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Power price rises are from data centres. Nothing but data centres.
(pivot-to-ai.com)
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Depends on which side of the Rockies you're on. Don't forget, only 80% of the USA is on the East side; the economics are totally different for the 20% on the West Coast. As your own source says:
Maybe you'd say that that's unfair; they don't have many datacenters and additionally California's economy operates on a different scale than most of the rest of the USA. Additionally, California's recent world-famous wildfires are partially caused by the utilities, who then have to pay to fix it up:
Oregon does have lots of datacenters, though, and our wildfire rates are within historical norms. What's driving electricity prices in Oregon? According to Oregon's state government:
Why is the underlying cost of power rising, though? They go on to explain indirectly:
They aren't worried about data centers; instead, they are spending rhetorical points on the most politically-inconvenient cause of rising costs, which is retiring old coal plants in the name of decarbonization. Don't get me wrong, I support switching to more sustainable and less harmful production, but I also think that my state government is being a little too quick to insist that it's not part of the cost of electricity.
Perhaps it is reasonable to say that power price rises on the East Coast are driven by datacenter buildouts. I would be interested in numbers that go back about two decades and study Virginia or the Carolinas specifically; this trend could go back to the beginning with AWS's
us-east-1in 2006.PS: Previously, on Awful, looking at Omaha, Nebraska specifically, I noted that there is a nearby abandoned nuclear power plant. There's a nearby abandoned nuclear campus here, too! Quoting from one of WP's articles on Satsop:
Whoops! Starting to notice a pattern here. It's well-known that the USA has a strong NIMBY anti-nuclear sentiment; perhaps cancelling nuclear plants half a century ago is part of why we have "rising power costs" today? We may never know~
I think you're glossing over how interconnected the grid is. California does not generate it's own power, it buys a significant amount from Oregon. So if data centers are being built in Oregon, that will impact costs in California. For instance, there's a DC link from the dams on the Columbia in eastern oregon that goes directly to southern California, and that area is now absolutely littered with data centers. Like a whole city of them right by the dams. They are there specifically for the cheap land and cheap hydro energy. And they use A LOT. Obviously I'm not packing any numbers here but I also wasnt born yesterday. Zero chance that all that load, there specifically, isn't impacting prices.
If you're not gonna do numbers then I won't either. The main thing you need to keep in mind is that electric power has transport costs; sending electricity to a distant place means losing power along the way. Thanks, thermodynamics~ Therefore, if one wants to consume a lot of cheap hydroelectric power then they must build near the corresponding dam. Power at The Dalles campus is cheap, but that same power over in Portland is less cheap. By the time it can get across the Californian border it will have reached a price floor which is higher than the one in Oregon; Oregon electricity physically has a premium attached to it when Californians buy it. Note that this affects other high-wattage industries too; famously, aluminium smelters are generally built near dams.
The other thing to keep in mind is that datacenters generally pay market rates for everything. The datacenters in The Dalles, as well as e.g. Meta's installation in Prineville, pay the same prices for electricity and water as the residents. They do often get massive discounts on the land in the form of various tax boons. The Dalles has all three necessary resources for cheap (land, water, electricity) and also it's located in a high-desert biome which makes air conditioning extremely efficient.
See also the Stubsack thread, concomitant, on Awful, where we discuss water usage. Near The Dalles, I estimate that the local cherry farmers probably use more water than Google. Germane to California, the reason that the Colorado River is drying up is farmers abusing inherited water rights, not datacenters. You might also be interested previously, on Awful, where we consider how long it takes to build a datacenter.
Hilarious dude. I've designed some of the things you mention. Data centers consume power, a shit ton of it. The idea that the demand is increasing but the price won't is bonkers to me. And that's before you consider all the labor going towards building new infrastructure for these things rather than repairing our existing grid. This trend is absolutely ravaging our industry. I'm being asked to design GREENFEILD fossil fuel gen stations to feed gigawatt scale data centers. How is that not insane? We as a society are burning our planet for LLMs