Its best for all these AI companies to invest in nuclear fission, fusion, dark energy, etc.
Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
111–120 of 308 posts
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#112> 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.
Up to 50%
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#1131. 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.
I don't choose to use all the AIs sites keep shoving at me.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think government regulations to put a cap on utility profits is a better long term move. Force excess to be directed into green energy expansion.
> government regulations to put a cap on utility profits I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?
Governments are extremely bad at calculating how much something "should" cost. Profits are revenue minus expenses. "Expenses" are revenue to someone else. Whenever you try to cap "profit" of some entity that isn't actually subject to competitive pressure, the next thing that happens is that the people running it start colluding or taking kickbacks from any of the people whose revenue constitutes their expenses.
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#115> 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.
Google already does this at their existing Hamina data center. The building is also a repurposed paper mill.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#116Shouldn'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 catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#117Good 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.
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.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#118This 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 as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#119Good 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.
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.
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Re: Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
#1201. 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.
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).