Google will pay people to use less electricity so its data centers can use more | Hacker News Reader

Google will pay people to use less electricity so its data centers can use more

computerworld.com

56 pointsmikelgan30 comments

All these decades with little, slow action on climate change, and all it actually took was the seven largest companies in the world wanting more power than is commonly available and, yes, we can find ways of making the average household more efficient right away!

It's a sad, but true, indictment about how scaled humanity works.

Funny because the way I look at it is, all the things I've ever done or will do in my life to reduce energy consumption, including shipping efficiency improvements to billions of installments of consumer software, means nothing because suddenly the investors of the world have an insatiable appetite for compute and all of big tech's talk about social progressivism is thrown out the window.

I call it the "paper straws vs private jets" problem.

It's often overlooked that large wealth gaps are incompatible with a sustainable society. High prices will save the Tuna from extinction (economists were right!), except if there's a market for $10,000/plate sushi.[0] People are motivated to live efficiently, except if we see gross unfairness in the rest of society.

"Don't use trees faster than they grow" is the obvious part of sustainability. This is less obvious but no less important.

[0] shamelessly ripped from Donella Meadows keynote talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhSpzQhvFS8

Paper straws and private jets are two things that people think are important but are insignificant.

Perhaps surprisingly, I agree! But those are the things people actually complain about on social media etc.

Why? Partly because paper straws are accepting a significant comfort compromise for a tiny (supposed) environmental benefit, and vice-versa for private jets. Your lips will feel like you're licking a dry stamp every day for the rest of your life, thank you for your service, meanwhile I'll be emitting a year's worth of pollution in one day for more legroom.

Paper straws and private jets are indeed a small part of the total environmental problem (we've all read Without Hot Air), but I think those two examples best illustrate why people feel the unfairness so sharply.

Not just for more leg room. I'll take three times as many flights because they're so much more comfortable!

But I don't really think tiktok activism is the answer here. Pretty simple: carbon tax. (Maybe if there were a carbon tax us humies could hang on as competitive elements in the workforce for an extra 6 months?)

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "think are important" but instead said something like, "are emblematic of some problem but are actually insignificant to that problem".

The whole inequality angle of private jets is one thing (which I also think is irrational) but the environmental angle of it, imo, comes completely as a way to deflect from the actual reason people don't like it, envy that people they don't like get to so things they want to do.

It's basically, "I'm not jealous, I actually just care about the environment!"

  >Perhaps I shouldn't have said "think are important" but instead said something like, "are emblematic of some problem but are actually insignificant to that problem".

No, I got your meaning! My goal was to create a good emblem. ;)

  >It's basically, "I'm not jealous, I actually just care about the environment!"

Of course people are jealous. Should they not be? Jealousy is an adaptation to dysfunctional resource hoarding in social groups.

That doesn't invalidate the fact that wealth inequality by itself is also (oddly) bad for the environment.

I highly recommend going back up and watching Donella Meadowa original talk on this. She explains it much better than I could! Cheers and salutations

> Jealousy is an adaptation to dysfunctional resource hoarding in social groups.

I wouldn't agree with that at all. If jealousy, as an emotion, is an adaptive strategy, it's certainly for promoting success of the jealous individual, as any successful evolutionary trait is. That seems entirely functional to me. The most successful succeed the most making everyone else want to be successful.

> That doesn't invalidate the fact that wealth inequality by itself is also (oddly) bad for the environment.

I don't think that goes without saying at all. What drives wealth inequality, in modern economies a free societies, is success and innovation. The richest man in the world got his start by helping create a widely used and safe way for people to make financial transactions in the Internet. He then rolled that into popularizing electric cars along with creating what still is the only reliable charging network . He then rolled that into making home batteries accessible (and trying to innovate in the solar field with the solar shingles).

So many of the innovative ideas that have progressed us towards more environmentally friendly technologies have come from and aided wealth disparity.

> Cheers and salutations

To you too!

Did anyone think paper straws were significant? I've only ever heard people complain about or heard it talked about as what politicians/whoever could push through without major complaints, rather than anything that'd actually do anything.

Heck, the only thing it's probably effective at is tiring the general population with non-solutions that reduce their quality of life. People know it doesn't do anything, and yet they have to engage with it.

It really does seem like the kind of thing the energy companies would push through in order to spike public opinion of the anti-petroleum movement.

To me, plastic straws are clearly distinct from climate change (i.e. global warming). But perhaps others don't make the same distinction.

The big, obvious spending and waste by the ultra-wealthy is going to demotivate people, but it's for the most part a perceptual problem. There are a _lot_ of people and an absolutely tiny amount of them ultra-wealthy so it really is the smaller decisions made on average that matter and not the big single events.

Hank green made a video on a similar comparison that is useful to get a sense for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXVmkurTOgM

(Data centers are similar because they're big and concentrated. They represent a diffuse demand but there's a perception that they are only for the benefit of a few)

I think it's both, in the worst way.

1. From "We can't do X, it'll have to be a very slow transition over decades" to "alright, this is how it's going to work"

2. From "we need to be more efficient in power use at every iteration, we constantly need to be looking to do more with less" to "build as much of this, most power hungry thing humanity has created, as possible as quickly as possible, no there was never a forest there, go go go"

> adjusting tens of thousands of smart thermostats at once, effectively moving their electricity usage to a time when there is less demand

Somewhere amongst this was a great opportunity for reducing consumption of electricity from dirty sources, mass-optimizing millions of thermostats, car and electric bikes/etc charging, refrigerators, computer power settings etc to reduce emissions... but now it sounds like it should be illegal.

Sweden have by hour and more recently by 10 minute electricity billing. Companies use it in automatic load balancing, car chargers use it, and IoT pilled dads in their 50s make home assistant schedules based on it.

It's pretty good! The need came from the high variability of wind power. Less dystopian than ... data centers... urgh.

It's of course optional. If you optimise well you can beat the monthly or daily tables and save quite a bit. If you don't care; you pay whatever the grid operator estimates.

Actually there are some utilities out there with programs like this!

My local utility has basically this program.

I have an EV charger that already pays me an offset, apparently selling the carbon credits I am not using by not driving with gasoline? It doesn't pay a ton, but it's interesting.

I have heard of efforts to link thermostats etc. with this virtual power plant idea so that when there is an energy demand one's home appliances stop working so hard and use less energy. This of course could lead to hot/cold houses for people, so there must always be the option to manually override if the discomfort is a problem. So many of these efforts come from e.g. California... other places in the world have wider weather extremes to worry about!

Source article: We are working with Voltus to build a 1-gigawatt virtual power plant (2 points, yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198487

Origin 5 months ago Google and Voltus sign agreement for smart energy capacity (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371484

(They'll still pay more for electricity, but less than if they hadn't taken the deal)

Edit: why is this comment suddenly grounds for an auto shadowban??????

> Edit: why is this comment suddenly grounds for an auto shadowban??????

Your previous comment was the one that first got auto killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216326

I don't know why it was. Reach out to the mods (contact link at the bottom of the page), asking the question here won't get you an answer.

The first was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216275 but someone must have vouched for it because it's visible now

Of course, here in the US, regalation, is not only misspelled, it's also a dirty word.

Mostly because it fails to keep all the dirt of industrial processes from landing in everyone's yard 8-/

In China, you know, where their tech is kicking our ass (why else do we need to keep an ever increasing amount of it out of the country completely?), there are new regulations that require data centers to reach total energy self sufficiency, based on sustainable sources:

https://enviliance.com/regions/east-asia/cn/report_10060

Here in the US, any legal entity that's not able to spend at least millions in lobbying and other bribery is not a consideration for the government...

Mr kushner sends his regards.

It would be interesting if google started to offer deals on getting people solar and having an exclusive contract with individuals on the output.

Basically, you get solar and battery, and google gets the excess power.

Google and all these other companies can't tolerate variable output. They need to be running 24/7 to even have a snowball's chance in hell of financially breaking even. But if they could do that, they'd just put the solar panels on their own roof.

This point of this whole concept is about getting better about dealing with variable production. It seeks to better-fit flexible demands against production variations, and thereby smooth things out.

(...which is actually really good for all of us even if we're not active participants in the game, as far as I can tell.)

A taste of the abundance of our coming AI utopia: "intelligence" too cheap to meter, but you won't be able to afford much electricity.

This looks like a good idea, why all the gloom?

I'd guess because the sudden increase in demand for electricity due to AI will drive the price of electricity up, so the people being "paid" to not use electricity will probably still be paying more (nett) for electricity than previously they were, and now to get this "subsidy" they can't use it when they most feel the need to, like when the weather is extreme.

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