alt Hacker NewsI'd rather see legislation banning crypto mining and AI data centers from the public grid entirely. No sense in forcing the broader public to subsidize them.
Replies
If they weren't on the public grid, they would just slap in a bunch of gas turbines and run one of the noisier, more polluting sources of electricity. I think it would be better if we required them to replace the power they used, but do so on the grid so that it benefits everyone.
I'd rather see legislation banning everyone from the grid. Why have a common resource if its no longer common. Just get rid of it. Ban everyone from using the roads, who knows, they might be transporting evil computer hardware to an evil data centre using a road. Farms obviously have to go, they supply food to people who write code that gets run in datacentres. In fact, just ban all trade and commerce to be on the safe side*
*The US should implement this policy for real for my personal amusement.
Didn’t Texas pretty much do the exact opposite thing recently?
The problem with that is one of the best things we have to control pollution at power plants is the rules that go into place when connecting to the US grid (I know TX is different).
I really don’t want to incentivize private power plants that aren’t on grid. Or just running tons of industrial sized generators instead.
If we’re going to allow enough of this stuff to be built that it can destabilize things why not require they behave and don’t stop off like that? Some sort of organized draw down?
And if they don’t? Mandatory cutoff for X amount of time. Weeks/months.