Curious what the collective brain capacity of Ireland actually is?
Start from the basics:
An average adult burns 2200–3000 kcal/day (men) or 1800–2400 kcal/day (women).
That’s roughly 100 W total body power (24-hour average).
The brain takes a flat ~20 W of that, regardless of sex or size.
Of those 20 W, only 1–5 W supports conscious reasoning and deliberate computation. The rest runs vision, balance, heartbeat, memory maintenance, etc.
Ireland’s population: ~5.3 million.
Upper estimate (5 W/person conscious): 5.3 M × 5 W = 26.5 MW nationwide.
Lower (1 W/person): 5.3 MW.
Realistic range for deliberate thinking: 5–27 MW total.
Now the machines:
Ireland’s ~90 hyperscale data centres pull ~1.3 GW (1,300 MW) for IT load alone (2024–2025 figures).
That’s 48–260× more electricity than the entire country’s conscious-thinking budget.
Efficiency comparison:
- Human conscious slice: 0.3–3 petaFLOPS from 5–27 MW → 0.01–0.6 GFLOPS/watt
- Irish data-centre fleet (2024–2025 GPUs): 2–6 exaFLOPS from 1.3 GW → 1.5–4.6 GFLOPS/watt
(FLOP = one floating-point operation, e.g. adding/multiplying decimals).
So the machines deliver 1000–20 000× the raw throughput and 100–500× better performance per watt than the deliberate-thinking portion of every Irish brain combined.
Rough numbers, wide ranges, but the gap is real and widening fast.
A few square kilometres of server halls now out-compute and out-efficiency the focused minds of 5.3 million people 😀
Educated up to Ph.D., I've fully progressed through the Dunning-Kruger rollercoaster into an expertise in energy, where I believe I teach it competently, and I now earn a decent living from that.
However, to my shame, my biggest mistake in life was avoiding the adult requirement to deeply understand what exactly money is, how it works, how we are taught nothing of value on it, and I'm still working to recover from that deficiency to this day.
I do however hope that in the future my kids wont need to understand money in the same way, as they'll just earn, spend and save in the hardest money there ever has been: bitcoin.
Green light given to 600ac solar farm in Kildare
Hi Brazil 👋👋😁
lol
Martin Luther monument, Worms, Germany, erected in 1868.
Twitter's so glitchy and keeps crashing. TG for nostr 😁
not tech savy but a bitcoiner with expertise in energy, and here for the freedom tech 😁
bitcoin is a store of prosperity
I'm a big fan of renewables but we cannot escape the reality that fossil fuel utilisation has been the single most successful way in which poverty has been crushed over the past century, even in the face of a population explosion (driven by energy prosperity).
Climate fanaticism has become a doom cult.
😁
Dr Niall Burke (of Bitcoin Network Ireland) has just published a new article.
"Title: Energy and the Irish electricity grid - a critical look towards 2030"
It’s an incredible piece of research and focused on the makeup of the Irish electrical grid & the nature of energy usage in general.
The research and article is intended to start the ball rolling with industry professionals, so he lightly introduces Bitcoin Mining near the end. Mining will be in the spotlight in the next edition or two.
https://bitcoinnetwork.ie/energy-and-the-irish-electricity-grid-a-critical-look-towards-2030/
thanks Conor 👋😃
Just different, no?
Maybe too late, and a little unorthodox, however the answer is 316 😁
21 + 10 > 1²+((2+1)*10)=31
22 + 20 > 2²+((2+2)*20)=84
23 + 30 > 3²+((2+3)*30)=159
24 + 50 > 4²+((2+4)*50)=316
What happens if the central bank tightening causes a gdp contraction, asset values crushed, major unemployment, but CPI remains stubbornly high as it's a supply issue, not a demand one. 🤔
