Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?
50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
91–100 of 164 posts
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#92There 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…
The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs. The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much…
I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#93just as a thought experiment, say you're an entrepreneur, how would you solve this problem? whether it AI, Data Centers, EVs...I'm seeing this problem more and more, we need more energy/power. I'm curious to see what others think are possible viable solutions.
If you're xAI, just build your own power plants:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#94This is like the movie Chinatown, where people were fighting over water, but now it's all about electricity. It sounds like Lake Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road and didn't care about electricity for so long that now they have to pay the piper. I think it's entire just that they have to bear the costs of their own electricity.
Chinatown was based on a real event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
“nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation” don’t take the quote out of context now. I would bet most coops have fairly concrete contracts on generation. This one is unique because they were using usage from a grid they have no standing in. Weak agreement, folks should have been figuring it out 20 years ago.
Humans are bad at solving problems before they need to be solved.
Not having a reliable power source sounds like a here and now problem.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs. The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much…
I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory.
Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#97There 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…
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.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory. Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no…
Haiti is in Anarchy. All sharing and mutual aid is shadowed by resource and power struggle. It is even worse than communism and fascism.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#99There 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…
The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs. The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much…
The last two sentences are drawing downvotes to an otherwise sensible comment.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#100Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?
Sure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is no way to build the power infrastructure in less time than it takes to build the additional data centers. It’s also not clear that there would be enough elasticity in the supply chain for building any of these generation methods that you even could strike ground on increasing us electricity production by the ~10% needed over the given time frame. The reality is, there is no way to build all the additional data centers without significant inflationary pressure, that will be borne by everyone except the well connected hyperscalers with excellent lobbyists unless average people actually realize that fact and force their dealing with the relevant municipalities and grid operators to be transparent.