Its a serious disease in this country. Everything is lit - every shelf in the store, every sign above businesses that are closed, lights everywhere. Entire buildings lit up with decorative lights. Offices lit all night for no reason. Its psychotic. Meanwhile the grid is being overwhelmed.

Last edited Fri Jul 3, 2026, 08:48 PM - Edit history (1)

is that most of that lighting is LED, which uses much LESS energy and provides more bang for the buck.

except maybe in the refrigerator cases!

Some kind of lighting fever took over sometime in the 2000s probably to match the electric online vibe, everything aglow

So...

has no lights on shelves and the frozen section freezer lights only turn on when a person is next to that segment of freezer space.
The smaller market that is closer to me leaves the freezer lights on but don't have more lights than they did decades ago. Lights are not the problem with electric use, blackouts and brownouts happen during the day when electricity use is the highest.

watt hours are watt hours, every single one counts at this point, all down the line. Thats why social fads like extreme lighting are so bad - everybody has to prove themselves and it becomes a major load on the sytem. Its also the sheer arrogance of lighting each bottle of wine.

I wonder if that makes it easier to keep it cold enough.

With the sunshine outside, I can see well enough.

Keeping my fingers crossed that the power will hold up. It's horrible we are competing with data centers for resources.

the influx of data centers and escalating Climate Change because of our reluctance to embrace sustainable power by our gooberment.

Instead of all these trillions we waste on meaningless wars, how about we invest in improving our grid, cleaning our air and water, and embrace 21st century solutions to our problems.

Data centers are an f-ing nightmare

To protect the American people from the countless harms, a national moratorium until the problems can be addressed should be a priority for electeds and candidates.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/from-capacity-to-chaos-how-ai-data-centers-challenge-the-grid

over every inch of their roofs and parking areas. These would provide power for the servers and electricity for cooling systems.

Any excess power they generate could be channeled back to the utility grid during peak cooling times.

Covering their parking lots and roofs with solar panels would offset a few MINUTES of their daily consumption. They're truly energy hogs of the highest order.

The amount of power required is utterly mind-boggling -- 50 to 100 megawatts and more -- which is what the essential problem is.

It would take over 1000 acres of panels. The roof wouldn't offer much space because they need to be covered with cooling equipment.

There are discussions of combined wind / solar / battery storage:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/How-to-use-data-center-wind-turbines-for-sustainable-energy

The thing is, it is insane for this nation to be pushing forward with these monsters until approaches that don't cause the incredible harms are designed and regulated. Really and truly insane given that it is all for a technology that is costing billions for failure after failure to provide ROI. Talk about an f-ing money pit. Absolute lunacy.

July 2025
MIT Study finds that 95% of AI initiatives at companies fail to turn a profit
https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf

May 2026
81% of Enterprise Technology Leaders Report Production Failures from AI-Generated Code, New Research Shows
https://www.cloudbees.com/newsroom/enterprise-technology-leaders-report-production-failures-from-ai-generated-code

Not exactly worth the war crimes, American lives lost, killing and destroying the lives of the Iranians he claimed to want to "free," and hundreds of billions of dollars, but...

Maybe they should use AI to solve this problem before building more centers.
I imagine the first part of the solution would be to eliminate Republicans that are blocking renewable sustainable energy.

Yes, that seriously needs to happen.

The proliferation of these energy hog data centers should not be allowed to continue willy-nilly. It's a disaster waiting to happen, and it's one that is completely foreseeable. We need some adults in the freaking room to put ths brakes on before the worst happens.

drink lots of water and stay hydrated...........

You know, the career public servants, who watch the nitty-gritty details of your daily lives, making life bearable, like keeping the lights on, keeping water and sewage at your place flowing, etc?

What do they think of data centres?

If those go unrestricted, we are heading for a dystopian future.

Sitting in your cold living room in winter, with only a candle for light, while the data center next door is humming and bathed in lights everywhere.
And in summer? No AC, just cold showers every 30 minutes and sitting in front of a fan.

Welcome to the future!
You may not like it.

They are the problem!

(*a metric for uptime) Yup the Republicans have really nailed the values thing.

while he orders his minions to search for dead bodies
to DRAG into his LOSER 'national fair'....

Although those are my initials I have no involvement with PJM.

(wink)

Foggy and 55 here tonight.

n/t

With more power plants. What is really needed are cooling systems that are more efficient. Cooling using less energy. It's only going to be worse in years to come, should be working on ways to alleviate the problem.

Private equity (PE) firms are aggressively acquiring regulated public utilities, a trend heavily driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) data center boom and the stable, guaranteed rates of return these essential services offer. When a PE firm takes a utility private, it introduces an aggressive, profit-maximizing corporate structure to a captive customer base.

The standard PE timeline relies on holding an asset for a few years while cutting operational overhead to maximize short-term cash flow, then flipping it for a profit. This can lead to severe underinvestment in long-term safety, maintenance, and upkeep, increasing the risk of infrastructure failures.

When a PE firm takes a utility private, it introduces an aggressive, profit-maximizing corporate structure to a captive customer base. PE firms frequently fund acquisitions by saddling the target utility company with immense amounts of debt. Captive ratepayers end up with the bill, paying higher rates just to service the Wall Street debt used to buy the utility in the first place.

Secretary Chris Wright @SecretaryWright
"I'm thrilled to report that after 35 years, on July 4th, we will end the subsidies for new wind and solar projects, thanks President Trump’s Working Families Tax Cut."
1:05 PM · Jul 2, 2026