[HN Gopher] Does that use a lot of energy?
___________________________________________________________________
Does that use a lot of energy?
Author : speckx
Score : 134 points
Date : 2026-03-04 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hannahritchie.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (hannahritchie.github.io)
| quotemstr wrote:
| I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of
| magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to
| anyone who cares about energy.
|
| That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy
| independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price
| is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a
| set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to
| people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy
| than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to
| lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think
| you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and
| you can't either. Nobody can.
|
| If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and
| not the market because prices don't internalize certain
| externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities
| accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-
| hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.
|
| As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call
| the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to
| you as to anyone else. If you propose policy X and you can't get
| X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the
| system is broken.
|
| Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost
| we must account. We should have a prior that costs _are_
| accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal
| must involve _numbers_ , not emotional appeals. What _specific_
| costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what
| specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting
| mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X"
| is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted
| externality.
|
| That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe
| otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with
| fungible commodities like kWh.
| spencerflem wrote:
| How am I as an individual supposed to get externalities priced
| in?
|
| And given that right now they are clearly not, what's your plan
| until then?
| alphazard wrote:
| Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they
| affect you directly?
| spencerflem wrote:
| Climate change and pollution, and yes they do.
| srdjanr wrote:
| Sure, by your own argument, you should somehow increase the
| price of people telling other people what to avoid spending
| money on
| mltvc wrote:
| How do you propose to convince people to get those
| externalities accounted without emotions? How do you convince
| people of the value of externalities that are far away in place
| or time (but not less real)?
| burkaman wrote:
| > As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we
| call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as
| open to you as to anyone else.
|
| Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify
| these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the
| rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this
| stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also
| say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if
| the price is wrong.
|
| > any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals
|
| Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website
| that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
| sixo wrote:
| Your dismissal of moral concerns is not convincing.
|
| Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was
| generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You
| would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than
| energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your
| effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming
| energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you
| determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a
| moral question.
|
| Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of
| the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had
| any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything
| short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse
| to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being
| is not a utility monster, but something very different, and
| moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates
| the world, they should not be dismissed.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Of course I'd use energy differently if it cost more. If I
| had to generate energy by pedaling a bike, I'd consider it
| costly indeed. So what? Energy _doesn 't_ cost as much as it
| would if I had to manually generate it, and who are you to
| say allocation decisions made under that regiment are good
| and ones made under ours are bad?
|
| Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it
| were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Doesn't this argument hinge on equivocating between two
| different definitions of aversion, though? I'm averse to
| bananas, but that doesn't mean I think it's immoral to eat
| them. The moral dimension kicks in if somebody else had to
| ride that stationary bike for you, because then you'd be
| wasting their time on frivolities.
| bena wrote:
| My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"
|
| And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with
| linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make
| their estimates.
|
| Either these companies need to build these massive data centers
| that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't
| use a lot of electricity.
|
| You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity,
| then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that
| capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a
| query to these LLMs?
| quotemstr wrote:
| > You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of
| electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?
|
| A small number times a large number is often a large number.
| Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case,
| electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the
| degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies
| buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even
| subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.
|
| If all these people and companies are making electricity
| allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own
| money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary
| transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
| spencerflem wrote:
| It's new capacity!
|
| They're not even saying they shouldn't do it or that they're
| not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both
| "these things do not use a lot of power" and "we need to
| build more power plants to handle these things"
| jeffbee wrote:
| It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly
| ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need
| new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by
| general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small,
| grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more
| efficient cloud services.
|
| Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by
| the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century
| not building generators and that negligence has finally
| caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency
| efforts on the part of the IT sector.
|
| https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth
| spencerflem wrote:
| If so, why do they need to build new power plants for it?
| burnished wrote:
| Yeah you can, though to be fair its referred to as jevons
| paradox because it is counterintuitive.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I'm not saying it's inefficient. I'm saying cloud
| computing uses a lot of power.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Useful work is debatable here, a lot of people just talk to
| the thing or use it instead of searching the internet.
|
| The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it
| is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning
| through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram,
| storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and
| then subsidise the users to use it.
|
| I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite
| them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money
| to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and
| burn when the investors get impatient.
| IanCal wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand where the issue is here - something
| can use a small amount of energy per use but a large amount in
| aggregate because of lots of use.
| raincole wrote:
| War is Peace,
|
| Freedom is Slavery,
|
| Facts are Whitewashing.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| Hannah Ritchie is a quite well reputed writer and data
| scientist squarely in the climate field. She's written two
| books on climate and I found the one I read ( _Not The End of
| the World_ ) was quite good and data-driven.
|
| https://hannahritchie.com/
|
| You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is
| biased towards LLM than that.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| Much like when people discuss whether these companies are
| profitable: training costs don't count.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You have set up a false conflict. The data centers are "huge"
| and they also consume about the same power as 1 airplane. These
| things are both true.
|
| It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a
| misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that
| really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution
| warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard
| the fact that:
|
| - first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally
| do without them, so it's still a net pollution
|
| - they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just
| browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such
| equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes
| analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page,
| etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer
| negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
| empath75 wrote:
| LLM calls are getting cheaper every day.
| AgentME wrote:
| LLMs don't use a lot of electricity per user. Why should the
| fact that the energy usage happens in data centers instead of
| each user's house be an important moral factor?
| burnished wrote:
| What about it is whitewashing? This seems like it would be a
| great resource if you wanted to contextualize the argument
| you're gesturing at.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also
| publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's
| in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's _Sustainable
| Energy Without the Hot Air_.
|
| This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too,
| especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy
| usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on
| HN before).
|
| https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Who pays for their research?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Ritchie
|
| You would have to figure out where the grant money comes from
| for their department, but doesn't scream compromised to me.
| philipkglass wrote:
| She's employed by Our World In Data. She is also a published
| author of printed books. Her substack does not have paid
| subscriptions enabled (or at least it did not as of last
| summer; see this post [1]). Our World In Data is funded by
| donations:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/funding
|
| [1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-
| substack
| keybored wrote:
| What narratives and framings does a blog post or
| "visualization tool" serve? What does their overall work?
| What's their recurring ideological slant?
|
| Could be wholesome and altruistic. Or it could be something
| else.
|
| Someone can be an honest ideologue (useful idiot) without
| being directly funded by someone shady.
| 0x53 wrote:
| And wrote a great book: Not the End of the World
| sien wrote:
| Yep. It's a very good book and well worth a read.
|
| It's interesting to see how upset people are on Goodreads
| about that book:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624737-not-the-end-
| of...
|
| The top reviews are mostly people angry with Ritchie for not
| being a catastrophist.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Wow, putting everything in the same units is really informative.
| Running my 450 watt gpu for a day is approximately equivalent to
| driving a car 10 miles.
| creeble wrote:
| I doubt your 450w gpu runs at that wattage 24 hrs, unless
| you're mining with it.
|
| My (admittedly old) gpu+CPU idles around 50-75w.
| janalsncm wrote:
| During training it's running at around 410. But yeah idling
| at 450 would be pretty crazy.
| medi8r wrote:
| Glad it has AI. AI has nothing on cars. Save a car trip a week
| even if electric is way more than 10k queries.
| nikcub wrote:
| chatgpt use should be in the default set since energy use of ai
| is so often in the news now - and more often in social media
| nightski wrote:
| 1 chatgpt query is a little misleading though. Let's see an 8
| hour full bore claude code agent session. Or maybe running 3
| agents for several hours a day.
| fwip wrote:
| It also doesn't include the amortized cost of training the
| models, as far as I can tell. I believe I heard that training
| the models took more energy than total queries against that
| model, but I could be mistaken.
| kimixa wrote:
| I believe training currently costs significantly more than
| inference to all the current vendors, so I'd be surprised
| if it doesn't also use more power.
|
| And by the look of it, that'll be the norm pretty much
| forever - unless something fundamental about how models can
| be trained/updated, an "older" model loses value as it's
| knowledge becomes out of date, even if we no longer get
| improvements from other sources or techniques.
|
| But other things likely change based on "lifetimes" and
| usage patterns too - e.g. a large battery for an electric
| car may have a higher upfront energy cost in manufacturing
| than a small ICE + fuel tank, but presumably there's a
| mileage that the improved per-mile efficiency overcomes
| that, and then continues to gain with each additional mile.
| petercooper wrote:
| Or even a 5 minute shower. About 2500 queries.
| jwilliams wrote:
| It was genuinely a surprise to see how much relative energy
| petrol cars use (and shame on me - I'm an electrical engineer). I
| mean I think I knew it intuitively, but this simple chart blew my
| mind.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| When one gets in the weeds on EVs or ICE cars two things become
| shockingly clear: internal combustion is hilariously
| inefficient YET gasoline is hilariously energy dense. Most
| people's intuition is wrong on both of these points but then
| they cancel each other out.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The tyranny if the rocket/horse equation: You need energy to
| carry the energy you need to move.
|
| There's a good reason so many sprawling civilizations of the
| past involve leveraging wind-power for transport.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Train locomotives have used diesel powered generators that
| then powers electric motors. Would this be less efficient
| than battery powered EVs? Or better asked, what would be the
| most efficient use of gasoline?
| jfengel wrote:
| When it comes to the environment the most efficient use is
| to leave it in the ground.
|
| Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't
| need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades.
| They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.
|
| Battery power would be better, because you can build even
| larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to
| haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is
| too large, so far. That is changing.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Isn't it better for trains to just to draw from the
| electric grid?
| csours wrote:
| Do you have to run new electric transmission lines? Will
| you have to maintain those power lines?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| We once dammed basically every river in the nation
| because it was in vogue at the time.
|
| Maybe building overhead power lines for rail
| infrastructure should be the "hip" thing right now
| instead of AI. Maybe building oodles of solar power farms
| and batteries should be "hip"
|
| We built electrical infrastructure to the most remote
| residences just because we could and because it was an
| investment in our people. We directly funded our massive
| and formerly world class rail network because we could,
| and because it would pay off. We built a world class road
| network half as a make-work project, and it still pays
| dividends. We purchased Alaska, with no obvious reason.
| We built a space program to have slightly better nuclear
| weapons, and it's part of the reason we were so dominant
| in computer chips for so long.
|
| We have spent something like 40 trillion dollars over the
| past 25 years, and almost none of it on anything of real
| value. More than a little of that debt is just handouts
| to already rich people.
|
| We can build new electric transmission lines and I'm so
| tired of things that we _absolutely 100% can do if we
| just demand it be done_ being somehow treated as a
| problem. America can afford infrastructure.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Nissan makes a range of these under the e-power branding:
|
| https://www.nissan-
| global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| In the auto industry these are usually called a series
| hybrid and there have been a handful. The Chevy Volt
| (though it had the ability to directly connect the engine
| to the wheels at highway speeds), and the BMW i3 and i8,
| the Fisker Karma/Karma Revero. The new Ram Ramcharger
| truck and the second gen Ford Lightning will also be
| series hybrids.
|
| It's a really good drivetrain that was unfortunately made
| untenable for a long time by a combination of regulation
| and market forces.
| csours wrote:
| > Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs?
|
| Measured in terms of mass * distance, trains with steel
| wheels will beat anything with rubber pneumatic tires.
|
| Part of the magic of hybrid trains is that you can have
| multiple generation units that can be turned on or off as
| needed.
|
| ---
|
| Efficiency is just one consideration for a power plant.
|
| Historically, reliability has been more important than
| efficiency, especially for industrial applications like
| locomotives. In other words, locomotives are probably not
| as efficient as they could be. For instance, you could use
| a lower viscosity engine oil for lubrication, but that
| would reduce reliability as engines fail due to friction.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| That's a complicated question that unfortunately has quite
| a bit of "well it depends" in the answer. I worked in the
| auto industry for a long time - both doing engine
| development and EVs - so my opinions here are well-informed
| but not world expert.
|
| From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat
| economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones
| that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load
| and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they
| rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can
| use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment
| systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with
| scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain
| works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can
| build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a
| single constant speed and load. But most of the
| advancements in internal combustion engines over the last
| 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the
| conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve
| timing and lift are probably the most underrated and
| overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from
| having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well
| over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable
| intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid
| systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions
| here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-
| levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research
| engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal
| efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful
| work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid
| 30s.
|
| So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more
| locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope.
| In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a
| parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go
| to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more
| emissions and product features. You can get the full torque
| and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in
| a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load
| spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak
| load.
|
| From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density
| of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to
| use it in applications for which you just can't use full
| electrification. Planes are currently the best example of
| this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit
| massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven
| load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a
| gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency
| losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example
| boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just
| doesn't get much.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Exactly. The environmental/social burden isn't just the
| energy used in the raw physical form, but the cost to acquire
| and make it useable.
|
| The problem with gas is not that burning it doesn't maximally
| capture all energy, but that there are externalities to doing
| so.
| tl2do wrote:
| In Japan, my country, this looks a bit different. A lot of
| electricity still comes from oil- and gas-fired plants. The
| mechanics differ (gas turbines vs. car engines), but in both
| cases we're still relying on combustion. I suppose some
| countries have the same issue.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Yes, similarly in the US: I think the largest portion of the
| energy in the US is produced with gas fired power plants.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| One hour of Claude code-- well, I'd guess it would be comparable
| to an hour of driving an electric car. How to know?
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| OP says one query uses 0.3 Wh. Driving an electric car for 10
| miles = 3,000 Wh which is roughly 10,000 Wh per hour.
|
| I'm not sure how many queries is equivalent to an hour of
| Claude code use, but maybe 5 seconds, which means an hour of
| continuous use = 216 Wh, or ~50x less than an electric car.
|
| OP has a longer article about LLM energy usage:
| https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
| rsolva wrote:
| It is not only about raw power consumption. Comparing driving
| an electric car with using AI only in kW hides a major point:
| Hyperscale datacenters are massively centralised, which brings
| it's own problems; a lot of energy is used for cooling, and
| water consumptions is enormous. Charging electric cars at home
| is distributed and does not suffer from the same problems as
| the centralised hyperscalers do. Also, running AI models at
| home is not much different than a gaming session :)
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is an incredible sequence of assertions, every single
| one of which is very incorrect.
|
| "A lot of energy used for cooling": hyperscale data centers
| use the least cooling per unit of compute capacity, 2-3x less
| than small data centers and 10-100x less than a home
| computer.
|
| "Water consumption is enormous": America withdraws roughly
| 300 billion gallons of fresh water daily, of which IT loads
| are expected to grow to 35-50 billion gallons _annually_ by
| 2028. Data center water demands are less than a rounding
| error.
|
| "distributed and does not suffer from the same problems":
| technically correct I guess but distributed consumption has
| its own problems that are arguably more severe than
| centralized power consumption.
| loganp wrote:
| This is neat. I think I'm actually more interested in avg ChatGPT
| query than median single query so that I can enter a large query
| # and be confident in the associated energy cost for that larger
| number (e.g. what's the energy cost for 1,000 chat gpt queries)
| nikcub wrote:
| I can't find a github or email for Hannah - if you're reading
| this i'd like to add Australian energy price data via Open
| Electricity[0] to the data (reach out via my profile)
|
| [0] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/
| philipkglass wrote:
| Her github is here: https://github.com/HannahRitchie
| nikcub wrote:
| thank you!
| Sharlin wrote:
| For reference it would be good to have per-passenger numbers for
| "sitting on a diesel bus", "sitting on an electric bus", "sitting
| on a tram", "sitting on a commuter train" as well.
| 20after4 wrote:
| The marginal cost of one extra passenger is going to be very
| nearly zero. The vast majority of the cost is just moving the
| bus / train / plane, and the overhead / inefficiencies in the
| system. I've seen somewhere the numbers for one passenger on
| trains and planes but I can't remember where that was. Just
| know it is a very very small amount for the added weight of one
| more passenger.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I
| imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only
| need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK.
|
| Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and
| understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to
| take enormous energy for it to work at all.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think specifically it's comparing gas heating vs AC. Heat
| pump heating would probably do better. In other words, it takes
| less energy to move heat inside/outside than to "create" it
|
| (With caveats like heat pumps are much less effective in
| extreme cold)
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah without knowing the climate, temperature delta and
| insulation these values don't really mean much.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| What's startling to me is how many comments in this thread just
| take the provided values as gospel without asking questions that
| methodology answers either in the abstract or barely describes.
| Also going giving a cost for "United States" is absolutely
| nonsense - electricity, gas and gasoline prices vary widely
| across the country. There is no one cost for each, and the
| average is worthless for this kind of thing (especially since the
| average of each - gas vs. electric vs. gasoline cost - are
| independent variables that have no relation to each other on a
| region by region basis).
|
| Why are people so gullible?
| djhworld wrote:
| I think stuff like this really crystalises how people
| misunderstand how much energy stuff uses.
|
| My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the
| house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even
| though it would barely make a dent in their bill.
|
| Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at
| a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I turn LED lights off because of the difference in operational
| life, and I don't like changing bulbs. M GE bulbs say they have
| a rated lifetime of 13 years......at 3 hours of usage per day.
| So if they don't get turned off, then that 3 hours can very
| easily become 12, and now you are at a rated lifetime of ~4
| years instead.
| skybrian wrote:
| I see it has a ChatGPT median query, but for those of us using
| coding agents this isn't so relevant.
|
| Here's a post that makes an estimate:
|
| https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
|
| > So, if I wanted to analogize the energy usage of my use of
| coding agents, it's something like running the dishwasher an
| extra time each day, keeping an extra refrigerator, or skipping
| one drive to the grocery store in favor of biking there. To me,
| this is very different than, in Benjamin Todd's words, "a
| terrible reason to avoid" this level of AI use. These are the
| sorts of things that would make me think twice.
| mikepavone wrote:
| I'm not sure it's even a particularly relevant comparison to an
| hour of use of various other electronic devices. I'm sure the
| median user is running a lot fewer queries than a Claude Code
| power-user, but I would guess it's still more than one in a
| typical session.
| scarmig wrote:
| I end up shrugging. For a Claude Code power user, today, a
| day's use uses less electricity than a morning commute in an
| electric car. To say nothing of the costs to keep your
| workstation running, your building heated or cooled, etc. Not
| quite a rounding error, but a relatively minor component of
| overall usage.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I attached a generator with some supercaps and an inverter to a
| stationary bicycle a few years ago, and even though I mostly use
| it as a way to feel less guilty watching Youtube videos, it does
| give me a quite literal feel for some of the items on the lower
| end of the scale.
|
| - Anything even even halfway approaching a toaster or something
| with a heater in it is essentially impossible (yes, I know about
| that one video).
|
| - A vacuum cleaner can be run for about 30 seconds every couple
| minutes.
|
| - LED lights are really good, you can charge up the caps for a
| minute and then get some minutes of light without pedaling.
|
| - Maybe I could keep pace with a fridge, but not for a whole day.
|
| - I can do a 3D printer with the heated bed turned off, but you
| have to keep pedaling for the entire print duration, so you
| probably wouldn't want to do a 4 hour print. I have a benchy made
| on 100% human power.
|
| - A laptop and a medium sized floor fan is what I typically run
| most days.
|
| - A modern laptop alone, with the battery removed and playing a
| video is "too easy", as is a few LED bulbs or a CFL. An
| incandescent isn't difficult but why would you?
|
| - A cellphone you could probably run in your sleep
|
| Also gives a good perspective on how much better power plants are
| at this than me. All I've made in 4 years could be made by my
| local one in about 10 seconds, and cost a few dollars.
| nomel wrote:
| Where I am at least, people using less power because power
| because power need to profit more, is _wild_.
|
| They literally had record profits the last few years, rather
| than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a
| _global_ endeavor, not some local for profit business with
| complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.
|
| Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most
| anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with _LEVEL 2_ using
| city provided charges, during the day, it 's more expensive
| than gas.
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Amazing stuff, have you written up a blog post? I could see a
| video being a fun format for this as well. Might help people
| develop the intuition for watts/power consumption in a
| different way
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Kind of, it's in bits and pieces here:
|
| https://hackaday.io/project/191731-practical-power-cycling
|
| and is also a few years out of date.
|
| I did do a video back then going against the infamous
| "bicycle toaster challenge" video (in which I determined it
| was probably less real than they made it out to be). I'm
| nowhere as fit as those guys, so in my attempt I was only
| able to turn a bagel into a dry crouton over the course of an
| hour.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcNXp86BJ-o
| 1-more wrote:
| Once I did a little bike training and looking at my power
| curve, I was incredibly impressed by how cheap energy is. 100W
| is an all day number, 200W less so, 300W is exactly 20 minutes
| when I do an FTP test. 400W is 4x Tour de France winner Tadej
| Pogacar for an hour and he's a mutant. 1 horsepower is under a
| minute iirc, definitely under 2. 1kW is maybe 10 seconds. So I
| could keep my laptop and phone charged probably indefinitely as
| long as I have food, but not a ton more than that.
|
| https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Any sense what the efficiency ratio was for your setup?
| jolmg wrote:
| > Desktop computer - 1 hour of use - 50 Wh
|
| That seems low...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Doesn't show the comparative energy waste of bitcoin?
|
| This source[0] says
|
| > One Bitcoin now requires 854,400 kilowatt-hours of electricity
| to produce. For comparison, the average U.S. home consumes about
| 10,500 kWh per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information
| Administration, April 2025, meaning that mining a single Bitcoin
| in 2026 uses as much electricity as 81.37 years of residential
| energy use.
|
| [0] https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/us/bitcoin-mining/
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The presentation is nice, but some of the conversions are
| questionable.
|
| For instance: The cost section, wherein 1kWh in the US is figured
| as having a cost of 9.7 cents.
|
| In reality, it's not that way at all. Unless we're fortunate
| enough to live in an area where we can walk over to the
| neighborhood generating station and carry home buckets of
| freshly-baked electricity to use at home, then we must also pay
| for delivery.
|
| On average, in 2025, electricity was 17.3 cents per kiloWatt-hour
| -- delivered -- for residential customers in the US.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
| philipkglass wrote:
| I looked at the electric car example for the United States. It
| has 3 kilowatt hours priced at $0.51, 17 cents per kilowatt
| hour, which seems about right. The "petrol car" example at the
| top of the chart isn't powered by electricity so its cost
| number is not directly comparable to the things that consume
| electricity.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| On the energy tab: It says that driving a petrol car 10 miles
| uses 10,000 Watt-hours, eg 10 kWh.
|
| On the costs tab, for the United States: It says that this
| has a cost of $0.97.
|
| 97 cents / 10kWh = 9.7 cents per kWh
|
| (I didn't look further than that. Perhaps I should have.)
|
| ---
|
| edit: I now see a note at the very bottom stating that it is
| using an assumed "$0.17 for electricity".
|
| $0.17 per kWh is plenty close enough for rough figurin', so
| I'd like to take this opportunity to retract my previous
| complaint.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Yes, for the petrol car it's showing primary energy from
| petrol (gasoline).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Ga
| s...
|
| Assuming 33.41 kWh/gallon it takes about 0.3 gallons to get
| 10 kWh, which costs $0.97 at a pump price of $3.23 per
| gallon.
| RobinL wrote:
| One thing missing but important to understand is the energy
| embodied in buying 'stuff'. At a very rough approximation, the
| cost of stuff, especially consumer goods manufactured cheaply, is
| quite a high percentage energy.
|
| When you look at people's energy usage, quite a lot of it ends up
| being the embodied energy in the stuff they buy. For quite a lot
| of people, it's probably the largest category of energy
| consumption. I once had a very rough go at calculating this here:
| https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/
| csours wrote:
| One may look at aluminum as a solid form of energy. In fact,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| I don't think the problem Is how many joules of energy are used.
| But the cost/burdnen to produce them. The costs and forms for
| each of these examples is very different making their energy use
| incomparabale.
| rtcode_io wrote:
| Aa Digital ID is getting forced on the public, it is dangerous,
| almost traitorous to demand/suggest ordinary citizens need to
| care about energy efficiency to the point of giving up their
| freedoms/conveniences!
|
| Focus your thinking on solving/promoting energy production
| instead!
| davidw wrote:
| A bicycle continues to be the most efficient means of
| transportation:
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/davidho.bsky.social/post/3mga7uhxnd...
|
| Even an eBike is way, way more efficient than a gas-powered car,
| and causes orders of magnitude less wear and tear on the road.
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