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

bbc.com

141–150 of 308 posts

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

#141
post #68

Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.

The plant mentioned in the article is by no means new, its two reactors began operation in 1977 and 1981, respectively (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant).

Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...

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

#142

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.

With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar. It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.

> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK

The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.

If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.

You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)

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

#143

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.

[dead]

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

#144

Will all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now? The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power. Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.

The trillon dollars question is more, will the current GPUs still be relevant in 3 years? 5? 10?

Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?

The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.

For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.

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

#146

The his will likely put a strain on neighbouring countries energy supply who used to buy that surplus before. Prices will go up even more.

Do you know the specific of which countries buying how much electricity from this plant, or just your wildly guess?

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar. It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.

> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in. If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there. You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power pl…

A Chinese nuke on the coast of Britain might be hard politically. Even if it's benign, you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.

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

#148

The his will likely put a strain on neighbouring countries energy supply who used to buy that surplus before. Prices will go up even more.

Do you know the specific of which countries buying how much electricity from this plant, or just your wildly guess?

Quick Duck search away: this power plant exports energy to Estonia where energy production is 4x less CO2 efficient. Literally exporting energy right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes

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

#149
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 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

The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.

For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.

The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.

Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.

So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.

But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.

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

#150

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 a…

1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science 2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton cat…

What is carbon based proton catching mechanism?
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