At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.
It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.
That would imply that increased demand strictly decreases prices, no?
Given fixed supply, no dice.
To expand supply, one would use incrementally more expensive mechanisms to generate the incremental supply. (Because, why wouldn't you already be generating via the cheapest supply?) Either all existing customers would pay the same and the new customer would pay the higher rate OR smear the incremental costs across everyone. Prices might hold steady under the former choice but they would not decrease.
Is the idea that the new customer would unlock some better generation capabilities through capital investment? Something not already incentivized by the distributed grid?
Or is the idea that one should soak the new customer to subsidize the existing ones? Maybe rejigger some pricing tiers to push more of the existing customers into lower tiers while charging the new customer more. My guess is you're proposing this last option. I otherwise can't see how to square your suggestion with supply vs demand.
First, the bad. Build a facility that consumes 1GW at existing rates in a market with slow growth like the US. The supply sources are roughly fixed, so the grid will need to run more expensive sources. Prices go up.
Now the good. Choice A, in a growing market like China and like the US arguably should have. Lots of demand is coming online all the time (not just datacenters), and everyone plans for this. Power plants of various sorts get build, and there is so much construction that costs can be quite low. Oh well, we can wish.
Choice B: suppose there’s a market with roughly constant demand and enough cheap supply to go around (maybe a good hydro resource or some solar and wind and/or cheap natural gas). Residents have cheap power, which is a good thing. But the hydro doesn’t magically get bigger just because someone builds a 1GW data center. Some careful market design is needed, but that datacenter’s grid connection could be contingent on the operator actually sourcing 1GW of new generation and paying the marginal cost of its demand, with appropriate corrections if the time that the generation produces doesn’t line up with the demand. As possible pretend numbers, suppose that existing prices, all-in for the customer, are 12 cents/kWh. 5c of that is distribution and we’ll ignore it. So the data center operator sources 1GW of average supply at 10c/kWh and tries to connect itself fairly directly, so their transmission is cheap. They are allowed to buy from everyone else and sell to everyone else, but they are paid 2c/kWh selling to the grid (which the grid and residents like!) and they pay 15c/kWh when they plus whatever capacity they supplied have a shortfall and they need to buy. And, if the numbers were picked right, the grid makes a small profit selling peak power to the datacenter while still selling at peak times to residents at 12c/kWh.
Would this work? I don’t know, but I think it could be done in a way that makes residential and ordinary commercial rates go down as a result of someone building a giant new load and also paying for the new capacity to supply it.
Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.
I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.
0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines
(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)
I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.
Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
I support an increase in housing development and cautious modifications to zoning regulations because I believe these changes will improve housing affordability for humans.
I support more development into renewable energy sources because I believe these changes will improve the environment that humans must live in.
I do not support a massive increase in data center development, resulting in situations like xAI poisoning parts of Memphis and Southaven with methane turbines.
Zoning modifications seems like something you’d want to think about no matter what.
"Cautious" as I mean it exists in the space between where we are now and just throwing zoning regulations out entirely and YOLOing it.
I support significant changes, but I don't support just eliminating all regulations with no replacements and expecting "the market" to do the right thing. IMO we'd be trading one problem with another likely much more destructive one.
The NIMBY argument is generally that the current zoning system is fine (and then hiding behind it to support their NIMBY-ism).
The status quo of zoning basically just stops people from living and working where they want to.
Regular zoning in most of the US already covers data centers. They're highly likely only being placed in medium or heavy industrial zones. Opposing a data center despite zoning allowance is being a NIMBY. It's saying that community members should have veto rights over what gets built in their community, despite zoning and code which restricts what can be built.
I don’t want any more shitty AI data centers anywhere. Sorry that that negatively impacts your totally awesome start-up.
Last I was using data centers directly there was no water use, though I know now that many use water for cooling and don’t bother with a closed system because water is cheaper than the power. (Exception being Elon and gas turbines for data centers of his but that’s something you get away with doing to Texans).
I don’t get why utility bills go up when the DC should pay for the upgrades it needs for power itself.
I don’t get why people would be against them. For that matter, I don’t understand why people would be for them.
I spent many many hours in my local DC in downtown LA and you would never know it was there except the office building windows were not open to see inside.
I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.
Personally, I think bootlicking more accurately describes wanting to allow the billionaires in control of the country unlimited ability to build data centers to help destroy the fabric of society and spy, stalk, disappear and murder people with impunity.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?
Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.
We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.
Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.
But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.
Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...