Artificial Intelligence & data centers are increasing demands on electricity. Trump handicapped solar & wind. If there were a dumber idea, they would have chosen it.
China's renewable energy deployment rate surpassed the rest of the world in 2024, installing more wind & solar capacity than all other countries combined.
We have touted China as our largest competitor. Who thinks coal is a long term solution? [A: people loyal to Putin who want to drag America backwards.]
We have shot ourselves in the foot. Now MAGA are reloading.
Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period last year, according to the Energy Informati
Data centers are concentrated in these states. Here's what's happening to electricity prices
Electricity prices are surging, voters are growing angry, and the artificial intelligence industry's data centers are increasingly a target for blame with U.S. mid-term elections on the horizon.
Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
the journalist who wrote the larian + gen ai piece released the full, more contextual transcript on blsky, but what i find hilarious is that he was surprised by fan backlash at gen ai being construed in the negative?
everyone (including myself) has talked about the issue of relying on gen ai; it's disrupting the creative process, stunting the ability to brainstorm, its borderline deceptive since they can say 'technically our game has no ai in it's final product' and can bypass the 'ai badge' on platforms like steam (which coe33 did too, sadly), and it's also affecting concept artists. not to mention the ethical qualms of 'generating' from appropriated art that is not named for its source or mindful of resource wasteage--
did you know Micron has pulled out of supplying and manufacturing consumer-based RAM in favour of working exclusively with ai companies?
did you know that Samsung has predicted a 100% price increase in consumer-based RAM already?
this means electronics which use RAM [basically all of modern tech.] are going to become considerably more expensive (not even adding the ethics of coltan/lithium mining to this list).
did you know many electric grids are not designed to accommodate this amount of strain from data farms--and they do not use renewable and sustainable energy sources at high enough levels to offset the damages of fossil burning?
china is the only pioneer in the sustainable electrical grid market atm (that i am aware of)--and because of their 10-year dev plan in alt. energy sources, they produce excess electricity and charge data centres half the price that American/European grids do? did you know that large companies don't have to pay more for their electricity use most of the time, the supplier just hikes up the prices for ALL users, so Microsoft and Google pay the same amount as you do, and based on the fact many of us aren't giant corporations, we technically pay MORE since we have to work more and spend less of the revenue elsewhere.
and don't even dream about the Global South having infrastructure to support any of this, many of those countries deal with daily load shedding!
anyway, i digress, because i wanted to talk about the fact that I'm tripped out a bit by the 'filler text' bit.
I especially don't like the very vague and ambiguous use of the phrase "filler text" in early design, character and narrative development because as someone who drafts and proofs endlessly, but often relies on a mini txt file with story beats or dialogue boxes I'm saving for future scenes, it's often very easy to forget the fidelity of your text if you don't explicitly mark it. I've sometimes plagiarised MYSELF and sometimes I'll write things down and forget to reference where the quote is (and because Google doesn't work anymore and I have limited access to good scholarly search archives this year, sometimes I end up stonewalling and then have to discard the use of a quote or reference because it wasn't thoroughly logged -- human error!
but a machine or LLM won't have this precontext or 'moral' predicament around its text generation, and game dev department communication is notorious for never really being on the same page or being done P2P; emails and memos and notes are messy and limited forms of communication.
So when they say filler text, we also have to factor human forgetfulness, LLMs lack of referencing, plagiarism, and the possibility of errors on two fronts from as EARLY as the concept stage. That's wild. And if gen ai is used for the conceptual bits too, that means that sometimes the text material will not engage with the art material at a core level. I've read that fromsoftware (elden ring specifically) is exceptional at adding the lore and worldbuilding into character designs like armour or fabrics or weapons etc--that nuance will be affected to, because no one will be thinking about that nuance (because it is so microscopic).
personally (ethically, artistically, morally and based on the fact that machine learning is just blatant, wide-spread, uncontrolled consumption, regurgitation and exploitation of human input and output--passion and drive), i do not support or care to condone and be a participant in any art spaces that use gen ai, chat gpt, llms or other destructive, disenfranchising, and displacing technologies.
where I could understand (and still not condone) using LLMS or ai in text is for text or character fidelity (to ensure tone is consistent) -- but then again, writing is eclectic, acerbic, romantic, soapy, contextual, stylised, misleading, grotesque, picturesque, etc., etc. a character doing something out of character or having a rapid declaration or acceleration in verve or passions, or lack there of, could be ACTIVE story telling beats used to aid character development or devolution in a narrative, i.e: traumas overwhelming a stoic character causing them to break out of their perceived norm, trickery, manipulation, forms of fantastical representations of loss of sanity/autonomy, etc. so fidelity texting could also be a hinderance. a limitation. plateauing. in this case, i could simply argue: why machine when you can have beta readers, proofers, game/play testers?
another use I could understand is as an aid in rendering, airbrushing, asset building, smoothing or touching up on hastily drawn or modelled assets because of limited time constraints to alleviate artist pressures (but, then again, it could be argued that hiring more artists would alleviate this pressure, and a longer production time would help, too).
So for every "understandable" use of ai, there's a drawback--and a very normal, human alternative.
and that's why I'm disappointed but also baffled that the excuses given were somehow supposed to make things less dire or serious? in the end, it just came off as shady, insincere and callous!
that said, environmental bodies are being omitted from the discussion by devs (they speak of voice actors and mocap and writers--but not water and electricity and the ecosystem).
this generation is suffering from irresponsible resource use and the strain on the electricity grid -- YOUR ELECTRICITY GRID THAT YOU RELY ON IN SUMMER AND WINTER AGAINST HEAT STROKE AND FREEZING TEMPERATURES! THAT YOU RELY ON FOR BANKING AND THE HOSPITAL AND COMMUNICATION AND STORAGE AND PERISHABLES.
ontop of all this, we have media monopolies, we have streaming being pushed but no ability to own things physically--we have impermanent opinions and sanitised media, we have a rise in propaganda and minimalism and fascist ideologies coming for queer and gender equality rights.
where are we going? what is the 'inevitable ai machine' paving? what is the end goal besides rich getting richer, poor getting poorer and hate being used to pit the status quo against the always-already-disenfranchised other?
The combination of a data center boom, rising gas exports and cuts to clean energy tax breaks could spike American energy bills, analysts sa
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The cost of electricity is rising across the country, forcing Americans to pay more on their monthly bills and squeezing manufacturers and small businesses that rely on cheap power.
And some of President Trump’s policies risk making things worse, despite his promises to slash energy prices, companies and researchers say.
This week, the Senate is taking up Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, which has already passed the House. In its current form, that bill would abruptly end most of the Biden-era federal tax credits for low-carbon sources of electricity like wind, solar, batteries and geothermal power.
Repealing those credits could increase the average family’s energy bill by as much as $400 per year within a decade, according to several studies published this year.
The studies rely on similar reasoning: Electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades, partly because of data centers needed for artificial intelligence, and power companies are already struggling to keep up. Ending tax breaks for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries would make them more expensive and less plentiful, increasing demand for energy from power plants that burn natural gas.
That could push up the price of gas, which currently generates 43 percent of America’s electricity.
On top of that, the Trump administration’s efforts to sell more gas overseas could further hike prices, while Mr. Trump’s new tariffs on steel, aluminum and other materials would raise the cost of transmission lines and other electrical equipment.
These cascading events could lead to further painful increases in electric bills.
“There’s a lot of concern about some pretty big price spikes,” said Rich Powell, chief executive of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, which represents companies that have committed to buying renewable energy, including General Motors, Honda, Intel and Microsoft.
A study commissioned by the association found that repealing the clean electricity credits could cause power prices to surge more than 13 percent in states like Arizona, Kansas, New Jersey and North Carolina and lead to thousands of job losses nationwide by 2032.
Many Americans have felt the pain of inflation at the gas pump or when buying groceries. But not all have noticed that the electricity prices have quietly gone up. For this coming summer, or even a much longer time, more American families will be hit by hefty electricity bills.
Texas’s deregulated electricity market left millions in the dark last week. For the past 20 years, its consumers have paid more for their electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a WSJ investigation found.
On January 1, 2002, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature and then-Governor George W. Bush deregulated power generation, stopped using regulated power utility companies, and left its consumers to purchase power from retail power companies rather than a local utility. They called its new policy “customer choice,” and formally stated the reasons for the new law:
“The legislature finds that the production and sale of electricity is not a monopoly warranting regulation of rates, operations, and services and that the public interest in competitive electric markets requires that, except for transmission and distribution services and for the recovery of stranded costs, electric services and their prices should be determined by customer choices and the normal forces of competition.”
Republicans argued (as they typically do) that deregulation would save Texas consumers enormous sums of money, as the power of a free marketplace would force power providers to offer more competitive pricing.
Bullshit.
The recent winter storm caused widespread power, water, and heat loss across the state as a direct result of deregulation. At the same time, private Texas utilities jacked up their rates to the legal maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. As a result, individual consumers accustomed to paying “around $30 for electricity” have been billed as much as $5,000 during a five-day period, and nearly $17,000 for the month.
Nevertheless, Texas Republicans are still claiming that the benefits of deregulation justify the occasional deadly risk, because Texans would supposedly have had to pay much more for reliable regulated power.
Again, bullshit.
“Deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities.”
Deregulation has led not only to disastrous power failures and astronomical prices in the worst possible weather, but also to higher prices overall. Exactly the opposite of what Texas Republicans repeatedly promised their constituents.
But hey, the private power utilities who collected that extra $28 billion dollars-and who won’t be held liable in any way for their failure to deliver power during the storm--are probably pretty happy about it.
