India's Grid Cannot Keep Up With Its Ambitions (indiadispatch.com) 22
India's electricity grid is struggling to accommodate the nation's economic expansion and isn't adequately equipped to handle future data center demand. Goldman Sachs estimates that power required from utilities needs roughly 7.2% annual growth between fiscal years 2025 and 2035, up from a prior 5.6%.
India's data center base sits in the low single gigawatts today, but Bernstein forecasts reach 5 to 6 gigawatts by 2030. AI servers draw five to seven times the power of a legacy server rack, according to HSBC. Solar farms can be built in 12 to 24 months, but they flood the grid when daytime demand is comparatively low and then fade as households and commercial loads climb after 5 PM. On Goldman's full-year models, the system runs a 1 to 4% energy deficit by fiscal years 2034 through 2035.
Assessments suggest India may need roughly 140 gigawatts of additional coal capacity by fiscal year 2035 versus 2023 levels. The government's current target is roughly 87 gigawatts by fiscal year 2032. Coal plants can run around the clock and can ramp up production during the evening hours to meet surging demand. Some of this coal is bridge capacity to stabilize a faster greening grid, but the scale required exceeds what policymakers have publicly acknowledged or what most analysts expected even two years ago.
India's data center base sits in the low single gigawatts today, but Bernstein forecasts reach 5 to 6 gigawatts by 2030. AI servers draw five to seven times the power of a legacy server rack, according to HSBC. Solar farms can be built in 12 to 24 months, but they flood the grid when daytime demand is comparatively low and then fade as households and commercial loads climb after 5 PM. On Goldman's full-year models, the system runs a 1 to 4% energy deficit by fiscal years 2034 through 2035.
Assessments suggest India may need roughly 140 gigawatts of additional coal capacity by fiscal year 2035 versus 2023 levels. The government's current target is roughly 87 gigawatts by fiscal year 2032. Coal plants can run around the clock and can ramp up production during the evening hours to meet surging demand. Some of this coal is bridge capacity to stabilize a faster greening grid, but the scale required exceeds what policymakers have publicly acknowledged or what most analysts expected even two years ago.
India? (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you mean the US? Or Germany? Hell, which grid on this planet IS adequate for the political ambitions of the grespective government?
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China
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Hoping the $100K per H1B policy kicking in, helps return jobs to the US and relieve that job strain on people and resources (like the grid) over there.
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grespective?
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So you understand poverty. The impoverished class is less impoverished and are now taking up energy grid expansion that the AI industry wants.
Work with what you have (Score:3)
Why not deploy more, cheaper, less efficient AI processors, but run it only during the daytime when the solar farms are pumping out excess energy? It won't be the highest performance and have more heat output but you don't have to worry about energy availability or build grid storage infrastructure to support it. You could then offer it at a discount for customers that are willing to wait a little longer for training tasks to complete.
This is obviously not good for on-demand inference tasks (e.g. talking to AI customer support agent), but inference is orders of magnitude less demanding on the hardware.
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They have coal. They're going to work with that.
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Oh my goodness!
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I know... we can't use something as polluting as coal. We'll use natural gas (which also pollutes), and not fund fusion research.
Do we (as humans) need these dumb AI-LLMs for more than chatting to a sexbot?
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This is obviously not good for on-demand inference tasks (e.g. talking to AI customer support agent), but inference is orders of magnitude less demanding on the hardware.
Inference per request is relatively less demanding than something else like training. However, millions and billions of these small requests collectively turns into a total energy workload that is far higher than training.
The AI mentality is more is better (Score:2)
A million nukes wouldn't be enough to make Mr Altman happy.
Pick me! Pick me! (Score:2)
So, they will add in two new team members to a working party every week. Only one of which has even heard of electricity.
In response to the lack of progress, the managers will make the customers train the newbies. And they will all need to work stupid hours while accomplishing nothing.
Repeat next week with three or 4 new members, but two from two weeks ago have quit (and are now marketing themselves as having vast industry experience). Meh.
"Future"? They can't handle themselves now (Score:5, Informative)
I was in India only a few months ago. Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, in all locations I experienced rolling blackouts. These blackouts were not new, or not unexpected. In fact in every building I was in (including some residential ones) diesel generators provided backup power for the *expected* power outage. On average I experienced an outage every 2-3 days.
Our office had wifi and network systems on UPS. It was completely normal for the power to go out and see people flip open their laptop screens, put aside their keyboards, and keep working while waiting the 15-20 seconds for the backup generator to kick in.
I saw multiple elevators with warnings in them "Don't panic if the power goes out, the generator may take up to 1 minute to restart the elevator."
And my favourite, the jokes: "oh I guess xxxxx just plugged their EV in" when the power goes out.
India's grid isn't keeping up *NOW*.
Re:"Future"? They can't handle themselves now (Score:5, Interesting)
Indias Ambition (Score:3)
India's X cannot keep up with their ambition. Put in any dang thing there. Boom ! I said it.
Batteries (Score:2)
Solar farms can be built in 12 to 24 months, but they flood the grid when daytime demand is comparatively low and then fade as households and commercial loads climb after 5 PM.
If only there were some technology which could be built to time-shift electricity from when it is plentiful to when it is needed Some sort of ability to allow energy storage and recovery. We could call it a "battery". /sarc
For grid scale or industrial scale systems, there is no need to use volatile and expensive battery chemistries like LiOn. Use Sodium, or Iron, or whatever chemistry China will sell you cheaply enough and in volume to meet your needs. India is buying the solar panels and inverters from
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And, you can shell out a bunch extra for the tariffs.
Maybe they could make them in the US or whatever is near you.
If "company X" can't make it on US soil, maybe check out the US-made ones.
And... batteries: a battery system that can power Minneapolis would easily be the size of a nuclear plant, and would need tending and monitoring all the time.
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INDIA is not in the USA.
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Where did I say 'India'?
That's you trying to put words in my mouth... that's not welcome (not in the mood right now).
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Article being discussed is about INDIA.
(you are being an ass)