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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

A source of the increasing demand are data-centres scaling up for AI (machine learning) workloads... and crypto mining is still happening I guess. They're also sucking up a lot of fresh water for these tasks. I'm curious how significant this portion of the demand is.

If it's big enough, maybe start making those companies pay for these externalities they're forcing on the rest of society.

Though for other industrial uses... does the U.S. have a plan for SMR research and policies for deploying them when the tech is ready? I'm a bit ignorant on that one. I know Canada has been making moves in that direction.

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Externality of energy consumption? I'm pretty sure they are already paying for that. Or are you saying they should pay more per KWh than some other user for some reason? As for SMRs my guess is that local regulators will be the first hurdles to overcome. Cities and states will either embrace or reject the risk/reward there. I know the DOE approved one last year at the national level.

My small city of 50K is soon to be home to an $800M 700K sq ft Meta data center that will employ 100 people. I don't think the planners involved in these deals care much about risks, like the power company might have to petition the state regulator to increase rates for everyone so they can build a new power plant to satisfy demand. IMO they are only focused on the reward part.

> Or are you saying they should pay more per KWh than some other user for some reason?

I just checked, and residential electricity users pay more than commercial or industrial users:

"Residential Sector: The average price is approximately 17.08 cents per kWh. Commercial Sector: The average price is around 13.10 cents per kWh. Industrial Sector: The average price is about 9.47 cents per kWh."

https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/commercial-vs-residential-el...

The good thing about a data center is at least with fewer employees, there isn't a huge pressure to build new housing and schools.

I’m not even sure why we would need to ‘make’ them pay for this. As it says in the article:

> A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. ... Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers..

Sounds like these companies have capital investment available, and their demand is inducing increased supply of data centers.. which should also induce demand for electricity supply too.

If they really want to grow fast they are welcome to invest in generating capacity and grid infrastructure too.

> If they really want to grow fast they are welcome to invest in generating capacity and grid infrastructure too.

That's what I was getting at: if the grid is burdened by their demand, and the demand is outpacing other uses (preventing other productive use of that electricity like say... powering air conditioners in a heat wave) then maybe they should be contributing a portion of their capital to building more capacity.

Why does every one else, from residential users to small businesses, need to suffer rolling blackouts because a bunch of VPs need to, "win at AI?"

At this point it seems like the big tech companies are simply using up as much supply as they can get in order to grow and that there's only so much capacity to go around since funding for expansion comes from investments in projects that aren't being funded by the largest growing set of users creating that demand.

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