Un jour, je tenterai le coup. Mais depuis un petit balcon, c'est compliqué.

L'Arcom, l'Arcep et l'ADEME se sont penchées sur l'impact environnemental des usages audiovisuels en France. Comme on pouvait s'y attendre, les appareils, et notamment les téléviseurs, sont le plus gros poste d'émissions de CO2. Mais, malgré une diminution prévue des postes TV, les agences prévoient que cette empreinte carbone pourrait augmenter de 30 % d'ici 2030 si aucune action n'est prise pour la limiter.

Communal bathing could be a third approach, but it’s rarely mentioned. That’s remarkable because, in terms of resource efficiency, it’s hard to beat. Building and operating a bathhouse for 1,000 people requires much less energy than building and operating 1,000 individual bathrooms. A public bathhouse is also more efficient concerning materials, money, and space.

We here at the Department of Energy wanted to thank you for being conscientious about your energy usage this summer. Your efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. As a token of our gratitude, we wanted to highlight all the small but powerful steps you’ve taken to conserve energy over the past few months—and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI.

⚡️⚡️⚡️😂

It’s also worth noting that data centers are at the moment a relatively small slice of total worldwide energy usage—currently something like 1%, dwarfed by cars, heavy industry, commercial buildings, and so on. That could change—a report from the Electric Power Research Institute projected that the electricity required by AI companies could rise to reach up to 9% of the United States’ energy mix, which would, quite frankly, be insane. (If you think the web is overrun with AI content now, imagine a world where one tenth of all the electricity we generate is going into pumping out more of the stuff.)

The high steel intensity of low carbon power sources confronts us with a so-called “catch-22”, a situation in which there seems to be no escape from a problem no matter what we do. We need much more steel if we replace thermal power plants with renewable ones. Because there is not enough steel scrap available, we can only produce that extra steel from iron ore in blast furnaces burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need to build low-carbon sources quickly and in great numbers. However, to achieve circular material flows and build low-carbon power sources from scrap and renewable electricity, we would have to do the opposite: slow down the development of a low-carbon power grid.

Les article de Low tech magazine sont toujours longs mais absolument passionnants, sourcés et instructifs.

From simple ChatGPT queries — which themselves can consume as much electricity as a 60-watt incandescent bulb does in 10 minutes — to more complex image and video creations, to fast-growing enterprise implementation and hardware integration, the AI boom is spiking demand for power on an already-strained grid.

Tristan Nitot et sa loi d’Eroom, impeccable. 👌

« The staggering electricity demand needed to power next-generation technology is forcing the US to rely on yesterday’s fuel source: coal. »

Difficile de ne pas déprimer sec face à l’absurdité. 😩