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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

If these data centers are going to be so profitable, then it should be simple to make guarantees about clean self-power, closed loop cooling, and noise and light pollution mitigation. There definitely shouldn't be deals to avoid taxes while lying about job creation.

Maybe if they did those things, there would be fewer permitting fights.

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This is pretty much exactly my gripes, too. Data centers are necessary, but why are we doing this all the wrong way?

The new Utah data center is building new gas pipelines to generate 9GW instead of requiring ANY percentage of green energy, while also giving massive tax breaks that the families living nearby and statewide will have to cover.

For actionable information on this specific project, see:

https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...

I keep seeing people all over the internet adding the caveat that the data centres are necessary in comments following stories about rollout (and often the stories themselves). But never why that's the case. So the question is why are more data centres necessary at the proposed rollout rates? What actually drives this demand?

Don't worry, upstate New York's got your back.

We see your gas pipelines and raise you 100 to 316 diesel generators in a generator farm, with "only 20 running at a time". Shitty Bitcoin mining company that didn't give us any jobs suddenly pivoting to AI.

https://northcountrynow.com/stories/massena-town-board-takin...

Hot take: this is actual a symptom of power demand being too low, not too high. Bitcoin mining didn't draw enough energy to drive a real structural transition, so minors made up the gap with diesel. If NY had Virgina or Texas levels of datacenters, they could provide enough spend and power offtake to justify investments in nuclear.

Can you deploy a nuclear plant in 6 months, which is the time scale these facilities are looking for? You can do that with solar or diesel or natgas.

I agree with this in part. Funneling some of these massive investments into clean power, reduced water use, and noise mitigation, should certainly be a big policy priority, but I think actually achieving those things requires a lot of other policy flexibility. For example, if we want data center builders to use clean power, we also need to clear the way for them to actually build nuclear power plants. I suspect the water problem will solve it self as closed loop cooling systems come down in cost (and besides, 80% of data centers' net water use happens at the power generation stage).

Also, I am a big fan of data centers profit-sharing directly with communities.

Nuclear plants will not be built in the timescales these plants demand. No data centre is going to wait 5-10 years for a nuclear plant to be built in the USA, and the modular passively safe designs aren't ready.

I also seriously doubt the ability of the Trump admin to co-ordinate the required reforms and investments in nuclear energy.

Renewables, batteries and gas are probably going to be the only viable option.

> There definitely shouldn't be deals to avoid taxes while lying about job creation.

The people making those deals are physiologically incapable of not attempting to benefit from socialized externalities to make obscene levels of private profit.

You might as well be asking them to voluntarily stop breathing or pay a fair amount of taxes, they just can't do it.

The problem is it only takes one stupid municipality for them to get a ridiculous deal and, unfortunately, there are a lot of cities that don't have great representation. These companies probably only have to ask 10 different places for an obviously disastrous deal before one of this says yes. It doesn't take corruption, just odds.

>clean self-power

Just clean and scale the grid.

>closed loop cooling

Just clean and scale your water supply. Remove all the lead that's clearly in there while you are at it.

>noise and light pollution mitigation

NextDC B2 has its phase 2 under construction right now, after the construction workers have all gone home theres no external noise from Phase 1. You can stand outside Equinix SY1 2 or 3 and you cant hear anything but road noise. Its a solved engineering problem. Any deviance from this can be interrogated locally. Its not a pertinent issue with Datacenters as a class.

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