https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikesimoncasey_our-team-at-re...?

How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?

Also, consumer prices _have_ risen (mine included), but it's not clear that this is only because AI. While EV charging is not at the scale of all data centers combined, it seems to grow even faster than the datacenter's consumption, and is expected to eclipse the latter around 2030. Maybe sooner due to missing solar incentives.

Also, to rant on: According to [1], an average Gemini query costs about 0.01 cents (Figure 2 - say 6000 queries per kWh at 60 cents/kWh, which is probably more than the industrial consumers pay). The same paper says one other providers is not off by that much. I dare say that at least for me, I definitely save a lot of time and effort with these queries than I'd traditionally have to (go to library, manually find sources on the web, etc), so arguably, responsibly used, AI is really quite environmentally friendly.

Finally: Large data centers and their load is actually a bit fungible, so they can be used to stabilize the grid, as described in [2].

I would think it would be best if there were more transparency on where the costs come from and how they can be externalized fairly. To give one instance, Tesla could easily [3] change their software to monitor global grid status and adjust charging rates. Did it happen ? Not that I know. That could have a huge effect on grid stability. With PowerShare, I understand that vehicles can also send energy back to power the house - hence, also offload the grid.

[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358514...

[3] that's most likely a wild exaggeration