How are we getting the power? Most obvious way is to displace less productive industrial uses but we won’t let that happen. We must build new power. Natural gas. 100 GW will get pretty wild but still doable with natural gas.
If we let the price of electricity go up, we would naturally get conservation across residential, commercial, and industrial users. There are precedents for this, such as Juneau Alaska losing access to its hydropower plant and electricity getting ~6 times as expensive and people reducing consumption by 25%. Now of course people will complain and then they would support much more building, but we don’t have to do the building first to get 20% of current electricity production for AI.
For those thinking about carbon, doing it in America with natural gas emits less carbon than doing it in the UAE where presumably you are using oil. Emissions are fungible. If you say ‘but think of our climate commitments’ and say that it matters where the emissions happen, you are at best confusing the map for the territory.
Though there are instances in the Middle East of using oil for electric power, this only happens because of massive subsidies. The true cost is extremely expensive electricity, so I think UAE would be using natural gas.
If we let the price of electricity go up, we would naturally get conservation across residential, commercial, and industrial users. There are precedents for this, such as Juneau Alaska losing access to its hydropower plant and electricity getting ~6 times as expensive and people reducing consumption by 25%. Now of course people will complain and then they would support much more building, but we don’t have to do the building first to get 20% of current electricity production for AI.
Though there are instances in the Middle East of using oil for electric power, this only happens because of massive subsidies. The true cost is extremely expensive electricity, so I think UAE would be using natural gas.