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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

#161

Post by sfn42 »

Illotus wrote: post #118

This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price. This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long…

> they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price

If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply

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

#162

Post by mitxela »

throwaway473825 wrote: post #117
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.

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.

There's a simpler solution, stop letting the AI turn everything into paperclips and there won't be a shortage of paperclip material.

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

#163

Post by mitxela »

kennywinker wrote: post #126
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.

If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next? Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity. I think we will all soon…

Pretty much anyone sharing anything with a megarich person ends badly for the people who are not megarich.

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

#164

Post by cloudie78 »

Illotus wrote: post #129
pembrook wrote: post #55

Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force: - This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment - Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal - Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth…

Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.

You’d be surprised. Case in point Germany.

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

#165

Post by mitxela »

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…

The principle prevents governments from taking actual realities of any specific scenario into account, so it seams bad.

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

#166

Post by mitxela »

mcmcmc wrote: post #9
faitswulff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.

Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron tbh

The important thing is that they think it is.

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

#167

Post by jillesvangurp »

rob74 wrote: post #141
xvilka wrote: 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...

Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.

A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.

The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).

And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.

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

#168

Post by vasco »

linuxhansl wrote: post #128

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.

Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.

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

#170

Post by jryle70 »

Illotus wrote: post #134
jryle70 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer? "The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...

Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.

First of all, are you willing to wait to find out?

Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?

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