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We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]

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156 points xbmcuser | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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fibers ◴[04 Sep 25 13:17 UTC] No.45126940[source]▶
I was looking into energy markets and how they work and it is truly a cluster of moving parts all along the Eastern Interconnect. The question is when is the shoe going to really drop? You can only keep prices going up on an inelastic good before something really bad happens, and this doesn't even touch climate tail risks like heat sagging tx lines across the grid.
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boringg ◴[04 Sep 25 14:13 UTC] No.45127504[source]▶
Energy markets are deeply complicated markets. They are heavily regulated and have a lot of challenges outside of strictly cost of power. Worth remembering they have safety requirements, uptime, national security implications, truly the backbone of our economic welfare.

Only upside I see out of this huge demand for electricity -- hopefully nuclear will clear the deck on using coal, gas and diesel. If we can build and operate nuclear again we can level our long term cost of power. Combined with renewables its a good combo.

Other than that - power prices will always be derivative to the price of natural gas.

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fibers ◴[04 Sep 25 14:20 UTC] No.45127578[source]▶
After looking at Vogtle 3/4 I highly doubt any admin including this one is willing to bear the cost.
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1. Workaccount2 ◴[04 Sep 25 14:37 UTC] No.45127791[source]▶
If there is one good thing the admin might actually do, it's gut the incredibly suffocating regulations on nuclear.

Nuclear is only a fraction as expensive as the regulations around it. My company has a division that deals with the nuclear industry, and I really cannot overstate how incredibly intense they are.

Imagine your company issued laptops and required 14 different "live scanner" security apps running with twice daily full system scans. Now be a productive dev on that system. Would you be surprised if every project runs far over budget and far over timeline?