Internet-free days

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Our solar panels have the structure of potato gratin on this cold morning. I don't know what nature intends with this, but it looks like the work of an ice artist. Meanwhile, the sun is stretching; it woke up ten minutes ago, I see its red glow reflecting in the windows of houses a street away. Soon its rays will melt the solar panels (well, the ice on them) and then production can begin.

Recently I fitted the smart meter with a box that sends the current measurements to an app on my phone. This allows me to see (almost) in real time how much electricity is being used in our home. We are already practicing hard to use as much of our own solar power as possible: “Can the washing machine be turned on yet?”, is a question that rings through the house often. We then look at the current yield, but also at the short-term sun forecast. Because if the washing machine is turned on now and a thick dark cloud moves in front of the sun in five minutes, you still pay the bill. You do have to keep in mind that appliances like that do not use a lot of power continuously, but mainly when heating the water. With a bit of luck, I can break even on a sunny winter day. That bodes well for the summer.

So, for the energy management of our house, things look rosy. However, if you zoom out to the level of the nation, there’s a much more pessimistic picture: we are in a real energy crisis. There are reports of companies that cannot be connected to the electricity grid. Not because insufficient electricity is being generated, but because the network is congested. Strangely enough, this phenomenon has two contradictory causes: on the one hand, the high demand for electricity, for example because companies are switching from natural gas to electricity, and on the other hand, the high supply due to all those solar panels and wind farms. Think of it as an overcrowded highway: if there is a traffic jam on it, you cannot get on or off.

Our data center has a sturdy emergency power supply. If the mains power fails, batteries seamlessly take over, long enough for the diesel generator to get up to speed. As long as there is diesel, the data center will continue to operate. Grid operators predict that the power will fail more often in the future. So we are lucky to have our own energy building. But of course this facility is not intended as a remedy for grid congestion. In the trinity of information security – confidentiality, integrity, availability – this is a measure to ensure the availability of the service, but it was never intended as a power plant for permanent use.

Data centers are notorious for their power consumption. Pounding computer chips consume power and produce heat, and have to be cooled down because they don't like to get too hot. Even though most computer equipment in a data center has no moving parts, you need earplugs when you go inside. Every device has a fan, and then of course there is a large installation to dissipate all that blown-out heat. Especially the mega data centers of the tech giants, such as Google and Apple, are known for their enormous energy bills. We no longer store our photos on our phones, but in the cloud; in those data centers, that is. And all those millions of photos of the entire world population consume a lot of energy.

Artificial intelligence is a fairly new energy guzzler. With some embarrassment I asked ChatGPT the following question: “How much energy did answering this question cost?” Because it was a simple question, it estimated the consumption between 0.1 and 1 Wh (watt hour). Because it also understands* that I have no idea what that means, it gave a few examples: with 0.1 Wh you can light a 10 W LED lamp for 36 seconds, and 1 Wh is enough for 1 minute of YouTube on your phone. If the questions get more complicated than mine, the energy consumption increases tenfold, ChatGPT estimates. For a difficult question you have to give up ten minutes of YouTube if you want to keep it somewhat energy neutral.

I still remember the car-free Sundays from my youth. Because of the oil crisis, the streets were quiet on ten Sundays. Just imagine that, because of the grid congestion, you cannot use the internet at certain times, for example because the nearby industrial estate needs that power more urgently than you do. Or that the grid operator encourages you at certain times to turn on the washing machine, the tumble dryer and the dishwasher all at the same time because otherwise they cannot dissipate the generated energy. Or imagine that they take care of it themselves remotely.

The solar panels have now thawed and are supplying only a modest amount of electricity. The washing machine is running, so we are still buying electricity at the moment. We are not yet at the point where we can fully adjust our household to the weather, and it won’t be possible in the Netherlands. Not as long as there are no efficient, affordable batteries.

*) ChatGPT and its colleagues don't “understand” anything they say, but you get my drift.

 

And in the big bad world…

 

• the Chinese AI DeepSeek was poorly secured.
• DeepSeek is under fire from European privacy authorities. [DUTCH]
• you could fool ChatGPT with a historical perspective.
• AI literacy is now mandatory if you develop AI or use it in your organization. [DUTCH]
• Insider threat also plays a role in museums.
• This article calculates how serious the ransomware problem was last year.
• a police officer wrote a dissertation about ransomware. [DUTCH, with link to English dissertation]
• only a small percentage of all European privacy complaints lead to a fine.
• once again an international police coalition was successful.