Hacker News Reader

Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

The best outcome for all of us is for tech companies to get into power. Tech got into telecom (dark fiber, undersea cabling) and provide free services (youtube, gmail, etc), which used to cost a lot historically. Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. We can do video conferences with upto 100 people worldwide for free.

If tech companies get into power and break down the regulatory capture of utilities, they can make money off of energy storage and virtual power plants while providing free power for people.

View on HN

The geometric decreases in cost that you cite (in terms of communications and SaaS) are due primarily to Moore's Law. Unfortunately there is no similar law affecting power generation costs.

If tech companies got into power, the inevitable result would be that they embrace and extend the regulatory capture of utilities, with the explicit goal of maximizing their profit at the expense of human needs. As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on, to the extent that it serves as an impediment to this paramount goal.

Their philosophical stance on these concerns and tradeoffs has already been made palpably clear, in any case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642

From everything we know so far, these people definitely will not do the right thing without the swift and exacting application of a very heavy stick.

Solar has its own Moore’s Law called Swanson’s Law which shows that solar has been decreasing geometrically in price.

In power generation there is little appetite for innovation from producers since they are either monopolies or government agencies. So instead all innovation has been going to local generation like solar and wind.

Good points.

>As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on

As if any tech company would build anything but solar. You don't need to bend the rules here and you don't need too much storage either. You just need cheap land, a fuckton of solar to get your peaks to your base consumption and you already do 60% of energy renewable. Anything above that is battery storage and more land.

It's such a no brainer in cost and from an operations PoV the only thing that is easy enough to go into power.

And yet we have:

Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/dat...

From coal plant to data center: Old power stations are being repurposed - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/08/from-coal-plant-to-data-c...

Internet data centers are driving the resurgence of coal power - https://www.dailyclimate.org/internet-data-centers-are-drivi...

Meanwhile, both solar and wind also have their environmental externalities (from the mining of raw materials, to the sheer amount of land that needs to be put under shade for solar farms, and the noise pollution caused by wind farms), and correspondingly, tons and tons of rule for these companies to bend.

I imagine they will just finance their own small nuclear reactor plants probably through power purchase agreements in whatever states which will allow them to do so. Those states will be where the new data centers and jobs go.

They're not going to build a second grid, or power plants for everyone else. That's an awful business. These companies are in good businesses. They don't want to get into an awful business.

There's so much wealth to be created given the multiplier these SMNR companies are likely to have. And the tech companies will invest in the SMNR companies they purchase power from. Some of them are already invested.

Hopefully, they'll have enough scale that whatever they need to do makes it cheaper for the grid at large.

I think this is what you are saying, but to clarify, they will not own the power infrastructure. Execs from Google and Microsoft have already said this[0]

Microsoft have already entered into an agreement with Constellation Energy which pays to restart one of the reactors at three mile island. This comes with a 20yr purchase of the power from that plant.

There aren't many usable and idle nuclear power plants sitting around. It's extremely likely, as you point out, that states will soon be competing for jobs by offering land for both data centers as well as new power plants.

The best estimates I've seen but new construction of nuclear plants at 5-7 years. If this could safely be sped up then I assume big tech is already working to make it happen.

Of note, there are already some third parties/regulators working to stop big tech from capturing large shares of existing power generation[1]

[0] https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power

In South Korea, they can complete SMNR in 24 months: https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/who-is-building-sm....

They claim they can do that in 24 months.

I believe Microsoft is currently doing just that, reserving the output of Three Mile Island. The article was here on HN around a week ago.

I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that, and I can see the communication of demand changes back to generation being useful to those running the plant(s).

Microsoft commits to pay somewhere between $100/MWh and $140/MWh for 20 years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443

Microsoft's commitment allows Constellation Energy to restart the 819 MW nuclear fission reactor at Three Mile Island. This reactor operated without problems for approximately 45 years and was switched off in 2019.

The other reactor at Three Mile Island (880 MW) melted harmlessly in 1979 due to operator error. That reactor will never be restarted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Clean baseload power is extremely valuable.

Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source mature enough to be widely adopted. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. Having used fission reactors for 70 years, we know how to build them and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). For example, Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100% of their capacity.

In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline.

Furthermore, even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar and wind. As a last resort, fossil fuel backup plants can be built, but building them is costly and using them is dirty. See Germany's power grid for an embarrassing real-world example.

Solar + wind + batteries is an intrinsically unreliable, unacceptable solution. Please see Yann LeCun's comments, reflecting Meta's view on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097

>solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.

Being 5x cheaper more than makes up for that though.

None of the viable modes of storage (pumped water, hydrogen, batteries) are expensive enough to make paying 5x per kilowatt hour worthwhile any more.

If you roundtrip solar and wind via hydrogen stored for months and back into electricity again (the most expensive mechanism), it's still cheaper than every single kilowatt hour of nuclear power delivered on the sunniest, windiest days.

It really is difficult to overstate just how mind bogglingly expensive nuclear power is. Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.

Where are you going to build a 1GW solar installation with multiple days of storage capacity in the northeast?

long transmission lines significantly reduce efficiency and add massive costs as well as creating easy targets for terrorism.

Firstly, we should probably not start by building a mathematical renewable energy model that presumes wind energy doesn't exist. Storing solar energy for use while the wind is blowing hard is a bit pointless and vice versa.

You don't store energy from solar on a sunny winter day to use at midnight when the wind is blowing hardest and consumption is lowest. Your store energy to use on those rarer hours when it is neither sunny nor windy and when consumption exceeds the production of both.

This can be done cost effectively and at scale in two ways - 1) by pushing water uphill for short term storage and 2) by manufacturing hydrogen and storing it underground for longer term storage.

So, you combine overproduced solar, wind, pumping water uphill and electrolyzing and storing hydrogen to match demand with supply.

Solar and wind and their transmission are distributed. This makes them poor terrorism targets. A nuclear plant, on the other hand, is a great target for terrorists.

> Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.

I feel sure Ontario does not have nuclear weapons ambitions.

> If you round trip solar and wind via hydrogen

Do you have any examples of this at commercial scale (hundreds of MW) and their costings?

>I feel sure Ontario does not have nuclear weapons ambitions.

Canada actually used to be a nuclear power until 1984. Since then it has signed up to the NPT and disavowing weapons but maintaining a nuclear industry that would let it spin up a nuclear weapons program in a hurry should it deem it necessary (i.e. if the American nuclear umbrella faltered).

There are several countries around the world that follow a similar policy - Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Iran. There's value to belonging to the NPT but there's also value to being able to get a nuke in months if an existential crisis presented itself (as it has for Iran).

>Do you have any examples of this at commercial scale (hundreds of MW) and their costings?

Google for lazard LCOE.

> Canada actually used to be a nuclear power until 1984.

No, it wasn't, except in the sense that Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey are nuclear powers today. It was a participant in a nuclear sharing agreements (under the auspices of NORAD, rather than NATO like the other countries) where US-owned and controlled weapons were deployed at Canadian bases, under control of the US military, with plans for transferring them for delivery by Canadian forces in the event of war. It never had its own nuclear weapons or, AFAIK, nuclear weapons program

> Google for lazard LCOE.

I guess LCOH is a more relevant search term. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

Page 28 is informative. 220-235 USD/kWh for a 25% blend of unsubsidised PEM hydrogen, or 210-221 USD/kWh a 25% blend for unsubsidised alkaline hydrogen.

>In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline.

ok so weather is predictable and highly accurate for at least 3 days in advance. You are still able to buy energy from markets. You can still load battery storage in case of bad weather forecasts.

I don't know what the problem is here? Why do you paint a scenario where data centers magically are now off the grid and have to be on 100% reliable energy sources?

> After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity).

France would like your phone number.

Knowing how and being politically prevented from doing so are entirely different things.

It’s nuclear or fossil fuels until an order of magnitude change in chemical storage.

No one is going to be building enough gas peaker plants sitting idle 360 days a year to achieve the reliability of the grid most consumers and modern civilization require. So it’s burn more gas or coal on a regular basis or enjoy power outages if you want what we have today.

I love solar. I plan to have a week or so worth of battery at an off grid home someday soon. It’s both entirely financially impractical (yay disposable tech income) and I will still back it with an expensive propane generator since I live over here in reality.

> France would like your phone number

I think there is a small matter of national/international politics (running nuclear as renewables backup), a lack of focus within EDF and perhaps a dash of French industrial action (at least a go slow on the refuelling outages).

Project Hercules was meant to solve the latter https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/ceo-of-edf-defe... but this never happened.

On them positive side their nuclear generation is recovering a bit, albeit from a low base. https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...

Fossil fuel plants already exist for the base load. If they run only 5% of time, it will be lot cleaner than what we have right now.

Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time? That would be a pretty interesting pitch deck.

That’s a pretty damn low utilization rate. The cost per Mwh would make the Texas polar vortex incident look downright cheap. Or you’ll be having the government build and operate idled natural gas (or coal!) plants via taxpayer money since investors are generally not quite that poor at math. An idle plant still needs the same number of staffing and engineering as one operating at 90% capacity factors, before you even begin to look at capex.

Perhaps that will happen. Running your baseload generation balls to the wall at 100% seems to be a far better use of capital to me, and have your cheap intermittent power sources fill in for those peak loads that don’t require reliability.

I can come up with all sorts of great ideas on how to utilize spare solar capacity. None are financially practical in the scale of a human lifetime at a societal level, even with a magic wand to instantly enable the political will to do so.

Humans continue to amaze me with their inability to account for tail risk. The same political magic wand makes nuclear viable within a decade or two, accounting for said tail risk within it.

That said, the current unserious political climate gives me zero hope any solution will be found, so I’m simply preparing for semi regular power outages becoming a thing within my lifetime.

> Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time?

This is what the capacity market is for; ensure the plant needed to operate the grid can pay the bills. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit...

It does feel like an inefficient use of capital. My best explanations for intermittents are 1) they are fuel savers, making natural gas cleaner by having them run less; 2) they siphon money into the generator’s pockets (from taxes via the Inflation Reduction Act and other subsidies, from other electricity generators via renewable energy mandates, from the utilities via rooftop solar which reduces the consumption when energy is easier/less costly to produce).

"Operator error", classic.

You nuke fans always conveniently leave out the costs of cleaning up the mess that the civilian nuclear generation program has already created. Last I heard it was about half a $T.

It wasnt tech companies that "got into telecoms", it was telecoms that overbuilt infrastructure which tech companies later bought up for a song when the bubble popped.

This is a "workable strategy" only if you can find a sucker to eat the losses.

Telecom is not more affordable today than it was in 1990. Back in 1990 the private phone line we shared at home for a family of 4 primarily to support connecting to local BBSes and the internet cost $20/month, or roughly $48.65 in 2024 dollars. That $20 was enough to be able to send and receive email through Fidonet and UUCP, download software and connect to the local Freenet for internet access. Today's telecom spend is on the order of $250/month once a cell phone, landline (since there is no cell phone service here) and internet connection are all included. That's pretty much a factor of 5x increase in telecom spend required for a family of 4. Sure, we can do a lot more, but it's not cheaper when directly compared to the historic cost of telecommunications services.

I don't think tech getting into power will make things better. Just look at what is happening in Texas and other parts of the world: grid operators have to pay bitcoin miners to turn off their farms when grid capacity is overwhelmed, which drives up cost for everyone. Depending on where data centers are located, construction of new transmission lines becomes necessary. All this increases the baseline operating cost of the grid. Personally, I don't want more AI generated content or timelines powered by AI driving toxic engagement because it gets more clicks. The "improvements" we're seeing now are beyond the point of diminishing returns. Tech will abuse any externalities that exist worth exploiting, and society will end up paying for it.

Handwaving away all the additional utility seems unfair to me. These pipes are a lot fatter, more accessible than ever before, and there are many more ways to use them. Working from home, eliminating shopping trips, telehealth, video calls, online banking and bill pay, podcasts, maps, music, gaming, the list goes on and on.

If you're "cord cutting" and not paying for cable TV anymore, then you likely still come out ahead even after folding a couple of streaming services into the mix.

If all you have are 1990 expectations, then you should be able to make do with something for about $50/mo, maybe less. Either a cheap phone plan, or entry level internet and VOIP. And it'll still be leagues more useful.

That private phone line you shared could only be used by the one computer in the household, if there even was a computer, which more often than not there wasn't, and when it was online, you couldn't take phone calls, which was more of a problem than now, because it was 1990.

And we don't live in fear of our telephone bills like we used to. We don't charge long distance, by the minute, or per text. Data caps are annoying, but they're not life-changingly expensive, and hey, if you're living it up like it's 1990, you'll never get anywhere close to exceeding them anyway.

The big tech companies are already “into power” - they (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) are constantly investing in power projects close to their data centers and manufacturing hubs.

>Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free.

Not sure where you are but where I am you still have to pay for cell phone data plans and internet to the house.

Yes yes because the solution to the myopic God complex of the tech industry is more of it.

Wow. Really chugging the coolade.

Dear sirinsalot, we regret to inform you that this post is not in line with our community guidelines and as such we have temporarily suspended your power. Please speak to our AI representative if you wish to appeal this decision.

So it'd be better for these companies to not pay for their own resources? It's better to let Microsoft consume so much power that it browns out the local grid? And what, we're all suppose to just hope that the utility companies fix it for us with taxpayer bailouts and massively increased residential power bills?

I think you were too busy chugging that contrarian kool aid to spend even one moment thinking about what you're arguing for.

“Oh, just great. That what we need…more engines. These egomaniacs are going to ruin the world.” -sirsinsalot in 1898

Everyone having an engine surrounded by two tons of metal has done untold damage to our built environment and social fabric. So this isn't even a joke.

Having lived in a country where only lucky few had personal cars, I would not agree at all. Social fabric of a society where people can expect some privacy and personal autonomy in their commute is certainly a better one.

I rest my case regarding the cult thinking.

The jury has deliberated and demands that you pay my legal fees.

Jury decides to change their verdict after being algorithmicly sentenced to 90 days in jail for using the wrong exit in the court building as they were being released from duty by the court officers.

CEO of VerdictAI is quoted as saying “shit happens, if they have any value as humans they would have enough money to get out of this, so the AI must be right. One must not lose sight of the fact that we have freed Americans from millions of hours of manual labor with our InmatesAI volunteer workforce.”

Maybe I’m making assumptions a rather than making an inference, but this seems like the perspective of somebody who wants to stop development of future technology altogether because of bad actors.

I’m not saying there aren’t concerns, but risks can be mitigated and precautions put into place to prevent catastrophes. Stopping development because of valid concerns is not the right move. It’s not even the right move to stop developing weaponry which has a stated goal of causing direct harm to other humans.

There are people in the world who will attempt to do these things and much more dangerous things recklessly and with far worse intentions than making money, and if those people get technological and military superiority over The West, the world will look very different than it does today. There are a whole lot more ways the world could be worse than it could be better.

The current world order is not ideal, but think about what the actual long term outcome is if The West stops.

“Stopping a small number of incredibly over-resourced people from externalising consequences for their sole gain and causing significant and long lasting woe and damage on the rest of us” != “stopping innovation”

Nobody is saying “uh uh, no more problem solving”,drawing that conclusion would be uncharitable at best, and “wrong” at worst. The argument is “gosh, maybe we could have some innovation that’s actually useful, and not some polished-turd/enshittification”.

I’m not sure you’re making the same argument as the others in the comments above. I agree with your comment aside from your characterization of the others comments.

We’re still a democratic republic that can stop the enshittification of utilities (or whatever the problem de jour is). There are bad actors, but by and large, things are working and continue to be improving. Some things need to be bolstered, some things need to be replaced. Stagnation is not the answer.

What would you propose as the solution? All new ideas go through a centralized approval process? That experiment is already being run in other countries. If they start winning, the US will adapt or die.

Engines replace horses. What does AI replace?

Was this meant to be sarcastic? Because like, this might have metaphorically backfired on you.

You know, because of the global warming and such.

We can innovate our way out of it. I don’t want to imply that anthropogenic climate change is not real, but the topic is moot anyway because world has been through much more dramatic climate change before without the help of humans. Sooner or later, with or without anthropogenic climate change, we would be forced to solve all climate change or die as a species.

You thought you wouldn’t find kool aid drinking tech fanboys here? You might need a new compass.

Tech companies and their cults are perfectly represented by the South Park episode about Priuses

  all communication is free

My internet and cellular bill say otherwise.

Edit: OP's comment is almost nonsensical I feel it might be AI. "Traditionally youtube would cost hundreds of dollars"??

Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100.

For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly.

A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include.

Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.

> Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered.

Yet we're in a conversation about data centers, and our concept of "unmetered communication" only refers to one end of the line.

What does it cost companies and orgs to communicate with us? What does it cost them to keep a server operational, functional and sending data to us? It's "free and unmetered" for you to watch YouTube, run yt-dlp, put up your ad blockers and PiHoles, but what cost for everyone but you?

I would also consider time/effort costs in communicating. Compare having a rotary-dial phone, the ultimate "thin client", with a general-purpose computer or smartphone. How much time and effort do we put into fiddling with them, upgrading them, fixing settings, troubleshooting whatever communication software is on top of them?

Newspapers cost us $0.25-$1.50, but that's a highly subsidized cost like riding public transit.

  it is effectively unmetered

My $30 data cap fee says otherwise.

Relative to the beginnings of the internet, your current internet bill is closer to "free" for communication than just about any other time in history. In 1996, AOL introduced their "unlimited" dialup plan. For a mere $19.95 / month, you too could browse the information super highway at a blisteringly fast 56kbps. At today's prices, that would make it $40 / month. But that was their unlimited plan. In 1995 AOL charged you $9.95 for 5 hours and the $2.50 per hour after that each month. Assuming you wanted 24/7 access like we all do these days, AOL would have cost you ~$1,800 per month, or ~$3,700 / month in today's money. Even assuming you don't want 24/7 access, the average internet user today supposedly spends 6 hours a day online[2]. Even at that rate you're still looking at ~$435 / month (or $898 / month today).

And that was just your access costs, you still needed to pay for the phone service. According to the FCC[1] you could expect to tack another $20 / month on to those costs, just for your local phone service. And all of that would have probably been enough to service one user online at a time. If you wanted multiple people in your household to be online at the same time, you at a minimum are going to want multiple phone lines, never mind the additional hourly access charges.

[1]: https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC...

[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/vpn/screen-time-statis...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com