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New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

reuters.com

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Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#161

Post by coryrc »

unethical_ban wrote: post #149
PaywallBuster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection > The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with a 220 MW DC tie near Oklaunion, and a 600 MW DC tie near Monticello, and is tied to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico with a 300 MW DC tie near McAllen, and a 100 MW VFT tie near Laredo.[29] There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas

Including in-flight projects, that totals several GW. Texas demand today is pretty low for noon - clouds and rain in much of the state, and we're at 70 GW.

Building interconnects costs money. What's the ROI on building more?

Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.

Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?

Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.

Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#162

Post by pembrook »

text0404 wrote: post #155
pembrook wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to confront you with reality, but if you're in the US, 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed. So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists. Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I hav…

Thanks for telling me how I think. If we're doing that, let me tell you how you think: you don't care about people and want to pursue profit over human life, and will go to any length to defend a private corporation over the people who have to live with the negative impacts of its poor decisions. Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact stu…

Yes, and as with everything humans do as a mob, the pendulum tends to swing way too far in whatever direction the memes are trending.

We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."

If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you articulate exactly what about Datacenters is uniquely bad in comparison to anything else humans build (factories, houses, warehouses, malls, golf courses, pools, etc) that you believe needs to be stopped?

Would you be happier if we de-centralized data-centers as hardware in everyones homes and re-classified their resource usage as residential (basically where things are headed if we keep down this path)?

Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? Are we afraid water used in a data center is somehow destroyed and can no longer enter the water cycle?

I'm struggling to understand here.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#163

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

pembrook wrote: post #152
text0404 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about? If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of ana…

Hate to confront you with reality, but if you're in the US, 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed. So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists. Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I hav…

> 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed.

Yeah and that's how we got a messed up environment.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#164

Post by beAbU »

whartung wrote: post #97

How are (can) datacenters be taxed? Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory. The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements. But how does that work with a datacenter? If I pay $5 for an EC2 instan…

You tax the revenue that the entity that owns the datacentre generates, like any other business.

Am I missing something?

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#165

Post by 7jjjjjjj »

pj_mukh wrote: post #17
afavour wrote: post #3

It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted. We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.

Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year. Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoveris…

Good. AI is an evil technology. These data centers shouldn't be built anywhere ever.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#166

Post by text0404 »

pembrook wrote: post #162
text0404 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for telling me how I think. If we're doing that, let me tell you how you think: you don't care about people and want to pursue profit over human life, and will go to any length to defend a private corporation over the people who have to live with the negative impacts of its poor decisions. Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact stu…

Yes, and as with everything humans do as a mob, the pendulum tends to swing way too far in whatever direction the memes are trending. We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things." If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you…

> We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything

These kinds of generalizations are so ridiculous as to be completely useless. You keep saying that we're blocking "everything"... what? Nobody is claiming that we need to stop building (in your words) "literally everything". This is called a "straw man".

> But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."

Yes, and environmental impact studies move us away from the "mass cancer and death" while still allowing "things" to be built.

> what about Datacenters is uniquely bad

- Excessive water consumption which is especially bad in areas that experience droughts

- Excessive electricity consumption which strains power grids which have not had time to adapt (also causing wildly increased bills for local residents)

- Continuous operation which exacerbates the above issues (compared to "factories, malls, golf courses, pools, etc" which largely operate for only a portion of the day)

- More land use, making the nearby land uninhabitable due to noise as well as other environmental impacts for local wildlife

> Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? I'm struggling to understand.

I'm struggling to understand where on earth you got this? It seems like you're just inventing arguments to debate against. I never said anything like this.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#167

Post by QuantumFunnel »

beAbU wrote: post #164
whartung wrote: post #97

How are (can) datacenters be taxed? Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory. The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements. But how does that work with a datacenter? If I pay $5 for an EC2 instan…

You tax the revenue that the entity that owns the datacentre generates, like any other business. Am I missing something?

The entities that own the data centers (the mag7) famously do not pay much in taxes due to their extensive use of tax havens and loopholes

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#168

Post by overfeed »

dlubarov wrote: post #98
pj_mukh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing" Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state. Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new For…

Yeah - there seem to be a lot of pretenses which don't actually justify banning a particular industry. If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades. It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things…

> If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies

Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible for addressing it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being legally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#169

Post by ianm218 »

overfeed wrote: post #159
ianm218 wrote: post #117

I live in NYC and think the politics in the city and state have been a disaster for middle class people and see this as a continuation of that. The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we p…

> I see this as a continuation of that You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.

There is huge amounts of construction costs on these things and electrical work as well. The general rule is 50% or more of construction in NYC goes toward labor, so that drives up wages for local talent.

Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.

There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.

Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.

And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.

Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.

[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/micron-delay-construct...

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#170

Post by giantg2 »

giantg2 wrote: post #56
aynyc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change. Solar farm on the other hand might go up tho.

Replacing natural lands with solar farms is one of the stupidest things I've seen. They're doing that on some state parks near me.

Why are people disagreeing? I find it wild that people actually condone putting a solar farm on a state park. That land is supposed to be mostly natural and for public use. If the park wants to power itself using solar, then put it on the roofs and cover the parking areas with panels. Don't contract out a forest/field to be developed as a solar farm.

Maybe I'm jaded, but it seems like city people want to exploit the natural lands to produce their electricity. True NIMBY. It's hard to claim to care about the environment when being willing to destroy it when alternatives exist.

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