by JOHN MIKKELSEN – THE dystopian future predicted in the Mad Max movie franchise may be closer than ever and it won’t take World War III to make it a reality.
To me, the only ones worth watching were the original and its sequel starring homegrown hero Mel Gibson.
- Adding AI to internet searches increases the energy used per search tenfold.
- While the appetite for electric vehicles is sagging, the appetite for AI chips is “explosive”.
- Data centres now each consume more energy than a steel mill.
Those drab desert landscapes from Mad Max 2 on, were traversed by fast supercharged fossil fuel powered vehicles without a single EV on the horizon.
So while the Teslas pile up unwanted at Port Melbourne and sales of EVs are declining globally, they represent just the tip of the iceberg on which the Western world seems destined to founder in its mad rush to offset climate change “driven by CO2 emissions”.
OVERLOOKED
The fact that climate always changes and it’s mainly driven by natural cyclical forces beyond our control, is overlooked by political leaders pushing the green dream of “renewable energy” focussed on the unreliable intermittent sources of solar and wind power.
Energy & Climate Change Minister Chris “Blackout” Bowen and PM Anthony “Each Way” Albanese would like to see an EV, electric scooter or bike in every Australian garage.
This would certainly keep our firefighters busy, but it won’t change the weather.
As former chief scientist Alan Finkel admitted to a Senate hearing several years ago, if Australia cut all its CO2 emissions immediately, its impact on world climate would be negligible.
But in the unlikely event that EV sales do surge way beyond the current rate of just eight per cent of total vehicle sales, it would place increasing demands on a power system already at risk of major blackouts.
In its latest 10-year forecast, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) warned that millions of Australians faced the risk of electricity blackouts without the “urgent” delivery of greater energy and transmission infrastructure.
Well, that alone might not tip us into the dystopian Mad Max future but combined with a seemingly insatiable power demand created by a villain masked as mankind’s new hero, it just might.
I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence or AI – the charmless i-bot that answers almost all government and major business phone calls, the source behind our internet searches and algorithms, the brain behind the helpful tools that do a student’s assignments or write a novel (badly) or create nude images of anybody from a normal photograph. Get the picture?
Sales of AI software are tipped to reach $126b by 2025.
Google is just one of the search tools getting in on the act, as I found when accessing emails recently and received the following message: Try the best of Google AI at no charge.
“Use ‘help me write’ in Gmail and Docs to quickly draft and refine content, or use Gemini Advanced to research and brainstorm using our most capable AI models. ‘Try at no cost’/ ‘Dismiss’.
I immediately clicked “dismiss”.
And now massive data centers are pouring AI chips into the mix as fast as manufacturing plants can build them.
As one researcher notes, adding AI to Google “search” boosts the energy use per search tenfold. And that’s only the first, perhaps the least, significant of the many possible applications for AI.
HAPLESS
An article in City Journal claims that the huge energy demand will make the type of energy transition our hapless leaders are trying to foist on us impossible.
It claims that Nvidia, a leading AI chip manufacturer, has shipped about 5m high-power chips over the past three years and each chip uses roughly as much electricity each year as three electric vehicles.
And while the market appetite for electric vehicles is sagging and ultimately limited, the appetite for AI chips is “explosive and essentially unlimited”.
“To see what the future holds, we must take a deep dive into the arcana of today’s ‘cloud’, the loosely defined term denoting the constellation of data centres, hardware and communications systems,” City Journal continued.
“Each data centre – and tens of thousands exist – has an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. And the nearly 1000 so-called hyperscale data centres each consume more energy than a steel mill (and this is before counting the impacts of piling on AI chips)….”
I find that both scary and mind boggling, to the extent that new mathematical measurement terminology has been developed to try to keep pace with the burgeoning energy demand all this is creating.
Forget billions, trillions or zillions, that’s old-hat and doesn’t go anywhere near the AI power horizon: “One way to guess the future magnitude of data traffic – and derivatively the energy implications – is in the names of the numbers we’ve had to create to describe quantities of data.
“We count food and mineral production in millions of tons; people and their devices in billions of units; airway and highway usage in trillions of miles; electricity and natural gas in trillions of kilowatt-hours or cubic feet; and our economies in trillions of dollars.
“But, at a rate of a trillion per year of anything, it takes a billion years to total one “zetta” – ie, the name of the number that describes the scale of today’s digital traffic.
“The numerical prefixes created to describe huge quantities track the progress of society’s technologies and needs.
“The ‘kilo’ prefix dates back to 1795. The ‘mega’ prefix was coined in 1873, to name 1000 kilos. The “giga” prefix for a billion (1000 million) and “tera” (a trillion, or 1000 billion) were both adopted in 1960.
“In 1975, we saw the official creation of the prefixes “peta” (1000 giga) and “exa” (1000 peta), and then the “zetta” (1000 exa) in 1991.
“Today’s cloud traffic is estimated to be roughly 50 zettabytes a year.
“It’s impossible to visualize such a number without context. A zetta-stack of dollar bills would reach from the earth to the sun (93m miles away) and back – 700,000 times.”
GRASPING
What the…? Are you grasping any of this Albo and Bowen?
Do you really think covering an area bigger than Tasmania including productive farmland and natural forests with limited-life solar and wind farms and 28,000km of new transmission lines, all backed by billions in subsidies, will solve our energy needs into the future?
You will need to do a lot more to prevent the dystopian future referred to in the Mad Max movies unless AI becomes intelligent enough to realise it is rapidly progressing towards its own demise.
It needs to convince closed minds like yours that the only way to try to keep pace is to embrace clean, long-lasting, safe, modern nuclear energy as promoted by enterprising young Brisbane teenager Will Shackel, the founder of Nuclear for Australia, and Opposition leader Peter Dutton.
It’s a no-brainer, and many overseas States and nations are already on-board. Civilisation could depend on it.PC
ABSOLUTELY NOT, this is a Government gone mad. All they are interested in is being the first to try something new, not taking into consideration whether it works or not!! This is what happens when Politicians are put into office without the proper qualifications. I am sick and tired of Governments making rash decisions without consulting the people or listening to what we are saying. Things need to change dramatically before major mistakes does immense damage to our way of life.
“A large data centre can consume the equivalent energy to 50,000 homes. Cooling the rows and racks of powerful computers also requires up to 19 million litres of water a day – a similar quantity of water to that consumed by a small city of 50,000 people,” ADP states.12 Oct 2023
That’s the size of the challenge. This is the sort of information that should be put to the people.
This is the sort of question that should be put to Bowen, how many data centres does he have in his plan?
The answer to our power needs becomes obvious with this sort of information.
Great topic John
It looks like it’s not just ‘Blackouts’ Bowen who is mad – this Morrie guy is in the same category. Comparing modern day nuclear plants with Fukushima….
“Comparing modern day nuclear plants with Fukushima….”
So it would also be silly to compare a Tiger Moth with a 737 MAX, because the 737 is “modern”, and therefore could not possibly be involved in a crash – it that right?
“[…] this Morrie guy is in the same category.”
You are not only dull; you are arrogant as well. You should educate yourself and learn some humility.
Just for the record, there are many reasons why nuclear-generated power is problematic. The only reason that Dutton is spruiking it is because he is too *GUTLESS* to admit that the emperor has no clothes – that “climate change” is nothing but a con, and that coal-fired power stations are fine. This is the real story here – that Dutton has no ticker, and is mortally afraid of the limp-wristed, know-nothing moderates who have reduced the “Liberal” party to the hollowed-out shell it is today.
“[…] the only way to try to keep pace is to embrace clean, long-lasting, safe, modern nuclear energy […]”
So I assume it’s “safe” because it’s “modern”, in the same way that a Tiger Moth might crash, but an aircraft like, say, a 737 MAX never would (because our forebears were a little dull, whereas we have achieved perfection, and never ever make mistakes).
Perhaps you should run your hubristic ideas past those who used to reside in Fukushima; they can tell you exactly how “safe” and “clean” they found nuclear power to be.
A really dumb comparison. According to the UNSCEAR report no people died from radiation poison and there were no lasting radiation effects:
https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/fukushima.html
Fukushima was an old reactor with good built in safe-guards which was destroyed by a 9 category earthquake and a 30 meter tsunami.
Modern reactors f the type being built by Bill Gates cannot runaway as the shibboleths put out by luddites claim:
https://www.sciencealert.com/bill-gates-terrapower-to-fast-track-first-next-gen-nuclear-plant-in-us?utm_source=ScienceAlert%20-%20Daily%20Email%20Updates&utm_campaign=3daefe8faa-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fe5632fb09-3daefe8faa-366137089&fbclid=IwAR01faaQOG_3gZSvXniaFAuMofzt2GQDYbB3i4zn-_VswSTr1ukQ9RE4J2M
The real issue is wind and solar DO NOT WORK; they are weather dependent. No grid can run on them. New generation coal, Ultra SuperCritical is a marvellous energy source, only surpassed by the new generation nuclear.
The great irony is we are only suffering wind and solar because gullible fools believe in Man Made Global Warming which is a nonsense.
“Modern reactors f the type being built by Bill Gates cannot runaway as the shibboleths put out by luddites claim […]”.
LOL, and we all trust Bill Gates because he’s got such a stellar record with software, doesn’t he? There are no bugs at all in any code that Microsoft ever wrote, and no one has *ever* had to reboot a Windows PC, have they?
What next? Will you be suggesting that Joe Biden has determined how to halt cognitive decline that is the result of old age?
“Fukushima was an old reactor with good built in safe-guards which was destroyed by a 9 category earthquake and a 30 meter tsunami.”
Once again, we have ignorance on public display. Perhaps you should acquaint yourself with what the geological records around Sydney show regarding the frequency with which tsunamis strike Australia’s East coast, and the severity of said tsunamis.
“A really dumb comparison.”
If it were “dumb”, I wouldn’t have made it. Tell me, would you yourself live in Fukushima? Do you think that anyone would like to raise young children there?
“The real issue is wind and solar DO NOT WORK […]”.
You are *WRONG*, that is only *HALF* the issue. The rest, as I’ve said, is that Dutton is too afraid to call out “climate change” as the lie that it is – because he is a spineless moron, he is trying to hedge his political bets, and placate those who talk of CO2 “emissions” as though they are harmful. He has no ticker, and is clearly not cut from the right sort of cloth to be a politician, let alone the leader of a political party.
Coal-fired power stations are not problematic at all. Why do so many otherwise sensible conservatives find this simple fact so hard to understand?
Well Morrie maybe take a tour of France which has 70% nuclear energy and exports power to Germany and other EU nations to help keep their lights on after they tried to go the unreliable renewables path. Check out the vineyards producing some of the world’s best wines and the dairy farms and cheese factories. It’s no nuclear wasteland because nuclear energy is safe and the only possible way we can prevent future power chaos here while trying to reach “net zero”. Peter Dutton is on the right track and will certainly get my/ our vote!
Mind boggling indeed John. If Bowen and Albo think their mad rush to renewables/ unreliables will ever get anywhere near meeting our future power needs, they are dumber than the policies they promote. Nuclear subs that will be serviced in Australia and visit all our major ports? No worries, that’s “safe nuclear”; Lucas Heights medical facility reactor? Yep, safe as always, no three-eyed fish near there; nuclear in our power mix? Shock horror – unsafe, costs a bomb, too long to develop. All exposed as lies by positive experiences in many overseas countries embracing modern nuclear. Wake up Australia.