Lynne Stevens
How much have you thought about Artificial Intelligence when you do a ChatGPT search?
AI is with us for the long haul. The next time you do your ChatGPT search, know that it costs roughly 10 times more dollars to produce your results than Google pays for your Google search.
Why? It requires significantly more computing capacity as it combs the web to give you that comprehensive answer in one place – rather than the Google search where you may need to go to multiple sites to get the information requested. It saves time and gives pretty comprehensive answers, if you form the right questions.
So what’s the problem?
Most of us in Graham County get our electricity from Duke Energy. AI data centers use massive amounts of energy over and above the needs of the communities and cities they are near. Our closest center is under construction in the sleepy town of Marble, about 15 or so miles away. It is massive, estimated to be 250,000 square feet. The electric demand is of major proportions and able to supply the needs of a population of roughly 30,000.
Wow! That is a lot of power for one profit making business in a small town. Utility providers are notoriously behind in updating the aging transmission lines needed to supply electricity to our homes. These data centers add another level of critical infrastructure that will be provided as the demand rises when the center is fully operational.
The data center is providing the demand of 30,000 homes, which begs the question: who pays? The last increase in our Duke bills was to pay for upgrades in transmission lines, infrastructure and use more renewable fuel mixes going into the grid. It also reduced the cost of electric to industrial users as our rates went up. Most people do not like to pay someone else’s, bills when they have the ability to do it.
The customers being solicited by Core Logic and Core Scientific are big tech companies like Meta, NVIDIA, Amazon and robotic companies. Core Logic should charge an amount to offset the impact of their electric use. These data companies are very reluctant to share their use of electric and water resources to lawmakers, and the lack of information makes it more difficult to plan ahead to reduce the impact on Graham and surrounding counties.
Commonly, utilities have residential rates for us, commercial rates for a business and industrial rates for industrial production. The needs of a data center far exceed that of an industrial factory. Let’s have a data center rate that reflects the costs to the surrounding communities like ours.
We are asked to sign up to curtail usage at certain times for a rate break. The same incentive can be provided to the data center. Let them do what they do best and innovate to use far less resources to run that Marble data center.
Will all county officials affected work together to make this system fair?
Lynne Stevens writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. She can be reached via email, geminga@mailfence.com.