[stevenwoo]

At least in the USA, I think if consumers realized their power bills going up every year are tied to these new data centers, there would be more opposition to data centers going up politically. https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a... I don't know if the electricity markets work differently in other countries.

[omcnoe]

The US needs sufficient energy surplus to power industry. US energy production has been essentially flat for the past 25 years and the country has forgot how to bring new capacity online. Chinese energy production is up over 6x over the same period. China has more clean energy generation capacity today than their entire capacity a little over a decade ago.

Instead of panicking about data center electricity usage we need to be worrying about getting back to a state where we regularly bring new (clean) generation capacity online.

[MountDoom]

Taxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment.

I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.

[chermi]

That's not the main problem. That's the convenient scapegoat so we don't get mad about the real problem. Power bills have been going up for years. We're just not good at generating and serving sufficient energy. Our grid sucks, our utilities suck and can do whatever they want, and we can't build anything. And the grid problems get worse as we add renewables as they have to manage more complex generation profiles. (I'm all for renewables, love solar.)

[fooker]

It's correlated to be data centers, not tied to. That's an important difference.

We could easily build ..say.. 10 nuclear reactors and halve the utility bills with amortization.

[noosphr]

The power bill going up is because the US, and the West in general, bet on renewables and a low energy future.

Neither of those things turn out to be a good fit for the new economy. The only thing left for people who derided nuclear for the last 40 years is to hope this is a bubble that sends us back to the 17th century when it pops. Anything else means we have to invest trillions in nuclear right now.

[DavidPiper]

Genuine question from a non-American: What is "the new economy"?

[noosphr]

Malthusianism for computers.

Moore's law is dead. The only way to increase compute is to increase the power we feed to computers. AI is just the shiniest example. Everything else will follow suit until electricity costs increase enough that it doesn't make sense to throw any more computation at it.

Any country that doesn't have energy to spare will be in the position of countries which didn't have food to support armies before the industrial revolution.

[fooker]

Interesting point. I can see this could turn out to be true.

If we needed, for example, 1000 TWH to power AI for a huge drone swarm but could not do it while China could, this would be problematic.

It requires a future where MAD with nuclear weapons is obsolete though, with some futuristic new missile defense tech. I don't see that happening until some currently unknown physics makes it possible.

[jimbob45]

What’s your beef with solar? Both parties seem to like it just fine, despite it not covering as much of the total demand as anyone would like.

[noosphr]

Both parties like it better because it turns the electricity market into another casino that lets you take billions from the parts of the economy that do things.

I worked as a quant in the electric market. There wasn't a single dataset I saw where more renewables resulted in lower total costs for consumers.

[Drblessing]

The amount of money being invested in AI should've been invested into nuclear, both fusion and fission. The AI bubble will burst, but the energy bubble never bursts.