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Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

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Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#171

Post by jeffbee »

mindslight wrote: post #163
jeffbee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your model of the infrastructure as a perpetually sustaining asset is not correct. These assets must be continually refreshed and improved or their value disappears. The emergence of the data center as a point load has merely coincided with the existing grid infrastructure falling to pieces. The places with the highest marginal energy prices such as California are the places with the fewest data centers. Large consum…

You would seem to be saying that grid infrastructure needs continual refreshing and improvement to continue carrying the same amount of power? That strikes me as a tall claim, given what I already know about electricity (electronic design and house wiring). I am open to entertaining it, but you've got to provide a reference or at least just describe the mechanism. This is talking about the capital assets themselves,…

Yes, exactly. It's a bunch of metal that stands out in the weather all the time.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#172

Post by gottorf »

CPLX wrote: post #168
gottorf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue…

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive. They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the d…

> The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question

I agree, and I do not assume that these people are stupid sheep. However, having said that:

> Data centers absolutely are loud

Compared to undeveloped land, sure. Compared to other uses of industrially-zoned land? Most likely not. I've been to a lot of datacenters. They're not very loud from the outside.

> They consume large quantities of water

I honestly do not understand why they don't just build closed-loop systems, or geothermal where they have a closed loop with the ground acting as the heat sink. Open-loop systems where they consume water just to evaporate sounds stupid to me. But I don't know how common that is.

Politicians showing off in front of the camera with a dirty jug of water, of course, is just grandstanding and has no real relation to datacenters other than they made construction happen.

> huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else

This isn't just true of datacenters. They're building an aluminum plant near me that will consume on the order of 100+ MW, which is comparable to a fairly large DC. Any other large industrial plant would consume a lot of electricity, but nobody's blaming them for utility capital investment needs.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#173

Post by juliusdavies »

tptacek wrote: post #170
CPLX wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive. They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the d…

They do not in fact consume large quantities of water, and "they consume lots of water" is a pretty good shibboleth for "this isn't going to be a productive discussion". Golf courses in the US consume more than 8x the water of all data centers combined. Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.

It would make more sense to complain about plants consuming sunlight than it does to complain about data centers consuming water.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#174

Post by jeffbee »

dqv wrote: post #153
jeffbee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.

Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that. You're saying the data center has a small foo…

I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#175

Post by mindslight »

jeffbee wrote: post #171
mindslight wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would seem to be saying that grid infrastructure needs continual refreshing and improvement to continue carrying the same amount of power? That strikes me as a tall claim, given what I already know about electricity (electronic design and house wiring). I am open to entertaining it, but you've got to provide a reference or at least just describe the mechanism. This is talking about the capital assets themselves,…

Yes, exactly. It's a bunch of metal that stands out in the weather all the time.

To be convinced, I'd need to see actual data showing that the costs for replacing existing assets are what's actually spiking.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#176

Post by LeFantome »

nixgeek wrote: post #33
LeFantome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each. So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individ…

AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA. I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon opt…

If so, us-east-1 may be over 1000 acres of floor space. For comparison, Disney World is 600 acres and Central Park is about 850.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#177

Post by dqv »

jeffbee wrote: post #174
dqv wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that. You're saying the data center has a small foo…

I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had. https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...

That's not how stormwater management works. Land elevation, adjacent land, the profile of the land (how much groundwater is there?) on which the structure is built (and probably even more that I'm not considering) all affect how big of a retention/detention pond is needed. And these requirements change over time when it is discovered that older sites' management techniques failed to adequately manage stormwater. The Walmart site was built at least two decades ago, no? That's enough time for stormwater management guidance and policy to change.

Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0]

The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention.

If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with.

[0]: https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeC...

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#178

Post by simianwords »

y1n0 wrote: post #154
JuniperMesos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes have relatively little to do with how good schools are, that is dominated by the quality of the students who live close enough to attend the schools.

I can't believe you blame students for bad schools.

They are somewhat right but it’s irrelevant. Good students can be brought in because there’s enough tax money.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#179

Post by insane_dreamer »

nixgeek wrote: post #44
insane_dreamer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a great site" -- you frame it like Microsoft was working for the public good

Building a datacenter typically employs thousands of people in the trades, often for hundreds or a thousand plus hours, per person, from the start of a big build to the campus being complete. It’s quite literally millions of billable hours in trade labor. Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling an…

temporary jobs during construction that don't benefit the town in the long run

the tax rebates can extend for decades

> these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well

these datacenters haven't been around long enough to know that; these are _not_ your grandma's datacenters -- they are much more resource-hungry since they do substantially more processing

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#180

Post by KptMarchewa »

Scroll_Swe wrote: post #38
jeffbee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.

I kind of agree but I live in a city in Sweden. Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?

Sweden has a bunch of data centers. Doubt any of them consume coal based electricity though.
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