[Karrot_Kream]

The reason is because permitting and building a natgas generator is the easiest among the energy production methods in the US. Datacenters need to be close-ish to Internet Exchanges to be cost competitive when lighting up network capacity. Solar cells are expensive (Chinese tariffs or domestic production) and permitting is tough. Nuclear is still a permitting and cost nightmare. Wind requires a lot of land. Hydroelectric is considered an environmental dead end after the ecological effects of the Hoover Dam. Geothermal is still unproven. Transmission lines moving power between generation and consumption is a permitting nightmare.

In that world, natural gas just makes the most sense. The US hasn't build generation capacity in any meaningful way in decades. We've deindustrialized over time so it's been relatively okay, until a new form of industry (datacenters) starts putting pressure on the whole thing.

[fc417fc802]

> Solar cells are expensive (Chinese tariffs or domestic production) and permitting is tough.

The tariffs I understand (even if they really don't make sense in this particular case) but the permitting I do not. Do you have more information or links?

> Wind requires a lot of land.

In rural but populated areas wind is generally installed on someone else's grazing area for a small fee. In truly unpopulated areas (ie desert) access to land isn't usually an issue since there's approximately zero demand for it.

That said I do agree with your general theme that our grid is underinvested and the management and policy surrounding it are a mess.

[Karrot_Kream]

> The tariffs I understand (even if they really don't make sense in this particular case) but the permitting I do not. Do you have more information or links?

Take a look at [1]. The current admin felt that NEPA reviews were taking too long for utility grade energy projects and put in a cap for NEPA review length that does not apply to wind and solar. The article goes into how long utility scale solar projects can take to go through NEPA.

> In rural but populated areas wind is generally installed on someone else's grazing area for a small fee. In truly unpopulated areas (ie desert) access to land isn't usually an issue since there's approximately zero demand for it.

The challenge then is bringing the power to the datacenter, which often involves transmission lines, which goes back to permitting.

[1]: https://www.resources.org/archives/delays-to-wind-and-solar-...

[paleotrope]

Building a facility that uses megawatts of energy in an old farm field in the country, and having long lead times to get it installed, isn't really indicative of "deindustrialization" is it? Also, I don't think building datacenters outside of Columbus are being driven by closeness to an IX. I don't recall seeing Columbus as being significant on any US backbone map. More likely they just want to be close to each other. Someone must have started that ball rolling.

[Karrot_Kream]

> I don't recall seeing Columbus as being significant on any US backbone map. More likely they just want to be close to each other. Someone must have started that ball rolling.

AWS us-east-2 (2016) and GCP us-east5 (2022) are both in Ohio. Not 100% sure they're close to an IX but my guess is there's existing infra to route onto.

> Building a facility that uses megawatts of energy in an old farm field in the country, and having long lead times to get it installed, isn't really indicative of "deindustrialization" is it?

Sorry I think my message might have gotten a bit conflated. I meant, in the offshoring that happened in the US in the late '90s-early '00s, the US ended up losing industrial demand. Obviously consumer demand increased in the meantime but we've been living on a mostly stagnant energy supply for a long time.