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County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

404media.co

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Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#161

Post by jollyllama »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #111
jonas21 wrote: post #29

This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on ele…

I'm surprised that the 404 Media article does not mention anything about this. At least, searching for the word "Clean" did not return any results.

Coal was made unprofitable by fiat and the plants were demolished (supply decreased).

Then, datacenters (demand increased, to put it mildly).

The explanation that one chooses for this is a function of one's other politics but the fact is, one has become a political rallying cry (opposition to demand increase) and the other (blame for supply decrease) has not, and this is the discussion we find ourselves in.

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#162

Post by kibwen »

Legend2440 wrote: post #136
kibwen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.

There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026. This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.

ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#164

Post by philipallstar »

jlarocco wrote: post #106
philipallstar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lobbyists are just doing their jobs well. It's the Senate that isn't. Blame the people who you pay taxes to purely to be impartial.

There's no reason not to blame lobbyists as well. A lobbyist saying "it's just business," doesn't excuse them for being assholes.

Their job is to represent their company. It's like calling a defence or prosecution lawyer an asshole for taking their client's side. It's the judge's job to be impartial, not theirs. And it's the regulator's job to be impartial, not the lobbyist's.

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#165

Post by iamtheworstdev »

hakunin wrote: post #28
scottndecker wrote: post #5

If everyone turned off their lights 100% of the time they left their workstation, they could power those additional data centers for about one second.

Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.

hahah that is so wonderfully malicious compliance

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#167

Post by jonas21 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #142
jonas21 wrote: post #29

This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on ele…

I appreciate that you linked a paper to support your opinion on this matter, though I read the summary PDF a whole lot differently than you did. I’m not sure I’d blame renewables anywhere near as much as you did. For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy deman…

Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#168

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

elgertam wrote: post #135
jonas21 wrote: post #29

This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on ele…

As a Virginian, this is good information to have. I see a lot of ludicrous objections to data centers here (the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems and regardless the humidity here isn't evaporating water). I've suspected that the energy regulations and the ruling party's close connection with Dominion Energy (the Governor recently attempted to fire the chair…

> the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems

Nb. Still many do not. Also, closed-loop systems use more electricity to operate, so it's not a cost-free solution.

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#169

Post by Havoc »

dmix wrote: post #160
Havoc wrote: post #146

It's kinda crazy that data centers aren't on some sort of ringfenced scheme. This whole just throw it on the grid and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane

> and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane These companies are investing heavily in new energy development? https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he... > Meta kicked off the year with a 200-megawatt solar deal with multinational electric utility Engie. The purchase went toward a solar farm near one of the company’s existing data centers in Texas. At the time of the dea…

Think you're missing the point a bit there.

All that generation capacity is great, but you need to get the electrons to the datacenter. And in most jurisdictions the transmission part of the grid is a shared cost. Mostly...there is technically some obligation to pay for upgrades but it doesn't really work.

e.g.

>Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills

It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.

[0] https://www.ucs.org/about/news/billions-dollars-unreported-d...

Re: County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

#170

Post by officeplant »

baggy_trough wrote: post #154
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no. It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer i…

Is there any reason to single out data centers, other than that they are the degrowther bugaboo of the year? Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.

>Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.

A factory produces tangible goods, and tends to get less hate because of that reality.

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