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I think we nuclear energy should play a big part in decarbonizing our energy infrastructure, but this is doing nothing of the sort. This is ostensibly 1GW of ne

by plorg 3y ago

I think we nuclear energy should play a big part in decarbonizing our energy infrastructure, but this is doing nothing of the sort. This is ostensibly 1GW of new projected demand without any new generation being built for it. Meaning, at best this is creating new demand that will have to be sourced elsewhere - this is a nuclear station that has been operating for 40 years. It's good for it to stay online, but they would not have a hard time selling that electricity. This really just seems like a crabs in a bucket capitalist move - laying claim to existing resources before they become scarce and expensive.

dgacmu 3y ago
That's not really "at best" - at best, this represents a mix of new demand plus some compute being moved from customers' on-prem / small and inefficient datacenters. I'm not sure how much of AWS's growth is "new compute" vs "moved compute", but for the part that's moved, it's not necessarily a bad thing for it to move to a datacenter with a low PUE (power utilization effectiveness - overhead such as cooling/backup power/power supply inefficiency) that uses green power. (AWS/Google/Microsoft's datacenters are a _lot_ more efficient on a per-compute basis than the typical small corporate datacenter; like 30+% lower power waste because of inefficient AC and power distribution design.)