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When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

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Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#61

Post by leonidasrup »

shit_game wrote: post #22
serial_dev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, video surveillance is less computationally expensive than LLMs, and much of the work can be done at the edge devices. So don’t worry, there is already probably a nationwide video surveillance system out there, even without Kevin

Regardless of the computational needs to facilitate mass surveilance, there are inescapable storage needs precipitated by surveilance. Governments want to retain data because its value in the future is unknown in the present. This is the entire premise behind the Harvest Now Decrypt Later[0] principle that fuels much of the previous surveilance actions taken by governments. But HNDL is speculative; it either hedges o…

Harvest Now Decrypt Later principle holds very well for intelligence work, the harvested information could be useful for very long time.

You can see this in the long time intervals specified for Declassification of classified documents.

"Executive Order 13526 establishes the mechanisms for most declassifications, within the laws passed by Congress.[1] The originating agency assigns a declassification date, by default 25 years. After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States

"Decrypt Later" should generalized to "Use Later", many recordings are useful without decryption, just from the metadata you can establish who, when communicated. Identification of relations between persons, building of social graphs, is the basic of intelligence work. Much of this relationship analysis can be done just from metadata.

One example of such analysis is the NSA Co-Travel Analytics

"CO-TRAVELER does not simply collect location information. It creates a portrait of travel times and people who crossed paths, revealing our physical interactions and relationships. The cell site information goes beyond email and phone calls and ordinary telephony data, allowing the U.S. government to know who we are with in-person and where. This is information that would be impossible to collect using traditional law enforcement methods. "

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/meet-co-traveler-nsas-...

https://www.eff.org/files/2013/12/11/20131210-wapo-cotravele...

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#62

Post by dang »

avazhi wrote: post #43

The irony of this article that was originally posted completely free on The Conversation being stuck behind a Fortune paywall is a bit much. https://theconversation.com/when-can-a-power-company-take-yo...

Ok, we've switched to that link from https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu... above. Thanks!

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#63

Post by dang »

usrusr wrote: post #4

Misleading title: they are using eminent domain to seize land for power lines to data centers. (emphasis mine) This is still quite debatable, but so much less so than the implied accusation that they would somehow sell out their privileges as subcontractors for the data centers themselves.

(Submitted title was "Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers" but we've since changed the URL - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975572)

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#64

Post by oliwarner »

jaredklewis wrote: post #29
oliwarner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be used for essential infrastructure for public use . Power lines to a private DC seem to miss on both counts.

We run power lines to everything else: houses, offices, commercial buildings, factories, and so on. Any particular reasons we should have a special exception where we don't run them to data centers? Where I live pretty much every piece of land has some sort of easement on it: for water, power, or something else. Seems weird to me if we can insist that now everything needs to be frozen and no more infrastructure upgra…

> We run power lines to everything else

But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is overwhelming public benefit. I can't just say I want to build a factory and force access and utilities across my neighbours without their permission or an extraordinary process to prove that I'm going to provide massive local benefit (or national security).

If my factory wants to compete on an already contested resource (water, power), I should have to go further to show that I'm going to be a net benefit in my area.

As things stand, datacentres provide very an extraordinarily low employment density. They don't produce food. They consume an extraordinary amount of energy making it more expensive. And they money they generate concentrates wealth to billionaires. If you want your powerlines prove you're going to be beneficial. Start with a solar+batterty farm. You can surge from the network, and sell on slow days. Guarantee free power and network for locals. Integrate heat pumps to heat local homes in winter.

I've wandered off the topic of forcing permanent access to others land into broader planning, but it's all related.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#65

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Animats wrote: post #19

This could work out. We need, for example, ultra-high-voltage DC lines from the US wind belt to areas with real loads. The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. Plenty of wind, no big power users. But nobody has been able to build lines west to California or east to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where the loads are. This is held up by land acquisition, not technology. China has so…

Does that actually make any sense when there is also plenty of wind across the ocean, which is >1000 miles closer to the coastal cities where people live?

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#66

Post by cucumber3732842 »

oliwarner wrote: post #64
jaredklewis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run power lines to everything else: houses, offices, commercial buildings, factories, and so on. Any particular reasons we should have a special exception where we don't run them to data centers? Where I live pretty much every piece of land has some sort of easement on it: for water, power, or something else. Seems weird to me if we can insist that now everything needs to be frozen and no more infrastructure upgra…

> We run power lines to everything else But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is overwhelming public benefit. I can't just say I want to build a factory and force access and utilities across my neighbours without their permission or an extraordinary process to prove that I'm going to provide massive local benefit (or nation…

>But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is

Ever since Kelo v New London we do.

> overwhelming public benefit.

This is just an appeal to authority that is predicated on the broad willful ignorance that the mean reader here will have toward how this particular sausage is made.

Read the proceedings. Half the time it's bullshit like "gravel pit or office park development wants an easement through undeveloped/agricultural/industrial parcels XYZ to build a road because that means they can exit closer to the highway which saves a bunch of money. They'd pay the land owner because at the end of the day it's money either way, they just think they can convince the state to stomp the land owner cheaper than they can pay off the land owner.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#67

Post by AnthonyMouse »

throwaway667555 wrote: post #38
SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, strictly speaking, it's /more/ debatable. Using eminent domain to seize land for the data centre itself gets a much more generally negative reaction, while seizing it for the purpose of infrastructure to supply said datacentre - and therefore, at least arguably, alleviate strain on the infrastructure used by everyone else - has more nuance and more room for debate.

Data centers increase strain on the grid, so their supply lines do too.

Data centers are a fixed load with on-site backup generators that can be used to shed load when the grid is stressed. Grids actually like that sort of thing. It lets them use more cheap renewables.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#68

Post by api »

mschuster91 wrote: post #51
9dev wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why not build data centers where the energy is?

Latency.

Doesn’t matter for training or most AI use cases. We are talking tens of ms latency here.

I’m gonna guess availability of employees may matter more.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#70

Post by sigmoid10 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #65
Animats wrote: post #19

This could work out. We need, for example, ultra-high-voltage DC lines from the US wind belt to areas with real loads. The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. Plenty of wind, no big power users. But nobody has been able to build lines west to California or east to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where the loads are. This is held up by land acquisition, not technology. China has so…

Does that actually make any sense when there is also plenty of wind across the ocean, which is >1000 miles closer to the coastal cities where people live?

Offshore wind power costs ~3 times more per MWh than on land. You can still do it if you're really low on space, but if you have tons of empty space anyway, it may very well be cheaper to simply build longer power lines.
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