I just don’t understand why this is a difficult question. Make the data centers fund their own power needs. End of story.
Yes. They can pay to build their own sources of power of their own choosing. Or put more resources into doing data centers more efficiently, their choice.
I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we’ve had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time.
It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.
Well put.
It’s actually not as simple as that, assuming they’re connected to the grid. Power transmission is costly too, which needs to be accounted for, not just the power consumption/generation. Them being off-grid also isn’t really reasonable because they’d need a lot of redundant power sources and backups, which would be better as part of the grid.
They should still be paying for all this, but estimating the real cost is non-trivial.
Agreed.
Datacenter. The end.
Datacenters build their own micro power plants for uptime anyway. This is a line item and an investment. Little Timmy’s parents need to feed little Timmy… Not finance some techbro or deluded CLevel’s fomo into the next big bubble.
It’s interesting to me that we don’t do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.
Most industries create jobs. Datacenters do not.
Just like Google in Lenior, NC. They played the local government with the idea they would boost the local economy and create jobs. The only job a local can get there is janitorial and there is like 10 of those and they don’t pay that much.
Wow, you can’t even apply to be smart hands? That’s nuts to me.
You’d be supprised to see how many industries probably have some sort of backups in place for power … But it’s typically more costly to run and they may not have plans in place for extended outages. At the end of the day it comes down to money.
What’s frustrating about the current situation with the power companies is people just are unaware they are getting bled or don’t have options for recourse… Whereas monopolies and large companies are getting (fuck if I know why) white glove treatment and discounts. It makes little sense to be deferential to these massive companies - as while they promise jobs, economic benifits, and the moon itself… Data shows this rarely materializes. Its baffling.
The data center provider. Why is this even a question?
So our utility came out and said they have to raise residential rates by a rather large amount, largely because so many data centers are demanding so much power they need to upgrade, so residential rates have to fund that…
If you read the article, it’s because power companies are monopolies and so we’ve regulated them rather harshly. They are often compelled to build infrastructure to meet demand, for example. We don’t make the provider of a steel mill, housing builder, etc pay (generally).
And that’s weird, right? It’s one area of the market where we do a planned economy, and all states manage it differently. Now it’s being stress tested in a new way.
Poor people, naturally
The question was “who should”, not “who will”.
I would suggest requiring these datacenters to also invest in sufficient green energy to power them.
It is very interesting to me that we don’t make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don’t put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.
The thing that’s breaking our systems here isn’t that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.
I’m surprised we didn’t make ‘bring your own power’ a rule before; I guess it’s infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn’t fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?
The people who want more power. Ie, the data center.
You want it? You bought it.
