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50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

fortune.com

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Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#131

Post by AngryData »

mikestew wrote: post #26
colechristensen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not really. Few years ago everybody was talking about the inadequacies of our aging electricity distribution infrastructure and how it was a shame it wasn't being fixed and the risks it entails. Now folks are wailing about the terrible AI come for our electricity and how awful the burden of the upgrades are. When the upgrades were for solar they were good, when upgrades are for AI they're bad. It's almost like pe…

It's almost like people just want to complain about anything associated with something they don't like regardless of relevance. I've noticed that we don't hear a lot about the EV boogyman taking down our electric grid now that AI has come to town.

I mean EVs are a change in power source, with an increase in energy efficiency even. AI is a brand new massive energy draw that isn't really reducing much elsewhere, and with a huge question mark over how much value it brings to the vast majority of the population.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#132

Post by scoofy »

therobots927 wrote: post #128
jmyeet wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government. This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.

*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich

No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks.

At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction.

We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#133

Post by cute_boi »

oooyay wrote: post #82

There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity: 1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers. 2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand. How can we imagine expanding a s…

How will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#134

Post by cute_boi »

therobots927 wrote: post #128
jmyeet wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government. This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.

*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich

And because poor people don’t have much money, the government decided it could borrow heavily from future generations and give it to rich ppl, making them even poorer.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#135

Post by AngryData »

WarmWash wrote: post #19
ageitgey wrote: post #7

It's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.

My read is People complain about AI in public, use it heavily in private, complain about datacenters in public, slam their fists about usage limits in private. In short, typical human behavior, want to have their cake and eat it too.

Are most people really using it a lot in private? As someone not working in programming, neither I nor 95% of my friends and family purposefully use AI for anything. And the few that do use it mostly use it as a wikipedia replacement.

Like if I needed some throw away generic art I might use it, so maybe a few times a year. And some searches will give me ai results to read before I can scroll to click wikipedia. But if that cost me anything, required a free login, or even had to scroll past a wiki or research link, I would just keep going to wikipedia.

Specific jobs benefit a lot from AI, but the general population? I still find it questionable if people will benefit or even want to use ai commonly.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#136

Post by AngryData »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #84
hannahstrawbrry wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that clear of a delineation especially in situations like this with utilities and governments wrestling over regulations. I believe that a lot of the folks who have been in the drivers seat and ignored the chips in the windshield that is the fabric of our society are happy to have something to direct blame towards no matter their affiliations or underlying beliefs about how resources ought to be ma…

i understand your point, however your "driver's seat" metaphor blurs the accountability of political representation IMO. Are voters in the "driver's seat"? Local governments? What I see as a valuable point is that federal governments with subsidies that "distort" markets for public goods and externality regulation, worsen the "tragedy of the commons". Explaining many things to a naive person, or a kid, boils down to…

I really disagree with the idea that goverment subsidies are either inherently good or bad overall.

Agricultural subsidies are often poorly distributed and managed from corruption and greed, but agricultural subsidies is also the only alternative to the granary system to prevent famine, and the granary system regularly failed and still resulted in famines. Countries with any decent agricultural subsidies however have essencially eliminated famine, despite the low 1-2% profit margins but 30% variations in yearly yield that farms have to weather.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#137

Post by mistrial9 »

nradov wrote: post #44
Glawen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ? Many country have public generation without any shortages.

And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.

Pacific Gas and Electric was built by engineers, who had a mandate to transfer huge amounts of power across very large and difficult terrain. When the management in the 1950s post-WWII society had this mandate, they executed amazing feats of engineering with very reliable outcomes. Much later, the very stable and profitable grid attracted a new kind of management, those interested in money. New kind of cost-cutting around maintenance, new kinds of labor relations involving non-union subcontractors, and a lot of advanced financial engineering involving using money to make money, took over from the previous internal culture. This was executed carefully and with a lot of control, and was successful, until the de-regulation of the electricity markets and then Enron.

Within a very short time frame, the previously iron-clad engineering of 1950s PG&E was defeated and failed, under new economic regulation. Read a couple of books about it, there are many.

What was discovered in the emergency proceedings that occurred in California during the California power grid crisis orchestrated by Enron and others, was that the upper management of PG&E had found legal loopholes in their very strict oversight, and were using dubiously declared shell companies to purchase power generating assets across the entire USA. Once those assets were purchased, and out of sight of regulators, more financial engineering took place. But the entire situation was discovered during the blackout hearings.

source: an attorney who worked for Sacramento directly involved in those hearings.

A "free market" is an attractive statement to some, politically, but we are very far down the road already for some of those experiments.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#138

Post by mistrial9 »

prepend wrote: post #5
pstuart wrote: post #2

Power should be a public utility, just like water and sewage.

In the US, power is a public utility. And regulated as such. The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location. Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.

this is a false statement. There are many kinds of business structures around power generating companies, across the USA.

Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

#140

Post by jjav »

scoofy wrote: post #132
therobots927 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich

No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks. At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their prop…

> fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks

The largest generation by population in the US is Millenials, second largest in Gen Z.

https://www.populationpyramids.org/generations/united-states

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