Humor & Hope⚡️🧡

Ireland gives 23% of its electricity to data centres. The US gives 5%. Europe 1.6%. China 1.1%. AI will push Ireland's share even higher, and AI is the hardest load for a wind-heavy grid to absorb. Inference (prompts!) answers users in real time and cannot wait for wind. Training runs thousands of chips in lockstep and loses progress if it stops. So the CRU now requires new data centres to bring their own gas engines or batteries. The flexibility sits in the backup plant, not the computing. AI data centres are built for 99.98% uptime. The best flexibility trial so far cut a quarter of one small cluster's load for three hours, with a day's notice. Bitcoin mining is computing that works the other way round. A miner can switch off within minutes when the grid is short, run when wind is being dispatched down, and lose no work in between. The grid only cares how a load behaves: when it draws power, how fast it can stop, and what it loses when it does. On those measures, a Bitcoin miner is more flexible than any data centre. Ireland is asking AI data centres to build gas engines. It should be connecting loads that can soak up the wind we already throw away. – at Galway, Ireland