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Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

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Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#91

Post by joshspankit »

ETH_start wrote: post #84
typ wrote: post #82

I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively. Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.

Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries? I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before t…

AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.

I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#92

Post by ericmay »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #72
ericmay wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower. The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.

> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.

By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.

> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.

I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).

When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#93

Post by typ »

ETH_start wrote: post #84
typ wrote: post #82

I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively. Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.

Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries? I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before t…

I think it should apply to all industries. But for many (or most?) countries where power generation is privatized in the first place, this shouldn't be a problem that we need to fix. The trickier question might be about the grid, which in most cases is publicly funded.

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#95

Post by vlovich123 »

jryle70 wrote: post #28
vlovich123 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.

Where did you read this? What I read is that Fortum was considering extending to 2050 as early as 2018 and finalized those plans 2 years ago. I read nothing that indicates the survival of this plant is dependent on this Google deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#96

Post by vlovich123 »

happosai wrote: post #71
vlovich123 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...

If I consume all the clean energy your country can produce with my data center, explain how cap and trade blocks a country from using other sources - I don’t think anyone will like news stories of people freezing to death in the winter.

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#97

Post by vlovich123 »

parineum wrote: post #46
vlovich123 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bigg…

Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.

Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#98

Post by vlovich123 »

kccqzy wrote: post #52
vlovich123 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West. If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that e…

This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.

Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.

Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

#100

Post by bigstrat2003 »

mgiampapa wrote: post #99
gblargg wrote: post #80

The power plant is about 1000 MW BTW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Missed opportunity for it to be 1.21 GW. I'm sure they can add another reactor.

Great Scott!
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