Re:Addressing AI’s energy cost
by bmitc on Tuesday June 07, 2022 @11:33PM
(#31662893)
Do you have a source? How is that calculated? I suspect it's a rather complicated calculation. Questions like what defines a person in this context, what defines electricity usage, where did it go or come from if it did change, etc. seem like important ones to answer.
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I don’t have the source where I read it, but it’s easy enough to calculate and the change is significant:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co... https://www.statista.com/statistics/183457/united-states--re...
3887 TWH in 2010 / 309.3 million people = 12.57 MWH per person.
3954 TWH in 2019 / 328.3 million people = 12.04 MWH per person.
3930 TWH in 2021 / 331.9 million people = 11.84 MWH per person.
Likewise if one looks at total energy consumption in the US:
2000: 98.7 quadrillion BTU / 281.4 million people = 350 million BTU/person/year
2019: 100.5 quadrillion BTU / 328.3 million people = 306 million BTU/person/year.
For the CO2 metric:
2000: 20.9 tonnes per capita
2019: 15.7 tonnes per capita
According to the below EIA article, things are getting worse worldwide.
> Global electricity consumption continues to increase faster than world population, leading to an increase in the average amount of electricity consumed per person
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44095#:~:tex....
Well, sure. You have developing countries... developing, in addition to the (difficult to quantify) outsourcing effects that I mentioned above.
Note that I really want electricity usage to go up a lot, too. It's just overall primary energy usage that we want to stay level or go down. That's why I used the primary energy usage metric. After all, moving to an electric car or replacing natural gas heating with a heat pump "increases electricity usage."