101–110 of 214 posts
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‘More power than an entire state’. Yep - take the Stratos data center project in Utah, the first phase of which is expected to consume 3GW and at full capacity is expected to be 9GW. By comparison, the entire state of Utah currently uses about 4GW.
3GW per what? Hour? Year? Minute?
Maybe the AI guys should use the AI first to develop fusion reactors they can then use to power the data centers. I honestly think they should pay fully for the infrastructure that provides power for them. It's not fair to have regular users pay for this.
If they have to pay for all the infrastructure themselves, the current financing model does not pencil out.
who is actually signing off on these agreements to build it, knowing the bill goes to the locals? seems openly shady
Varies on the project. As someone dealing with this locally, it varies how the project got approved. Almost all the approval is at local level, sometimes at state level. Feds getting involve is pretty rare. A) Sometimes, it's existing datacenter that repurposed from "normal" datacenter to AI datacenter with power consumption skyrocketing. There generally is not a ton of approval in this case or power company came by…
Virginia finally started saying folks using >25MW need to pay something more than the incredibly cheap rates they had been given. But generally data centers have often gottem marked as industrial, and it's been incredibly fantastically advantageous to do so.
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There is so much FUD going around SPECIFICALLY about data centers lately, that i’m dubious of anything i hear. it’s such a weird cultural phenomenon. Chronically online teenagers on Instagram making increasingly incorrect and absurd-sounding claims about water / energy usage. Comparatively barely anyone knew what a data center was 1-2 years ago.
They're chronically online because millennials basically shoved digital heroin into their face from birth
I can not imagine getting my children a straight access to internet or a phone or allowing them on social media until after 16.
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> I am curious how electricity is priced. Why are more and more utility providers charge based on ‘infrastructure cost’ or ‘fixed platform fee’ instead of usage fee? This is also happening in Australia. I wonder if it is a similar story in the US, or not. In Australia, rooftop solar and batteries have become so widespread, many properties have dramatically reduced their consumption of power from the grid. This poses…
Yea it's the same thing in California and will likely be a growing problem.
It seems that big money can overrule local government regulators at will. Here in Nevada, (Warran Buffet owned) NV Energy already has approval for a "Demand Charge" that will increase rates for everyone, and further reduce the ridiculously low amount of money that consumers get for selling their excess solar power back to the grid. The regulators didn't even resist, but there has now been so much backlash that they'r…
Even in Texas' "disconnected" grid, we're seeing the same mess. Oncor is currently staring down a mind-boggling 350 GW in data center requests - to put that in perspective, that's more than triple ERCOT's entire peak demand. They’re now pivoting to a $47 billion infrastructure spree just to keep up, and they’ve already pushed through a $560 million rate hike to help foot the bill. It’s the same story as Maryland: no…
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But datcenters have been around for decades now. That's what makes it so insane. Around me people are rioting about the construction approval of a new DC, it has all the insane FUD on social media flying around about it. ...and yet there are already 24 datacenters in the area, with the oldest ones running since the early '00s
Legacy data centers were not representing a multiple of existing electricity demand. It is only recently that DCs are being built hoping to consume hundreds of MWs, up to GWs. Elsewhere in the thread is the Utah DC which will consume more electricity than the entire state. Electricity demand growth in the country has been flat for the past twenty years. DCs are causing real strains to the grid which has not had to ac…
A single site consuming more than the entire electrical output of a nuclear core, considering the sheer size and scale of that reactor and its supporting infrastructure and workforce, is just boggling to my mind. It's literally billions of dollars just to feed that one site, if they're being accurate in their proposal.
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> Why are more and more utility providers charge based on ‘infrastructure cost’ or ‘fixed platform fee’ instead of usage fee? Because unlike many commodities, electricity, once generated, is hard to store, yet supply must match demand in real time. You need to meet peak demand, even if normal usage is not as high. If you pay purely for usage, that might not send enough price signals to ensure that you have the necess…
Hmmm, if you take a brick and mortar store, they have fixed costs to renovate and decorate the store, and they likely have capacity of the store that is not used during non-peak period as well. They charge for item sold, to cover for all costs they incurred for capacity of the store even during non-peak period as well. Is this an equivalent comparison? Don’t businesses generally roll in the fixed costs into their pri…
It seems that big money can overrule local government regulators at will. Here in Nevada, (Warran Buffet owned) NV Energy already has approval for a "Demand Charge" that will increase rates for everyone, and further reduce the ridiculously low amount of money that consumers get for selling their excess solar power back to the grid. The regulators didn't even resist, but there has now been so much backlash that they'r…
As a YIMBYist who can't afford a house where I live, I actively want big money to overrule local government regulators at will, because big money developers make their big money by building houses and local regulators are responding to the NIMBYist concerns of ordinary homeowners that result in insufficient housing getting built. A local government regulator fighting for the interests of local homeowners does not nec…