I think the one benefit people are overlooking is that there is an opportunity to increase power generation.

Rather than saying "no", how about making the new datacenters fund nuclear, solar, and grid battery?

New datacenters aren't harmless (noise or NoX pollution is real), and they'll consume more than they generate.

Yours better off mandating solar panels on parking lots (especially in the US!), etc.

I mean there are a number of places where datacenters have been built and claim to be putting 100% of the money forward to power their data centers with plants and infrastructure, however with everyone around those areas still claiming to be paying more for power afterwards.

> how about making the new datacenters fund nuclear, solar, and grid battery?

good luck with that

any promises will be ignored, avoided or dumped onto regular people the very moment the approval is granted

What about a making it prerequisite? Demonstrate you have built the nuclear/solar/whatever capacity to cover your own energy before you're allowed to build a datacenter?

Solar doesn't work well with 24/7 demand requirements, provisioning enough storage to fully even out intermittency drastically raises costs (most battery storage systems are for only 2-4 hours).

Nuclear has extremely onerous regulatory requirements.

I think this is the wrong way to go.

Let them buy energy, but why aren’t utilities’ power rates more strictly regulated?

Residential rates should be locked in with inflation, allow business rates to increase.

But you've just killed domestic manufacturing and any retail balancing on fine margins.

The only way to remove additional grid demand (and therefore cost) is to simultaneously flood the supply. The DCs should absolutely pay for that.

That’s fine with me, the government can just mandate utility capacity build-out.

These are monopoly businesses where the government has full control over the policy of their operation.

I would generally make the argument that data centers aren’t any different than manufacturing or retail businesses. Their demand should be considered equal in terms of priority - the government shouldn’t be artificially choosing industry preferences unless it has very good reason.

Either you’re a business and you pay the business price or you’re an individual and you pay the individual price.

> nuclear

See you in 15 years I guess.

Many site are already building their own capacity, but doing it (unfortunately) with gas turbines.

>any promises will be ignored, avoided or dumped onto regular people the very moment the approval is granted

Doesn't seem too hard to force the datacenter to put up a bond for it, and then if the requirements/timelines aren't met the bond's seized.

it's exceptionally hard because energy is fungible

try writing the contract, say, requiring 500MW of new gas generation to be built locally to power the DC, which is grid connected

they'll then secretly write a contract to sell 500MW of gas generation on the open market, conditional on approval

at some price they'll find a buyer, at which point 500MW increase in grid capacity has been cancelled out despite them actually building the plant

and all it cost them was the difference in the contract price

Hmm not quite following: 500MW was created at connected to grid as required although delegated to 3rd party. And the DC uses that power. So what's the problem?

500MW doesn't get built on the other side of the country when needed as the power has been sold

so there's a lag, but at this kind of scale you don't really care

Been amazing to see how far tech companies have fallen in public esteem (good). I remember when my friends and I would get together to watch the new MacBook announcements, eager to see what was coming. Feels as distant now as sk8erboi culture.

I mean what do these data centers provide for the locals? They are big ugly boxes were nobody actually works. All the money goes to faceless mega corporations.

At least with a nuclear power plant you can have the patriotic pride of doing something for the nation.

Not to mention, your electricity bill increases. It is just your money transferred indirectly to billionaire pockets even if you don't consume their product.

Doesn’t help that they’ve gotten so big. They’ve become “the man” the establishment that has a direct line to everyone’s brains.

And have in so many cases abused their power.

All that not counting the stagnation and enshittification.

I also used to get together with friends to watch Apple Keynotes. They were so much fun.

But now they’re just extremely sanitized pre produced videos (basically ads) that lack any sort of soul.

Yes yes I know they were always mainly ads. But there was something to be said for people presenting on stage.

Back in the day, these companies stayed in their lane, so to speak.

When you bought a computer, that’s all it was. It had much more of a toy or appliance like appeal rather than this deeply integrated life augmenter. The idea that a company like Apple or even a bigger (at the time) company like Microsoft would own a movie/TV studio and broadcast major league sports was an insane idea.

I will say regarding keynotes, it wasn’t limited to the genuine nature of the companies. The 90s and 2000s were just on different levels of the pace of technology development. I am sure that even Microsoft had an exciting keynote or two and they were the evil empire in those days.