Hacker News Reader

Comment by stdgy | Hacker News Reader

The thing that gets me is why the hell are these things being powered with loud generators and fossil fuels? These facilities are billed as being 21st century technological marvels. But what's actually delivered looks like something out of the industrial revolution. Harvesting old jet engines from decommissioned planes in order to power your facility? You've got to be joking.

This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.

View on HN

For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout. If the US were a thinking nation, it would be trivial to ram through solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines. However, we all saw what happened when Massachusetts tried to build power lines to buy power from Hydro-Quebec, for example. It’s entirely a regulatory self own that AI capex is being spent on gas turbines instead of wind turbines.

"For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout"

Got any proof for that statement?

> For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout.

That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it. From where I sit, a major criticism of the DC rollout has been the use of fossil fuels.

> That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it.

I dunno if it's for the most part or not, but it holds true in my experience.

In my home state, there has been a transmission line project planned for over a decade now to take wind power generated in the windy southern end of the state to bring it to the central metropolitan load center.

It's been basically tied up this entire time due to NIMBY. It just recently in the past year or so started to enter the next phase, just in time for the anti-datacenter folks to be added to the NIMBY allied cause to get it blocked again.

It might still happen, but overall green energy from where I stand is something everyone wants in someone else's backyard. In the state I currently live in rural folks protest the solar farms, and pretty much everyone everywhere protests the transmission upgrades required.

My whole life has been consumed with basically no one allowing anything to be built for any reason. It's getting tiring, so taking anti-datacenter concerns at face value is proving difficult to me. Even if I do logically understand many or maybe even most are being brought in good faith.

Polls won't really provide much value on the subject. Plenty of people will say they are in favor of green energy projects - until they are proposed near them.

How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered? The only on-the-shelf low carbon tech with the reliability and deployability we need is nuclear. Any other discussion is just pointless.

> How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered?

A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.

I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.

Neither of those get to the carbon neutral point of the whole endeavor. Just more complicated steps to shuffle the deck chairs around. Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines. The costly part is a political and regulatory problem that is more easily solved than paving over all the farm land with solar panels or strip mining third world countries for lithium.

> Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines.

Oh I see, I didn't realize it was so simple. Let's meet back in a week and we can compare my backyard solar + battery demonstration to your nuclear demonstration.

This is a good example of feeling like I've been transported back in time. A time before people had an answer to the question: How can I use a computer if I've disconnected it from the grid? (I guess that takes us back to 1980)

Supply constraints

Everything is kind of maxed out. The main guy going with jet engines is Musk who got in late after Altman et al had signed up most spare power. In a more sane world the government would regulate it but the current president doesn't seem keep apart from banning the term AI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com