Technology

59381 readers

3120 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

132

Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world

79 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong

Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it's a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I’ve read different stories. Of towns where cheap and renewable electricity can be made but it’s financially not viable especially at the start. So Bitcoin miners were used to sell the excess energy and that made the project possible. In a way something like Bitcoin can create a global price/demand for electricity which can have its advantages like I mentioned or disadvantages like you mentioned.

[–] jaycifer@kbin.social 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.

[–] JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They don’t require high internet speed at all. Why do you say that? You have to keep up with the network that creates a couple MBs of data every 10mins. That’s it. You need processing power and as such electricity but none of that requires high speed internet, quite the contrary. You can get away with a mobile data in most places.

[–] jaycifer@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

There's a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn't be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn't be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.