Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 308 posts

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

#211

Post by ZeroGravitas »

When Google was going hard on deploying renewables they stressed "additionality".

They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.

I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.

A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.

You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.

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

#212

Post by ZeroGravitas »

antupis wrote: post #204
throwaway473825 wrote: post #117

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.

Sweden main issue is that there is no transmission capacity between North and South, like now prices are 2x at south.

The government that keeps rejecting offshore wind for bogus security reasons is probably a bigger factor.

Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.

They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.

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

#213

Post by throwaway2037 » 

    > Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala
Wow, these are really far north. I checked on Google Maps: They are all about as far north as Oulu. It must get incredibly cold during the winter. Wiki tells me the region is at or below freezing for about six to seven months per year! I am curious how much cheaper is cooling in these locations compared to more temperate climates in continental Europe.

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

#214

Post by red75prime »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #201
red75prime wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 4…

> Extremely expensive. Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal. > it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation. Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more…

1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical.

Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.

China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...

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

#215

Post by pembrook »

kalleboo wrote: post #194
pembrook wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.

But they export a substantial amount to Estonia, who do

Coal usage is rapidly declining in Estonia too: https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/estonia/

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

#216

Post by lrasinen »

epistasis wrote: post #69
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.

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.

The new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.

Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.

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

#217

Post by amelius »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #213

> Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala Wow, these are really far north. I checked on Google Maps: They are all about as far north as Oulu. It must get incredibly cold during the winter. Wiki tells me the region is at or below freezing for about six to seven months per year! I am curious how much cheaper is cooling in these locations compared to more temperate climates in continental Europe.

You can now melt polar ice directly with your AI prompts.

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

#218

Post by Illotus »

pembrook wrote: post #210
Illotus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Finland’s electricity consumption is not projected to rise rapidly. Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu... Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear…

"Electricity consumption will increase from the current approximately 83 TWh to 103–123 TWh by 2030 and 104–159 TWh by 2035."

That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things.

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut...

In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear power.

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

#219

Post by hdgvhicv »

sfn42 wrote: post #161
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

What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2

Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.

The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.

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

#220

Post by Gud »

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.

You didn’t need “hindsight”. It was painfully stupid at the time.
Post reply on HN