You are right of course, and I am going by other people’s analysis so I am not sure how much they are correct or wrong this time around. I do not think we will have hugely rising commodity prices making green energy unfeasible, unless there is a war (or just a trade war) blocking the supply of a key input.
Nevertheless, the extrapolation of decreasing costs for solar and wind based on current trends will eventually hit some “hard” limit, and metals are a likely candidate. After all, as manufacturing costs for panels reduce, the fraction of cost coming from raw materials grows even at constant prices. And to get prices going down 10x, we need to supply several times more energy than now (maybe 5x?) meaning growing wind and solar by two orders of magnitude in 20 years. This could plausibly put strain on the supply of raw materials.
Of course, if the bottleneck will turn out to be energy distribution and storage, then we could get prices going down 10x at the source (what Daniel is interested in) but not for household consumption, and only a modest increase in demand.
Interesting—source pls? The price of energy is one of the most important things on my list so I’m especially keen to hear more evidence for and against my projected 10x drop.
As jacopo pointed out the Simon–Ehrlich wager is a key argument. As far as solar costs go, the cost of actual solar cells fell a lot more in the last years then installation costs.
When it comes to solar cells for training neural nets, it’s worth noting that those don’t need to be stationed on earth.
At 10$/kg or less for transporting material to space with Starship (and it’s successors) it’s possible that it makes more sense to have the data center in space where it gets exposure to the sun 24⁄7 and there’s no sky that blocks sunlight.
For earth based datacenters, if energy is the limiting factor and a lot of the energy comes from solar, it’s possible to do all the training for neural nets in the summer where there’s plenty of solar energy and not train your models on days where solar cells and wind farms produce little energy.
Is refrigeration a big part of data centers energy costs ? This would mean the best places for solar energy are also the worst places for data centers...
I’ve thought a bit about this, but haven’t done any calculations. My guess is that it would be overall cheaper to have datacenters in sunny regions than to try to get solar panels in cold regions. Your refrigeration (and heat management more generally) electricity bill will be higher, but not that much higher, but your electricity costs will be much lower.
If refrigeration becomes a major part of the energy cost it’s worth noting that there’s thinking about putting data centers under water where they can be cooled more easily. At the moment that’s not viable but it might be in 2040.
True but putting them in Northern part of the world may also be a good idea. Right now looking for example at Google’s data centers map there seems to be a very small trend toward northern locations (at least in Europe), but it may just be a flux due to local financial incentives being more favorable in some countries.
I think he might be referring to the Simon–Ehrlich wager. And indeed there have been other similar claims in the past, more often proven wrong than correct.
+1 to this, though I think a slightly modified version of jacopo’s argument is stronger: new constraints are likely to become binding in general when cost of current constraints drops by a factor of 10, though it’s not always obvious which constraints will be relevant.
People argued for metal prices being a problem for a long time and those predictions usually failed to come true.
You are right of course, and I am going by other people’s analysis so I am not sure how much they are correct or wrong this time around. I do not think we will have hugely rising commodity prices making green energy unfeasible, unless there is a war (or just a trade war) blocking the supply of a key input.
Nevertheless, the extrapolation of decreasing costs for solar and wind based on current trends will eventually hit some “hard” limit, and metals are a likely candidate. After all, as manufacturing costs for panels reduce, the fraction of cost coming from raw materials grows even at constant prices. And to get prices going down 10x, we need to supply several times more energy than now (maybe 5x?) meaning growing wind and solar by two orders of magnitude in 20 years. This could plausibly put strain on the supply of raw materials.
Of course, if the bottleneck will turn out to be energy distribution and storage, then we could get prices going down 10x at the source (what Daniel is interested in) but not for household consumption, and only a modest increase in demand.
Interesting—source pls? The price of energy is one of the most important things on my list so I’m especially keen to hear more evidence for and against my projected 10x drop.
As jacopo pointed out the Simon–Ehrlich wager is a key argument. As far as solar costs go, the cost of actual solar cells fell a lot more in the last years then installation costs.
When it comes to solar cells for training neural nets, it’s worth noting that those don’t need to be stationed on earth.
At 10$/kg or less for transporting material to space with Starship (and it’s successors) it’s possible that it makes more sense to have the data center in space where it gets exposure to the sun 24⁄7 and there’s no sky that blocks sunlight.
For earth based datacenters, if energy is the limiting factor and a lot of the energy comes from solar, it’s possible to do all the training for neural nets in the summer where there’s plenty of solar energy and not train your models on days where solar cells and wind farms produce little energy.
Is refrigeration a big part of data centers energy costs ? This would mean the best places for solar energy are also the worst places for data centers...
I’ve thought a bit about this, but haven’t done any calculations. My guess is that it would be overall cheaper to have datacenters in sunny regions than to try to get solar panels in cold regions. Your refrigeration (and heat management more generally) electricity bill will be higher, but not that much higher, but your electricity costs will be much lower.
If refrigeration becomes a major part of the energy cost it’s worth noting that there’s thinking about putting data centers under water where they can be cooled more easily. At the moment that’s not viable but it might be in 2040.
True but putting them in Northern part of the world may also be a good idea. Right now looking for example at Google’s data centers map there seems to be a very small trend toward northern locations (at least in Europe), but it may just be a flux due to local financial incentives being more favorable in some countries.
Google seems to have one datacenter in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Finnland and two in the Netherlands.
Those seem to be countries that currently have cheap industrial electricity: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1046605/industry-electricity-prices-european-union-country/
I think he might be referring to the Simon–Ehrlich wager. And indeed there have been other similar claims in the past, more often proven wrong than correct.
+1 to this, though I think a slightly modified version of jacopo’s argument is stronger: new constraints are likely to become binding in general when cost of current constraints drops by a factor of 10, though it’s not always obvious which constraints will be relevant.