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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

#101

Post by trhway »

luqtas wrote: post #87
epistasis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.

there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture

For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.

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

#102

Post by Lerc »

mcmcmc wrote: post #63
zdragnar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that. Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothin…

> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing. I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true

If everything the AI companies are saying is true, we'll all be living in a utopia while simultaneously annihilated by a rogue AI.

It will be pretty, but rather quiet.

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

#103

Post by trhway »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #8
sien wrote: post #5

Good on Google. Finland has low emissions from electricity : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly 71 gC02eq/kwH France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.

At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility. A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.

>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.

yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.

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

#104

Post by chardz »

wxw wrote: post #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.

Relatively uncongested…for now

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

#105

Post by joshdavham »

It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.

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

#106

Post by SoftTalker »

epistasis wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #2

Far north cool places seem logical for data centers. Not Texas and Arizona. Why?

Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company. When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company cru…

This is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

Lerc wrote: post #102
mcmcmc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing. I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true

If everything the AI companies are saying is true, we'll all be living in a utopia while simultaneously annihilated by a rogue AI. It will be pretty, but rather quiet.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nomel wrote: post #51
whall6 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations

There's also a power generation water cost though! Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year. I don't know if that's significant.

It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.

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

#109

Post by childintime »

Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?

Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.

But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.

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

#110

Post by Oh-Kay_Labs »

trhway wrote: post #103
marginalia_nu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility. A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.

>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry. yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.

Well, we don't have fjords or mountains in Sweden, otherwise a great plan.
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