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'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

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Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#151

Post by leonidasrup »

no-name-here wrote: post #136
leonidasrup wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median build time for 1 GW nuclear power plant in Japan was 1721 days (4.7 years), first concrete to grid connection. https://x.com/GrantChalmers/status/1422472474487263233

1. The 2 reactors under construction [1 > CONSTRUCTION] are expected to take 20 years and >20 years respectively [2][3]. 2. Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told a parliamentary inquiry that "Japan's atomic safety rules are inferior to global standards and left the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster". There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese…

Japan learned from Fukishima nuclear accident, and many outside Japan forget that earthquake and tsunami had bigger impact in terms of material damage and cost of life then the nuclear accident.

Currently, economy of Japan (world biggest LNG importer) is hit hard by the events in Middle East. Because of this goverment starts maximum use of nuclear power policy.

https://www.nucnet.org/news/japan-council-adopts-policy-pack...

https://www.powermag.com/reactor-restart-rekindling-japans-n...

https://ieefa.org/resources/japans-diversified-lng-procureme...

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#152

Post by autoexec »

semiquaver wrote: post #78
MatekCopatek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true? Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...

golf courses use much more. But you don’t see massive resistance against new golf courses being planned. Farms use an order of magnitude more than either. You don’t see any demands whatsoever on agriculture to reduce water usage.

golf courses don't contaminate the water supply. Amazon was just forced to settled a lawsuit for 20 million because they took a community's water supply and made it undrinkable. Now they'll be paying to improve public water treatment infrastructure and dig deeper wells looking for cleaner water. When's the last time a golf course had to do that?

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#153

Post by muddi900 »

lordgilman wrote: post #21
kerhackernews wrote: post #2

Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.

I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777 In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations ar…

Well I don't have the data in front of me, but building power capacity leads to higher capacity payments, which are passed to all consumers. This has been an global industry standard for decades at far as I know.

The study's authors acknowledge it in the text.

> We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach.

This is a good primer on capacity payments: https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#154

Post by muddi900 »

lordgilman wrote: post #123
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>your evidence for increasing energy prices it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.

There's a global market for energy. What you see at the pump translates into electricity prices in a slow and grinding process. Remember that most of our electricity is not generated from renewable sources! Three years ago Russia invaded Ukraine, that pushed up fuel prices and electricity prices have followed. Now, we have the Iran war and that will push up electricity prices even more. The issue here is that you do…

The effects of Russian War had normalized by 2024. Or the paper would have shown an increase in Electricity tariffs.

And the effects of Iran War are not apparent.

I would recommend reading the actual paper where it acknowledges that it does not regard capacity payments.

https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#155

Post by muddi900 »

OroPla wrote: post #124
kerhackernews wrote: post #2

Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.

> When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike Why is that? Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live. I've been to a data center before due to wor…

Unless the German government is subsidizing or fixing the cost, that is not possible.

Infrastructure requires new capacity to be build, which requires capacity payments.

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#157

Post by no-name-here »

leonidasrup wrote: post #151
no-name-here wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The 2 reactors under construction [1 > CONSTRUCTION] are expected to take 20 years and >20 years respectively [2][3]. 2. Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told a parliamentary inquiry that "Japan's atomic safety rules are inferior to global standards and left the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster". There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese…

Japan learned from Fukishima nuclear accident, and many outside Japan forget that earthquake and tsunami had bigger impact in terms of material damage and cost of life then the nuclear accident. Currently, economy of Japan (world biggest LNG importer) is hit hard by the events in Middle East. Because of this goverment starts maximum use of nuclear power policy. https://www.nucnet.org/news/japan-council-adopts-policy-…

That may be true, but does not change that the only 2 JP reactors built since the 2000s are each taking 2+ decades each to complete (started in 2006 and 2010, and estimated to launch in ___ and 2030).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cma_Nuclear_Power_Plant

https://pris-stats.iaea.org/reactor/862

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#158

Post by muddi900 »

convolvatron wrote: post #19
peterldowns wrote: post #18

As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc. I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.

we can probably generalize and say that anything that's a culture war issue has become disconnected with useful actionable reality.

This is not a culture war issue. And there are people posting real data ITT.

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#159

Post by autoexec »

luxuryballs wrote: post #46
MatekCopatek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true? Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...

Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology…

In the case of one amazon data center the town already had nitrates in their water due to agricultural runoff, but at levels that weren't a problem. Amazon took in hundreds of millions of gallons of that water for cooling, which evaporated away some of the water, but left the nitrates. Then amazon dumped the concentrated nitrate 'waste water' at such high volumes that it was pushed so deep into ground that it reached the aquifer contaminating the source for some 45k people. Soon people's taps were delivering water contaminated at 10x the legal limit. People got sick. A bunch of parents lost their babies.

Amazon was forced to settle for 20 million which will pay for digging to find uncontaminated water sources deeper in the ground. They'll also pay for water treatments to help remove the excess nitrates.

Data centers don't have to bring in new toxins and pollutants. They can also make existing problems much much worse.

Re: 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

#160

Post by beej71 »

simondotau wrote: post #110
doublepg23 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Data centres are hardly new A commenter below quotes a 73% annual growth rate vs. 23% over the prior decade. You don't think that'd have an effect on people's perception?

Perception, absolutely yes.

And physical, objective reality, too.
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