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Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
41–50 of 308 posts
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it. * easy permitting * lots of space
North Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#43> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#44Far north cool places seem logical for data centers. Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You now have a PhD in your pocket. Is that not the miracle of the free market? King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it. Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
> King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.
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Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes let's shame corporations for spending money on and supporting things that need more support. /s
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding tha…
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
You now have a PhD in your pocket. Is that not the miracle of the free market? King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it. Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
King Richard II would look at those devices you're offering and have you flayed for heresy
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.
I dont know why people bring this up. China has nowhere near the highest per capita pollution levels.
Per-capita can be bad and so can overall scale. It wouldn't matter if Norway was the highest per-capita because like 5 people live there.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
New Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
Got an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#50Far north cool places seem logical for data centers. Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.