Comment by cucumber3732842 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cucumber3732842 | Hacker News Reader

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cucumber3732842

>, but foundries and aluminium smelting plants have commonly been sited near generators in Britain.

IDK about Britain, especially historically when you would have been building aluminum smelters. It's not normal in the US more or less since the advent of the grid. I'm sure people will be along shortly to construe exceptions or special cases where the fossil fuels were extra cheap as the norm or heat was what they also needed and it was cheaper to capture that locally and make some electricity too.

>Every DC I've visited - probably ten - has on-site generators, for redundancy. To a certain type of mind, that's capital going to waste. I can imagine a bean-counter desire to sweat that plant.

But they don't use those for any semblance of "normal" load. Those are strictly for redundancy not "ah it's 3pm, power's getting expensive better fire up the genset for 4hr". At least that's normally how it is. It's not normal for it to be possible to out compete the utility even after fixed costs are amortized in. Bigger generation is more efficient, if you're buying fossil fuels then buying them in bulk is more efficient. Etc. etc. It should be cheaper to have the people who benefit from all that string you a wire.

In most places aluminum smelters have been located near power plants, because aluminum smelters have large electricity demand and transporting large amounts of electricity over large distances is expensive (high capacity power lines are expensive).

Electricity costs are between 40% - 50% of costs of the finished aluminum.

Also, reliability.

"Due to the nature of the process, power outages have the potential to cause damage to production cells as the molten liquids could solidify in absence of adequate current. For this reason, production facilities need to be near secure and reliable sources of energy."

https://arcticecon.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/aluminium-smelti...

"near" vs "next door or closer".

Like in all these historical cases there's been some sort of high voltage transmission in between. Sure, not a hundred mile line through god knows how many jurisdictions, but still plenty, a far cry from the "this won't pencil out if we have go farther than across the street" that we're currently seeing.

Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.

> Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.

Isn't the problem that the grid operators/generators have been asking for them to commit part of this huge pile of cash before they start the expensive buildout process but the DCs are refusing to do so?

I don't think it says anything about having a rough time, the grid would expand if those requesting major expansions would commit paying for them. Instead the grid is being told "we need it, build it, and we will pay after" which for the kind of massive investment necessary to push extra dozens of GW is absurdly risky. If the grid starts major expansion and AI investments crumbles in 3-5 years then it's both a waste of resources while also requiring grid operators to charge more the current consumers to bridge the gap left by the AI DCs.

The only thing I can see showing a very rough time is the entitlement of these companies, just because they are surfing a humongous phase of investments they feel they don't need to play by the rules that always existed: if you need something massive you gotta pay for it.

> a far cry from the "this won't pencil out if we have go farther than across the street" that we're currently seeing.

I'm not sure what crying has to do with it but the losses across two streets are double those "across the street", across 4 streets - 4x loss, etc.

Public utilities minimize losses over a wider area with many customers, connecting a GW datacenter to the public grid isn't as simple or as safe as connecting another house, the best solution here is to keep large consumers separate to avoid grid instabilities.

> Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.

It's not true that they "can't expand the grid", they don't want to. They were eager to leach on the public grid but when asked to pay their fair share to be properly integrated by the public utilities, they got worried that some minuscule share of their "infinite piles of cash" may benefit the public - nope, you can't have that under any circumstances.

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