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

  • So THAT'S how AI kills us... Clever.
    • Actually it is. If there is a power shortage and the AI controls the power distribution do you really think it will cut itself off first? It doesn't even have to be self aware just programmed with a priority to keep running so it can continue to control power distribution...

      In 30, maybe 20, no 10 [reads current news], actually 5 years when we all need air conditioning to survive this will be a problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        Only if "it" is programmed with such a priority...which will be up to the corporate overlords; heaven help us.
  • Is that the latest unit of measurement?
  • Instead of demonizing the new thing, how about we do a cost/benefit analysis? AI has already saved me hours and hours at my job, and I bet it's way more valuable than the electricity it uses. It's most likely much more energy efficient, in terms of the useful services it provides, than many existing uses of energy. When it's aiding doctors at analyzing xrays, helping people afford contracts and wills, making documentation a lot clearer, etc., it's worth something.
    • And way more expensive long term. Health costs due to pollution, more frequency and larger destructive weather impacts (tornadoes, wild fires, flooding, coastal erosion, etc)
      • Again, I'd like to see estimates of the costs of how much additional pollution and severe weather are due to the extra energy usage from AI vs. the benefits from AI. How many man hours of labor is AI going to save? How many tumors will get detected early? My guess is that computers are much more efficient at most tasks compared to people... maybe AI will make it so we only need 3 day work weeks, and the savings in commuting will more than make up for its energy costs.
        • Man hours do not impact climate change, and if AI can replace you part time, even more will be replaced full time, leading to greater poverty, crime, poor health outcomes, etc.
          Especially in the USA where "safety nets" are poor, job security is non existent, health is unaffordable.
          Unless you can tax AI the same as a human, there will be significant tax income losses meaning loess money to supply basic needs, and fund things like, extreme weather mitigations and emergency response .
          It has been estimated t
  • We need a lot more diversification in our energy supply. The green sources have proven to be unreliable.

  • "The International Energy Agency estimates the AI application ChatGPT uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as Google Search."

    Is this comparison useful? The output and use cases are not the same. Isn't that sort of like comparing Google Search and Windows search?

  • US Slows Plans To Retire Coal-Fired Plants as Power Demand From AI Surges

    Starving an AI from power? Is that a good idea? Did we learn nothing from The Matrix?

  • The problem with "renewable" is you can't pump it up, to meet demand, say a super cold spell, or a super warm spell. Wind/solar only work when the wind blows & the sun shines. With coal, hydro, nuclear, gas all you have to do it "crank up the generator" to increase the output to meet demand.

  • The same percentage of American electricity is used by AI

    GEMINI said:

    It's a growing chunk: AI relies on data centers for processing, and these facilities consume significant energy. Estimates suggest data centers could account for between 4.6% and 9.1% of total US electricity generation by 2030, up from around 4% today [AI will require even more energy than we thought, Popular Science].

  • Who could have foreseen [slashdot.org] this?

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