Note that no such deal is based on solar or wind power alone.
Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
181–190 of 308 posts
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
The US has effective run this on itself for the past few years. The Chinese look fairly benign in comparison.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#183Good 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.
France recently announced for €93B of data center contracts to be deployed in the next few years.
The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#184Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.
I don't know, I always feel these companies (including governments) are selling this kind of contracts too cheap.
They are not used to the aggressiveness of FAANG negotiators, they treat them as friends.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#185Earlier 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.
Yeah please send some electricity to Germany it's so horrible here :'(
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#186The his will likely put a strain on neighbouring countries energy supply who used to buy that surplus before. Prices will go up even more.
I think that’s a good thing, they could also build a nuclear reactor or two or three. Wouldn’t hurt.
A nuclear reactor is takes years and years to build, this is again Europe selling it's sovereignty to big tech for some short term cash.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suppl…
You'd be surprised how many European power plants (not only with Russian/Soviet designs) relied and still rely on fuel from Russia (https://www.voiceofemirates.com/en/politics/reports-and-inve...).
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#188Good 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.
Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because: 1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a pol…
So Germany is a net exporter of energy and is somehow causing checks notes ALL of Europe's high energy prices?
Weird
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#1891. Humans use AI 2. AI requires power^ 3. AI companies purchase/produce power 4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI) ^Same for water This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." > Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants. Yeah, it's because of…
> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost compe…
> You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.