"In order to protect uptime of our glorious data centers, neighborhoods will begin experiencing rolling brownouts to reduce demand."
- Texas soon probably.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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So why is it the duty of our country to gather all electricity possible for the richest people to waste on burning out GPUs so they can lose money on free chatbots?
For the same reason housing should be a speculative investment, and healthcare services available only to the highest bidder.
Data centers need to bring their own power.
In a well regulated way that includes oversight, yes.
To a significant extent, they do, contracting for construction of generation and transmission (very often renewable), at least at the largest scale.
But, it's (mostly) all on the grid.
With demand like that, it's not like there isn't significant negotiation with the local power company, especially because they're frequently built a significant distance from existing large power infrastructure.
Heck, all the big 3 cloud providers signed deals for nuclear generation in the last few months. https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-data-center
Here's just one more article about these sorts of investments: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/google-has-a-20b-plan-to-build-data-centers-and-clean-power-together
Heck, all the big 3 cloud providers signed deals for nuclear generation in the last few months. https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-data-center
Subsidized by US taxpayers ... If data center flops, we pay hold the defaulted loan
If demand is there, microshit get cheap nuke energy and operator makes profit...
Where is the benefit to the taxpayer?
A few job and chatgpt flooding internet?!
Clown fucking world
The one state that refuses to connect to the interstate power grid and has Uber-like surge pricing on electricity? Yeah, I'm sure this won't result in regular people footing the bill for more billionaire profits.
Texas is a joke, but not a good one.
Uber-like surge pricing on electricity
We don't really: that story you heard from a few years ago was the only company that billed like that. The customers made a bet that the pricing averages through the day (lower at night, higher cost during the day) would average out in their favor over fixed-cost billing, and frankly, it did right up until it didn't.
They took a risk and got bit by, frankly, not understanding how the system works and basically ate the spikes.
Everyone else paid $0.09/kwh or so during that whole period, and the electric providers ate the cost because when you're averaging out spikes across millions of kwh, it won't lead to bankruptcy.
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Hmm harness the holy light of the sun?
One of the windiest, sunniest, emptiest places on earth and they want to waste water building reactors instead of renewables.
Hell, the geology means you can store energy in the ground using pressurized air.
What? I've grown up around people in the nuclear industry, and nothing I've ever learned about the function "wastes" water.
Some rambling on how I understand water to be used by reactors
You've got some amount of water in the "dirty loop" exposed to the fissile material, and in the spent fuel storage tanks. Contaminated water is stuck for that use, but that isn't "spending" the water. The water stays contained in those systems. They don't magically delete water volume and need to be refilled.
Outside of that you have your clean loop, which is bog standard "use heat to make steam, steam move turbine, moving turbine make electiricity, steam cools back to water". Again, there's no part of that which somehow makes the water not exist, or not be usable for other purposes.
Not saying you're wrong. Renewables are absolutely preferable, and Texas is prime real estate to maximize their effectiveness. I'm just hung up on the "waste water building reactors" part.
Guessing it was some sort of research about the building process maybe, that I've just missed?
How do you condense the steam back to water?
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So, exactly one uranium patch with a mk 3 miner stuffed full of slugs? Not including waste reprocessing or alternative recipes?
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