Meanwhile my power company says I can earn reward points (like what credit cards have) by not running my AC
Man sign me up because I haven’t had AC in like 10 years haha.
PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.
So this is a combination of utter mismanagement by the power companies, combined with growth in data center demand. Data centers are not purely AI. And I would expect that if PJM continues to be a basket case with exceptionally high prices those data centers will move elsewhere, or at least not get set up so more in those locations. Data centers generally don’t have to be located in specific places, by their nature. AI-specific ones in particular since the bandwidth required is a lot smaller than their processing power.
Just ask ChatGPT how to fix it.
If you nuke a big city, the problem basically fixed itself.
