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Comment by synicalx | Hacker News Reader

I've often wondered if we're focusing on the wrong things with lines of thinking like "does X use too much power?". It's not like our demand for electricity is ever going to be lower than it is right now, so trying to use less of it seems futile. We can generate immense quantities of electricity given enough time and money, we've obviously fallen well behind if electricity is considered a limiting factor.

Disclaimer; I'm not talking specifically about AI here, just production and consumption of electricity in all it's forms.

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> our demand for electricity is ever going to be lower than it is right now, so trying to use less of it seems futile

not necessarily; for example, switching from incandescent lightbulbs to LEDs is a huge decrease in power consumption

In isolation, yes one led bulb is more efficient. People tend to use that efficiency as an excuse for using more on the whole though.

I wish I could find the link here, without it this is just anecdote, but I saw a study that found our energy use for lighting either remained flat or increased with the move away from incandescents. We install more lights and feel better about leaving them on for longer periods of time.

Yeah, there is that psychology at work. Would be interested in seeing some numbers on it.

Here's the best data I found so far [1]. They call out an increase use in 2022, but that's global and doesn't account only for countries that largely moved to LEDs.

[1] https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/lighting#trackin...

Do you ever wonder where that electricity comes from? It might be worth checking out if you’re not convinced that finding ways to stay efficient in the face of enormous technological growth is worthwhile.

I'm not really talking about the electricity we (global 'we') are generating right now, because we're still talking about curtailing our usage of it so it's obviously not enough. I'm talking more about electricity we could be generating in future so that demand is met - that should, and can be from clean sources like solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind etc.

Efficiency should be an implicit goal with everything, but that's only ever going to blunt the demand not stop it entirely. We still need massive growth in generation in the coming decades, or we have to accept that the pace of everything is going to slow down.

But if the growth rate of usage in a certain sector seems to outpace everything else, that can give us clues about how those trends may have to change in the future.

From a capacity planning perspective that's very useful information for sure.

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