Summary of this article^*

1. Chinese solar panel manufacturing loses money.
2. AI data centres with “behind-the-meter” (a.k.a., “off-grid,” “on-site,” “their own”) electric power generation produce artificial content at the exa-FLOPS scale, all of it with synchronous power generation, which is almost always gas-fired.
3. AI data centres with “behind-the-meter” (a.k.a., “off-grid,” “on-site,” “their own”) electric power generation produce artificial content at the exa-FLOPS scale, none of it solar- or wind-powered.
4. AI data centres with with “behind-the-meter” (a.k.a., “off-grid,” “on-site,” “their own”) electric power generation have clean air problems because of the preceding two points.
5. Generating artificial content at the exa-FLOPS scale requires baseload electric power supply, at the hundred-megawatt scale with a very exacting availability standard, i.e., with “blips” in electric power availability for the data centre processors that cumulatively, over an 8,760-hour year, amount to less than 4 seconds.
6. If it were true that the cost of wind and solar power is dropping, the previous five points would be false.

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