An essay arguing that AI should be understood as infrastructure rather than a novelty, comparing it to electricity and the internet. The author contends that while AI's language capabilities invite anthropomorphization, the real challenges involve regulation, equitable access, and efficient distribution of computational resources rather than model ownership.
This post develops a seasonal ARIMA forecast for household electricity consumption using four years of minute-by-minute meter data from UCI, achieving 0.2774 kW mean absolute error. The analysis covers data cleaning, stationarity testing, multiple modeling approaches including GARCH and state space models, and backtesting procedures to predict daily power use.
EV charging involves unavoidable losses as electricity is transmitted and converted from grid AC to battery DC. Testing shows AC Level 1/2 chargers typically lose 14–20 percent of electricity to heat, conversion, and thermal management, while DC fast chargers lose approximately 10 percent. Using dedicated wall-mounted chargers significantly reduces losses compared to household outlets.
Oregon has 111 operational data centers consuming about 23% of the state's retail electricity in 2025, with 32 more facilities planned or under construction, according to a new report from ECOnorthwest and the University of Virginia. The facilities directly employ 2,630 workers, mostly concentrated in Eastern Oregon, though data centers represent only 0.2% of the state's workforce. The report highlights gaps in available data on water use and community impacts as data centers become an increasingly contentious issue in Oregon.
India's coal power generation remained flat from mid-2024 to mid-2026, marking the first two-year period without growth in over 50 years despite rising electricity demand. The stagnation coincided with record non-fossil power generation increases, though India continues investing in new coal capacity and fossil fuel infrastructure.
A 2023 peer-reviewed study found that each Bitcoin transaction in 2021 carried a water footprint of approximately 16,000 litres when accounting for electricity generation and cooling. The estimate varies significantly by location, with Kazakhstan responsible for 63% of Bitcoin's water use despite hosting only 14% of computing power. Critics argue the per-transaction comparison is misleading since transaction count doesn't directly correlate with resource consumption.