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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

So it is a low efficiency power station with some servers attached to it.

People complain when you hook them up to the high efficiency generators that power the grid, so this is what they get.

People complain when you violate the rules and externalize harms, yes. They should be made to turn off the generators and pay enough for the electricity so as not to impact everyone else's prices.

Gee, I wonder why people were complaining about that?

It's very simple: just take some of the existing capital and invest it towards the grid, then build the datacenter. The problem with the grid isn't electricity stealing. It's that the grid literally cannot support the amount of datacenters being built. It's not a matter of opinion, just numbers.

So why won't AI companies do just that, invest in the grid? Well they want the datacenters now, not 10 years from now. I think they're all terrified investor capital will dry up at any moment, so they have to expend as much capital as possible, as fast as possible. That's stupid of course, but that's how they operate.

That's how it works already. You pay the power company and that money is invested into the grid. Somehow this has worked in Ashburn VA for their massive data center build out so I don't see why it can't work in other places too.

Obviously nobody wants to wait 10 years and it has nothing to do with stupidity or fear.

Okay that’s very obviously not the same thing I’m proposing, and you know that. Paying for electricity is normal. But that doesn’t magically increase the capacity. It does, in time. A lot of time.

Which is why we’re using diesel generators and not building data centers. We don’t have the power, we just don’t.

I am well aware that's not what you are proposing. What you are proposing includes "wait 10 years" which absolutely no reasonable person is going to accept.

Well that's actually the same thing as you're proposing.

And "no reasonable person is going to accept" okay... sometimes you have to accept reality. I don't know what to tell you, or venture capitalists.

We don't have the power, and we won't for a while. Using polluting dirty fossil fuel generators is not a solution, and plainly should not be allowed. Of course the current US administration is incredibly pro-pollution, so they don't care. But we should. It's you and I who will be consuming these pollutants and its you and I's health on the line. Donald Trump will be dead any day now, of course he doesn't care.

It does not take a decade to build a new power plant. Yes, if grid operators drag their feet companies will try to end-run them, but the solution isn't banning data centers it's making it easier to add proper capacity to the grid and requiring builders to add power in a place where it can be useful for everyone.

I'm not a fan of watching gas turbines sprout across the country but I'm also not a fan of seeing a bunch of NIMBYs waste the opportunity to tax hundreds of billions of dollars of investments. This isn't some pie-in-the-sky idea, VA is great at speeding up and taxing data center construction.

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