>, but foundries and aluminium smelting plants have commonly been sited near generators in Britain.

IDK about Britain, especially historically when you would have been building aluminum smelters. It's not normal in the US more or less since the advent of the grid. I'm sure people will be along shortly to construe exceptions or special cases where the fossil fuels were extra cheap as the norm or heat was what they also needed and it was cheaper to capture that locally and make some electricity too.

>Every DC I've visited - probably ten - has on-site generators, for redundancy. To a certain type of mind, that's capital going to waste. I can imagine a bean-counter desire to sweat that plant.

But they don't use those for any semblance of "normal" load. Those are strictly for redundancy not "ah it's 3pm, power's getting expensive better fire up the genset for 4hr". At least that's normally how it is. It's not normal for it to be possible to out compete the utility even after fixed costs are amortized in. Bigger generation is more efficient, if you're buying fossil fuels then buying them in bulk is more efficient. Etc. etc. It should be cheaper to have the people who benefit from all that string you a wire.

The problem is that the datacenters need grid investments. And if the utility makes those debt-backed investments but then the DC goes bankrupt, households are on the hook for the debt servicing.

Utilities requiring ten year of prepayment from the DCs makes sense.

The issue is with the price - why bother shipping LNG half the planet when one can just sell it at a significant markup domestically?

When the price is right all kinds of contracts and agreements are usually thrown out the window - especially if the penalties are small enough to make it worth it.

> is not something that’s currently a feasible path as it requires patient capital and long term vision and planning

HN arguing in favour of a planned economy - see, we aren't free-market cultists!

China is building all types of generation because they are rapidly growing their electric network (generation doubled from 2014 to 2024).

Europe's generation is roughly flat during the same period.

It doesn't make sense to build a lot of everything in a system without growth in generation. Replacing decommisioned generators would be enough. Growth in solar and wind generation (for ideological or economic reasons) means there's less reason to build new capacity of other types. There's complications there with firm vs intermittent capacity, but that's a different discussion.

US electrical generation was also flat from 2000 to 2020, but seems to be growing again since then, but not anywhere near China's growth rate.

Energy prices globally spiked in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine (again). I conclude that energy is tied more closely to fossil than solar. Happy to stand with you and throw rocks at stupid solar policy, though.

>I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

yes, they don't seem to fall for the "solar is unstable" trap and recognize new reality - the solar + wind smoothed by nuclear/gas is the new baseline

To the comment on the coal below : not really. You don't need that much as a smoothing capacity.

You gained the datacenter, which is providing a highly desired service... Are you European?

Why? Unlike loads involving a real physical process there is absolutely no need for AI-training to be constant.

I'm hoping the kind of gas turbines being installed on these datacenters are capable of quickly responding to a load change, meaning the primary source of energy could be solar during the day and complement when there isn't enough energy.

But I haven't looked into where these datacenter are being placed, I'm assuming that although solar is cheap now, the surface needed would make the purchase of nearby land probably not worth it. These new categories of datacenters are becoming very energy dense...

Solar power still can take a certain amount of load from any other source and saving money and CO2 while doing so.

And grid battery works and is cheap enough now.

but you can't trust especially hyperscalers with securely sealed HEUs in shipping containers

you're just incorrect. You probably missed 2 points :

- battery storage

- and in the article

"However, AI labs and some hyperscalers have relaxed those requirements as there is now a lower uptime tolerance applied to both inference and training, not just training. Many of Meta’s self-built AI datacenters, for example, target just two nines of uptime and forgo backup generators entirely, as detailed in our Industrials Model."

That's why we are getting clean, beautiful coal the likes of which nobodys ever seen before!

Let's go back to have open air sewers while we are at it. I mean, if the goal is to bring back stuff that lowered life expectancy and reduce 50+ years of progress, I don't see why not. I really believe that as arguments go, yours is truly terrible.

Additionally, you proved my point that the majority really doesn't care about the folks whose quality of life worsen because someone built a datacenter close to their homes. Or the fact that turbines still pollute the air with NOx emissions (which cause lung cancer and other respiratory problems).

You are basically saying that it is not so bad, but (I guess) it is because you aren't close to a datacenter not depending on the grid. And I trust more hearing about live accounts of people being affected, than a "trust me bro, it is not as bad". Are the accounts cherry-picked? Maybe, but they are also supported by videos that substantiate what they are saying.

It's called progress. People like clean air and rivers that don't glow.

Sacrificing it all for making tech bros richer seems like a ridiculously bad play.

Are you aware that public spending is a transfer from the public sector to the private, and that poor people spend approximately 100% of their income? Would you argue that stock buy-backs are a better use of public money?

At some point, probably in the 80s, the prophets of Mammon convinced policymakers that the liquidity of capital markets was the highest good, that no liquidity was enough, and that the financial class is inherently productive.

When we bailed out the banks in 2008, it amounted to a wealth transfer from the public purse to Jamie Dimon. That's your counterproductive welfare spending.

Texas had blackouts last year because free-market fundamentalism. Perhaps Texans should run their fridges on investment boom.

That was my point. We in the EU are destroying ourselves. The US is racing ahead and investing in all kinds of power generation technologies.