Hacker News Reader

Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

The county narrative is cherry picking imo and poor journalism. They are part of PJM which contains one of the largest data centers hubs. The PJM grid serves something like 67mm residents. PJM also uses an annual forward capacity auction to set prices and that is at least partly to blame in price increases. They are trying to forecast peak demand 3 years in advance to set a price for power plant owners to stay online in the event of needing that peak capacity. It’s poorly designed and why they have had such significant spikes there.

View on HN

That might be so, but is also simplifying things a little too much and pointing to the issue.

"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.

So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.

(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).

Agreed, this is a difficult topic to simplify. "The grid can handle it" is almost always a * statement.

Can it handle it today? What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030? Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran? What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?

People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.

If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.

It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.

Nobody has proven that those 37 customers are to blame compared to the poorly structured forward pricing system which is largely to blame for some of their recent pricing increases. Not sure where this grid can handle it narrative is coming from. Most of the woes in this article are cherry picked.

If you want to pretend the only source of information on this subject is the linked article I'm sure you can find many users here to debate within your arbitrary parameters.

Same goes for proof, which I'm sure would exclude power flow models if they were available for said debate.

Edit: We can agree the article is not comprehensive, and doesn't have data PJM and utilities have not published.

I’ve linked analyses explaining why PJM’s forward capacity market has been a major driver of recent retail rate increases, not just in this one county.

SemiAnalysis: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/are-ai-datacenters-inc...

LBNL: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...

If you disagree, point to the analysis or data. Suggesting I’m “pretending” doesn’t address the argument. The article cherry-picks one county while largely ignoring the broader PJM pricing mechanics affecting millions of customers. Do better. Between pricing mechanics, input cost inflation and yes increase in demand has impact but not like the article likes to weave it.

Without seeing actual power flow modeling for the lines attached to these data centers no one on the planet can accurately weigh the expense of these customers.

You can't 8760 where and when overloads happen elsewhere, unplanned downtime can't be identified in (or out of) the ISO, you can't forcast demand, you can't plan pre-purchasing of power before it's on demand. You can't speculate on if reconductoring could save money, or remove overloads.

You want to look at rate increases as the core driver. So much so you dump it on replies to others comments. Too many variables are opaque for me to have a discussion about what is the 'largest' factor when each item on the above list could represent 10 million to 8 billion+ in cost.

But I can tell you I won't be convinced that new large loads, and who approved them are not a contributing factor because no one has "proven" it in real time. That's the kind of logical falacy that results in dismissal of real issues.

Who said it was a poorly designed grid? I think you missed what I said. Their forward price auction system misaligns prices 3 year in advance. My point is a lot of the price increases for PJM is due to this auction system.

> poor journalism.

404 media has never been interested in being good journalism, but rather driving signups to to their website by people who don't know what proper journalism looks like

Reply on news.ycombinator.com