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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The US has been dragging its feet in increasing power capacity and modernizing the grid. Data Centers (and one day EVs) are the kind of push we need to get the complacent monopolies to do the work.

The water concerns are absolutely overblown, the paper that everyone draws their numbers from had to be ammended because they had a 1000x water usage error.

When a poor town has an empty lot get converted to a data center, they are getting some jobs. 20 jobs of remote hands, plumbers, and security guards is better than zero. And there is increased tax revenue (this point I disagree with, because property tax is wrong and we need a land value tax).

Long term these changes are good.

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They don't employ local maintenence/security. They contract with a large, reliable company from the nearest big city.

And those companies hire more people in the area. I don't care if the guy is driving 30 minutes to work. I know plenty of people whose careers are "security" . Why would I not want them to have more work?

No, they hire third-party staffing companies who only hire ‘independent contractors’ at low rates, with no benefits and punitive Ts&Cs.

> Data Centers (and one day EVs) are the kind of push we need to get the complacent monopolies to do the work.

Genuinely interested to know, has this actually happened on a larger scale? I.e. data centers triggering a systematic push to modernize the grid?

My impression (from headlines) was that companies either accept rising prices for grid power or generate their own power - using noisy, polluting and CO2 emitting gas turbines. In both situations the local communities are left holding the bag.

> they are getting some jobs. 20 jobs of remote hands, plumbers, and security guards is better than zero.

They'll also have made sure they won't ever get any more jobs from that "investment" over the next decades, whereas someone else could have built something with actual job growth instead.

I think those takes are a bit like saying the Fentanyl factory next door is great because it also needs a janitor and the exhaust contains CO2 so will make the plants grow faster.

I’m not against data centers, but they need to come with their own clean power supply, and export minimal pollution to its neighbors .

If you can’t provide that it’s not worth the downsides for the community.

Small power plants are less efficient and more polluting than larger ones. They are also harder to inspect and certify on a regular schedule. A single 1GW power facility in your county is much better than 10000 small power plants, one for each business.

True, centralized power generation using a grid that can carry that load would be the best solution. But in absence of that, the alternatives only seem to be between inefficient decentralized green and inefficient decentralized non-green solutions. In that case, I'd opt for the green ones. (Or of course: no datacenter at all)

Even for wind or solar ?

LOL. You’d need thousands of acres of solar panels to provide power for a single data center. Of course the exact area needed depends on what part of the world you’re in, but are you going to put up with 4 square miles of solar panels in your city? That’s a square two miles on a side, or 3.4km×3.4km. Or are you going to let them install hundreds of wind turbines in your neighborhood?

Yes. Don’t build the data center unless you can support that. What’s so strange about it?

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