201–210 of 266 posts
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So how much money is your homestead making?
Thirty healthy laying hens will produce about 21 to 24 eggs a day, which can gross you roughly $262 to $300 a month if sold at $5 per dozen. 10 bee hives, making 8,000-10,000 dollars a year profit. Supplement that with even a part time manual labor job, or a remote tech job.
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Are you looking at a textbook from the 1990s or something? I'm sure that was true at some point, but it hasn't been true for a long time.
It seems likely to happen again. Many US utility coal fired power plants are scheduled for retirement and will not be replaced with new coal facilities. [1] China is building lots of new coal generation, but also lots of new solar so coal use will be reduced during daylight (not the way a coal plant wants to run, but they'll adapt) Give it a few more years and data centers with onsite coal will look like a genius cos…
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> It is more cost efficient Depends. Getting a grid connection, and all the equipment to connect and step down with negotiating prices is not always fun. Especially as there is a limited amount of power on the grid. its not a free lunch and takes time. Its far easier to just slap shitty local generators on and live off the crappy noisy electricity they provide.
It's ironic when data center operators, who I'd expect to be experts on calculating complex cost/benefit scenarios, check for & arrange what's needed, sidestep better solutions because there's a bunch of requirements attached. Reads to me as going for a quick & dirty fix.
Attaching to the grid, at the powers desired, in the locations desired involves years of waiting beyond construction. Onsite genetation can be built within the overall construction timeline.
Maybe poor site selection, but I'm sure there's a cost optimization there. And my understanding is that there's not a whole lot of excess grid capacity around the country at the moment. Utilities are spending a lot of resources on changing the mix of generation and wildfire mitigation and don't have a lot of resources for adding generation capacity beyond what is immediately needed or increasing interconnection capacity.
This is different than the data center boom in the .com era; site selection was different, the grid situation was different, and the data centers being built were smaller loads.
> Clean Air Act (CAA) Acid Rain Program (ARP) does not apply to power generation facilities that are not connected to a public electricity grid, commonly referred to as “islanded” power generation facilities. This of course makes no sense whatever, as whether or not a power generator is connected to the grid has nothing to do with its environmental impact.
The effects of this will be reduced by the realization that these regulations can be changed in the future. No one will make a large capital investment if it could be shut down in a few years.
They will if they think they can bribe government to give them exemptions to the new rules or they think they can cash out and leave someone else holding the bag before that happens.
There are big benefits to having power generation grid connected. It is more reliable (due to many possible generation sources). It is more eco-friendly (solar in daytime, wind when the wind blows). It is more cost efficient (no need to overbuild for peak usage, generators don't sit idle when computers are off for maintenance). Yet our electricity grid has such a mass of regulations attached that people are choosing…
Those regulations are there for a reason though. I’ll never understand this logic. We have regulations so things are clean and safe. Yes, it would be easier to not have those regulations and just have dirty and unsafe electricity. But that’s the cost of having a business and also having a clean and safe society. Corporations love to externalize costs and that’s what’s happening here again.
There are lots of businesses and homes with onsite generation for various reasons, and most of them run for less than 100 hours per year. Not a lot of reason to add a reporting requirement and a strong emissions requirement.
Focusing on large scale generation was a good choice (that has worked for decades).
In an ideal world, congress would see this and adapt the rules to apply here as well. Probably an hour limit or a capacity limit or some combination would be a better discriminator than for public use.
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> There are already plenty of people that don't like the EPA. Rich assholes who are upset they can't throw their trash on the ground. Anyone else is parroting propaganda generated by said rich assholes.
I don't think that's true. There's probably a valid critique that they're doing their job badly.
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The AI companies look at something called the "endless government bureaucracy" and they think to themselves "fuck that, I'm not waiting 10 years for all that bullshit, I'll just use the loophole." I truly cannot comprehend any other reaction because I would rather have my fingernails ripped out than deal with years of government bureaucracy.
> I would rather have my fingernails ripped out than deal with years of government bureaucracy. These are just words. What matters are your actions. Your action is that you will cause other people to suffer pollution in order to enrich yourself. Why can't you stand up like a man and just say that that is what you want to do? And if you say "I am doing this to benefit humanity who need even more AI so badly" - Well th…
> Clean Air Act (CAA) Acid Rain Program (ARP) does not apply to power generation facilities that are not connected to a public electricity grid, commonly referred to as “islanded” power generation facilities. This of course makes no sense whatever, as whether or not a power generator is connected to the grid has nothing to do with its environmental impact.
We have state regulations that could solve this if they wanted to.
There are big benefits to having power generation grid connected. It is more reliable (due to many possible generation sources). It is more eco-friendly (solar in daytime, wind when the wind blows). It is more cost efficient (no need to overbuild for peak usage, generators don't sit idle when computers are off for maintenance). Yet our electricity grid has such a mass of regulations attached that people are choosing…
That's partly a result of having 50 states writing laws for themselves instead having all statues living under federal laws for everything. The line between what is acceptable to be regulated by federal laws and what is not is something I, not being a lawyer, have never studied. Power and water type utilities does feel like it might be something that could benefit from same rules/regulations every where, but basing r…
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The AI companies look at something called the "endless government bureaucracy" and they think to themselves "fuck that, I'm not waiting 10 years for all that bullshit, I'll just use the loophole." I truly cannot comprehend any other reaction because I would rather have my fingernails ripped out than deal with years of government bureaucracy.
Government beauracracy, which provides things like democratic oversight, environmental protection, enforcing power grid standards and interoperability, construction regulations, etc? Would you rather we just didn't have those things?