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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Data centers are a hard sell in general because they don't really provide too much benefit to a community. They run on minimal labor, whether skilled or unskilled, so the job creation argument doesn't work. They have huge energy requirements, which is a burden on the regional grid. And residents of an area won't really care that the Facebook latency of all of Western Europe could improve by a few milliseconds because of their sacrifice.

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Don't they pay for the energy they use? Isn't there a price for the energy that would make it appealing for the community to have them there?

If Facebook paid its electric bill to the neighbors, sure. But it doesn't.

We live in an age of energy scarcity. So even if people think about the electricity it uses, people probably see a data center as slurping up energy, causing prices for regular people to rise.

If the local grid can't provide that then upgrades are needed. They may pay enough for that but then the energy needs to be sourced, which may mean extra fossil fuels and potentially breaking promises made on move-in towards a higher % renewable use. It can be about more than the financial price.

Even if it was about the cost of sourcing and provision, someone that big will bargain down close to the minimum. There will be little benefit to share around elsewhere, unless of course this is made specifically part of the bargain (they can build, in exchange _they_ improve local infrastructure to cope, as greenly as the locals desire, with stated benefits for the area with compensation clauses for if said benefits don't turn up).

Energy is their #1 cost so they bargain heavily for large subsidies.

So the problem is whoever is in charge to say yes to discounts?

Genuinely wondering because I keep not understanding this situation and I'm Dutch. Indeed, if people worry about that it'll use up all the green energy then let facebook pay for replacement renewable infrastructure that supplies MW equal to what they use, to be placed and functional anywhere in NL within X (1?) year(s) after the datacenter is turned on (we're not that big, we can swallow those transmission losses).

The way energy consumption is taxed is in a staffled manner. In the highest staffel the consumer wouldn’t pay any taxes on their top use. The plants thet hit these amounts are for example the reffineries.

It’s not as straight forward as just paying more unfortunately as the rules are so much in favour of big consumers one first needs to change those rules before you have the ground to ask them to pay more.

Do I understand you correct that the highest tax bracket for energy is actually the lowest tax bracket? It works inversely to how income taxes work?

That is, how absurd is may sound, entirely correct. I belief on a yearly basis we subsidise about 18B on just big energy consumers.

Here is the source at the bottom table:

https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/...

It’s not even about “saying yes” to discounts, it’s trying to actively persuade Facebook et al to build their DCs in NL, and using subsidies and discounts to entice them.

See also an article that explains in more detail that it actually required a lot of lobbying to get Facebook interested: https://tweakers.net/reviews/9690/facebook-in-de-polder-meta...

I suspect our laws say that they just have to be given access to the grid at the same terms as any other company.

And we're having to transition to green energy, and having great difficulty doing so, as you know. So a new thing that adds 10% extra national electricity usage isn't exactly welcome right now, imo.

> that adds 10% extra national electricity usage

I read elsewhere that we're talking about 160MW, that's 1.4 GWh -- if it would run at peak power all year long.

The netherlands uses about a thousand TWh of energy in a year. (Electricity or other energy doesn't really matter because it's all going to have to come from renewables in the end anyhow.)

That's not 10%, not 1%, not 0.1%, not 0.01%, not 0.001% but 0.0001%.

Don't want to defend facebook but let's keep at least keep the order of magnitude correct

Selling electricity is never good business. Governments are at most going to recover costs of transmission and some ongoing operation, never the huge up-front investments they need to make in the sector.

I don't think it's necessarily that simple, if the community doesn't agree to it. The community might have a different idea about the appropriate use of electricity generation, other than selling all available capacity to the highest bidder, and then (probably) having to build out more capacity at greater expense. The community may have other expectations, such as phasing out of fossil fuels or other public goods.

> Isn't there a price for the energy that would make it appealing for the community to have them there?

The EU is in the middle of an energy crisis right now, so that might make that harder to sell.

No. They get lots of subsidies. Besides the energy, there simply is not a lot of space here in NL, and a huge datacenter won’t add anything to the country. Jobs, nature, view, spatial planning.

The only reason it was allowed before is that politician get a hard on from dealing with big tech. Aka corruption

They tend to go through a lot of water too, which is the big issue with the datacenter Meta wants to put in a town nearby to me.

I'm out of the loop on data center design. How do they "go through" water? I'd imaging they pipe some in, use to cool, and then pipe it out.

Some percentage of it is lost to evaporation (fairly obvious if you see a big steam cloud coming out of a tower). How much that is...I have no idea. I don't think any place on earth forces big tech companies to report on the environmental impact and resource usage of their data centers. In fact, I think a lot of companies view these details as a competitive advantage and intentionally keep these facts secret even from non-datacenter folk in the same company.

Many FB datacenters use evaporative cooling systems rather than traditional A/C, basically spraying water into the incoming air supply to cool it below outdoor ambient temperatures. The hotter it is outside, the more water is needed to cool the air, trading temperature for humidity. But this water can't easily be recaptured without using significantly more energy than normal A/C, so the evaporated water is exhausted as part of the hot air from the DC aisles.

Don’t forget the added coalents to the water that are dumped back! I’m still curiou to hear what the composition of these chemicals is but appearantly not s single data center is able to tell oddly enough.

> Data centers are a hard sell in general because they don't really provide too much benefit to a community.

The Netherlands is already the home of some FANGs (AWS has a few edge locations in Amsterdam) and dominant hosting providers such as Cloudflare.

I'm sure they'll be able to overcome the loss of Facebook.

I agree (aside from that AWS might think twice about where to strategically expand further given how politics treated Facehook) but I don't get how this is related to what you quoted or any other part of GP's comment.

> given how politics treated Facehook

According to today’s NRC coverstory it was the opposite: the project failed because of the aggressive lobbying demanding an exception. And Meta refusing to discuss their datacentre design. IOW it failed because of the way that Facebook treated politics. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/30/agressieve-lobby-voor-d...

> (...) but I don't get how this is related to what you quoted or any other part of GP's comment.

If you read about the topic you'll soon discover that Meta/Facebook has been systematically imposing demands for preferential treatment, including demanding circumventing laws to allow agricultural land, some of which they don't even own, to instead be used to build high-density industrial buildings.

This, in a country where Amazon and Microsoft already operate their own data centers. In fact, Facebook rejected the location already used by Amazon and Microsoft, and instead decided to force their way somewhere else.

It's also worth mentioning some of the apparent corruption aspects of Facebook's deal, abusing preferential rights of the municipality to exclude competing bids.

> Data centers are a hard sell

How did they convince existing locations if there is no upside for the community.

Probably the same way sports teams convince communities to build subsidized stadiums: with unrealistic projections about jobs and trickle down benefits.

Bribes. False promises about job creation. Politicians with wrong incentives, being starstruck, or who simply don’t understand what a datacenter is

i guess netherlands has more honest politicians.

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