alt Hacker NewsHospitals can also just run on the sunny days.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
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In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
Comparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think?
Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind.
I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
Or we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
Unplug a ventilator for five minutes and a patient dies.
If unplugging a data center for five minutes can have a similar effect, then every AWS or cloudflare outage would have been a mass extinction event.