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Why do the Greens hate AI datacentres?

Apparently, AI datacentres turn fresh water into sludge.

That's the claim being made by Green's co-leader Chloe Swarbrick.

They also use horrendous amounts of electricity and we're so short of power that the National government is planning to build new fossil-fueled power generation that requires a billion-dollar LNG terminal to handle the gas on which it will run.

On the basis of these claims, the Greens want a moritorium on the construction of AI datacentres because of all the harm they'll produce.

Those are the claims, what are the facts?

Well first of all, modern datacentres use closed-loop cooling systems with heat-exchangers. This means they don't "consume" huge amounts of fresh water at all. Poor old Chloe is a few years out of date.

These AI datacentres do however, produce significant amounts of waste heat -- so what better place to build them than in the coldest part of the country, such as Southland, where a $3.5 billion datacentre has recently received planning consent?

That consent gives the owners, Datagrid of Singapore, the right to use up to 600,000 litres of groundwater per day but the company says its cooling systems will be closed-loop and will use "naturally cool air temperatures and rainwater where needed". In that case, you have to wonder why their consent requested so much groundwater -- don't you?

Total energy consumption is expected to be around 280 megawatts of electricity which, by any measure, is significant.

There were claims being bandied about that this project would create thousands of jobs in the area and while that's true in the short-term, the long-term effects are far less positive. Construction of the facility and support infrastructure will indeed involve significant job-creation but the actual datacentre itself, once commissioned, will involve very few new positions. Most of these things end up being huge buildings lined with servers and a skeleton crew who simply watch the lights blink and call a repairman when something breaks.

The real issue here is whether we have the electricity budget to guarantee supply to these AI datacentres without affecting prices or availability to existing users.

The very fact that the government has considered more fossil-fuel generation capacity to cope with peak-demand would suggest that we ought not be adding huge extra loads that can't be shed at peak times for management purposes.

Let's be clear about this, an AI datacentre can't simply be switched off like your hot water heater when demand has peaked and generation capacity is stretched to breaking point.

This means that you can forget about all your intermittent renewables such as wind and solar. Sure, they maybe contributing an increasing amount to our total generation capacity but they're generally least available when demand is highest (such as early evening and early morning). Adding more solar and wind will not make it viable to build AI datacentres which can each use as much as eight percent of our existing total national energy consumption.

So the Greens do have some merit to their argument, I just wish they wouldn't use so much hyperbole when trying to convince people. When you doth protest too much it tends to erode trust in the genuine facts you bring to the argument.

Forget the "sludge" -- that's just stupid and, when challenged in an online interview, even Ms Swarbrick had to concede that perhaps "cloudy water" was a better description than sludge although she didn't seem to understand how closed-loop systems work.

A full energy audit needs to be undertaken before we start selling our valuable electricity (with guarantees of supply) to companies for AI datacentres. I shudder at the thought of poor pensioners huddled and shivering in a cold dark house during winter, as their electricity is almost gifted to a Singaporian datacentre owner just so that someone can create cute AI cat videos for their YouTube channel.

Carpe Diem folks!

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