'Never seen this level of objection': Scotland pushes back against datacentres | Hacker News Reader

'Never seen this level of objection': Scotland pushes back against datacentres

theguardian.com

39 pointsndsipa_pomu17 comments

The irony is, given the UK's single energy market and the bottlenecks moving that energy down from Scotland, building datacenters further south will push up Scotland's energy prices as well, more so than if they were built locally.

Datacentres can in theory reduce bills.

They're a large, mostly well-behaved grid load which lets you spread fixed costs over more units of electricity.

The problems start when they are being built by well connected entities that can leverage their power to simply demand that other people pay more to give them a discount.

Very similar to the shopping around factories do. Usually a factory brings jobs and other good stuff, but you don't get the factory unless you do X, Y and Z in competition with all the other possible locations. That can lead to a winners curse where you're effectively subsidizing the factory and losing out overall if you "win" the auction.

It's true that all else being equal new power demand lowers the fixed cost per unit of marginal energy generated. But if the data centre requires new grid and storage capacity to handle its load and those fixed costs are charged to the entire electricity consumer base, there is a trade-off.

Also, all else is not equal because the UK is already grasping towards a stretch target of a >95% low-carbon power system by 2030 which has over-loaded supply chains, sacrificed generation cost to speed, and created a queue to connect to the grid that outpaces the annual rate of connections by over an order of magnitude. Adding huge blocks of new incremental demand to the system is quite a challenge, in this context.

> They're a large, mostly well-behaved grid load which lets you spread fixed costs over more units of electricity.

Is that true of AI datacenters? I recently read an article that talked about one that dynamically would spin up gas turbine generators based on compute load.

And yet here we are, still subsidizing steelworks in England, and Scottish people are paying the cost in their electricity bills.

Scotland's abundant local energy resources should be spent on things that actually benefit Scotland and provide jobs.

They raise your electricity costs and employ relatively few people and send the profits elsewhere.

Don't forget about water usage (likely not an issue in Scotland), blighting the landscape (very much an issue) and probably discharging pollution into waterways as well as the inevitable noise pollution.

why dont they build the datacenters far away from people/village/towns?

More difficult to built, more difficult to get permission, ironically, and presumably the datacenters are planning to employ some people so they'll want to live at least somewhat nearby.

but since they have so many objection now. learn from china's approch? https://japantoday.com/category/tech/china-goes-rural-with-d... (from what i learned it should be build datacents far away -> attract people to work nearby, not the other way around)

even it cost more, but still better thant the current situation?

> build datacents far away -> attract people to work nearby

Probably not feasible if the remote area has no public services. You'd be wanting some people to move to an area without schools, shops, doctors, hospitals etc. I can imagine that appealing to nature lovers, but would they be wanting to work in a soul destroying hyperscale datacentre?

What, all 6 people who work at the datacenter?

i dont know much about Scotland. maybe it's because in china unemplomynet is a huge thing, and if the job pays well, people would love to go. its like the gold rush in the USA, not the same profit level, but you can make money, it worth it, in these days(at least in china)

Too easy to destroy if they're outside of population centers - soon they'll be building them under hospitals and orphanages

Which counteracts with the EU's desire to have any kind of sovereign AI. Guess you have to lose something if you want to earn something...

Scotland is not a member of the EU since brexit.

I think we can just call them AI surveillance centers. This isn't the usual fare anymore.

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