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Comment by micro2588 | Hacker News Reader

But in PJM they are almost entirely being powered by natural gas and coal? Even if you contract out power from a nuclear plant some other plant on the grid is now enjoying a higher capacity factor, at the margin natural gas.

The data center in question in Utah was marketed as a 9GW full build out natural gas facility more than twice the electrical generation of the entire state. Coal electrical production in the US increased 13% last year.

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I don’t defend every data center everywhere. I’m talking about the proposed data center about 11 miles from my door.

In my area we have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from that site. It sells 80-85% of all power generate wholesale to other markets. We have the power infrastructure here.

The amount of nuclear generation is roughly fixed (minus the refurbishment of three mile) in that region. If you add additional large load to the grid and outbid other demand for that power you are just shifting the load you replaced to other sources, which in PJM region would be mostly gas (new or existing) and delaying the decommissioning of existing base load coal plants. Renewables in that region are unfortunately a small percent of electrical generation.

I do agree that other demands like water consumption are overblown and could be largely regulated to enforce best practices. What infrastructure we are building as a society to meet this load demand is going to be the lasting impact of this generational infrastructure investment and it's looking like that will be mostly fossil fuel based in the near to mid term.

I’m only talking about my local area. I’m not defending the Colossus sites. I don’t live near them.

It is much more than the Colossus sites, I would look at the capacity additions in the regional grids you are apart of and what is being funded to meet these increases in demand from data centers. The majority of it is natural gas generation and a sizeable but minority amount of battery storage. Just outbidding people for a relatively fixed amount of clean nuclear ignores the second order effects of adding large loads like these. What happens in your area does have larger impacts.

Again, I’m talking about my region. We have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from the proposed site of the data center. That station sells 80-85% of the power generated wholesale to other parts of the state and grids regionally.

The nuclear generating station is part of a larger system. Say you build enough data centers in your local area to use up all the station power so that 80% is no longer exported, what is getting built somewhere else to make up for that missing generation the data centers now use? Its not new nuclear. When you add data center load to a grid how the additional generation is supplied is really what matters in terms of impacts.

We should have been building additional nuclear capacity for the past 50 years. The kinds of anti data center activism we’re seeing now was directed at nuclear back then.

It would take decades to build enough data centers to use 100% of the station’s capacity.

We can build capacity as we build consumers. It’s all about balance.

I also don’t believe that we’re going to be building all of the 1200 proposed data centers in the US.

Being next to a nuclear power plant but attached to a regional grid is not that relevant in terms of total additive emissions from a data center build out. You have to look at the change in emissions of the grid as a whole. Companies are incentivized to care about disclosing a narrow boundary view of scope 1 & 2 emissions but we live in the real world not a spreadsheet.

US electrical emissions YOY increased in part due to data center build out and energy demand.

I’ve made a few comments around this. I’m going to wind down my involvement in this thread.

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