Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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I'm in agreement with you on the jobs .. but power draw wise??

  An aluminium smelter uses an immense amount of electricity, requiring about 14,000 kWh per metric ton of aluminium produced. Because it takes so much power—roughly equivalent to powering a mid-sized city like Nashville or Boston—electricity can make up to 40% of the total production cost.

That's quoted from a google AI summary query, sure - but I've had family members work the S.Australian smelters and they're beasts for power consumption.

My dad's first job as an ECE was getting power for an Al smelter. Im quite aware of Al smelters.

I chose it as an example because they're crazy power hungry. The other classical examples of high electrical use are NH3 fertilizer plants.

But! We're not building hundreds of Al smelters all across the country. Nor are we building hundreds of NH3 plants.

We should be, seeing how a significant amount of our Al and NH3 is locked in the ME, but alas; we've decided to keep a structural, supply-side inflation that will devastate any family making less than $400k rather than divert capital from the surveillance state and chat bots.

At most, there's a market for two Al and NH3 plants in the country potentially employing thousands of lower middle class folks.

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