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With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan
by kulahan 1y ago
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
- RandomLensman 1y agoIt would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help. Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
- bluefirebrand 1y agoIt is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
- RandomLensman 1y agoWhy would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoBecause the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then
- RandomLensman 1y agoReactors need ongoing maintenance, repairs, replacement.
- kulahan 1y agoWhy would fusion reactors magically appear when the entire field of nuclear energy production is, in this scenario, essentially dead??
- RandomLensman 1y agoNot sure why pursuing fusion needs building fission reactors for energy production.
- kulahan 1y agoBecause nuclear engineers, plant operators, radioactive mining facilities, and other types of workers that will be needed across both, need to be employed from today until fusion reactors are made.
- yellowapple 1y agoNot even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
- robotnikman 1y agoThis right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.
- fundatus 1y agoBase load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
- yellowapple 1y agoIt'd be way easier to build a few nuclear plants than it would be to build an equivalent constant energy source from solar+wind and batteries. The nuclear plants would also consume far less land area.
- kulahan 1y agoDamn, so we’re left with nothing, because nuclear is by far the most viable moving forward.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoYou need solar and batteries for peak loads, not just solar In many places in the world, peak load does not occur during daylight hours, especially during winter And yes, further north the days are longer but the solar capture efficiency is also much lower
- yellowapple 1y agoTrue. I'm biased by living in a place where the peak load does happen during daylight hours (because that's when you need to run the A/C) and where heating usually happens via gas. Electric heating would indeed shift that dynamic (though municipal water heating would shift it the other way).
- raverbashing 1y agoI'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
- RandomLensman 1y agoMy baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.
- kulahan 1y agoI was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoYou limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops. Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025 US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
- kulahan 1y agoCool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoOther countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat. https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
- toomuchtodo 1y ago> Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims shared another chart, saying: “The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months alone.” Man, are they optimistic. Mims linked to an article by Paul Kedrosky, who offers another perspective [1] on the AI bubble, as a percentage of GDP. Kedrosky, in turn, quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping, who warned of overinvesting in AI-focused datacenters. When Xi Jinping and Wall Street traders are on the same page, you know it’s bad. [2] [1] https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/ https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/ [2] https://open.substack.com/pub/thealgorithmicbridge/p/im-an-ai-enthusiast-the-bubble-scares https://open.substack.com/pub/thealgorithmicbridge/p/im-an-a...
- oceanplexian 1y agoIt’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
- bluGill 1y agoGermany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
- standeven 1y agoIf we’re looking at the car and energy industries, I think China has already won.
- kulahan 1y agoCould you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
- simonklitj 1y agoHeh, it was bought by BMW in ‘94.
- tietjens 1y agoThe German car companies are struggling intensely against Chinese competition, everywhere outside of the US, and especially in China. The Chinese electric cars sell for 3 times less than the German ones in EU. The Chinese also invested heavily in e tech. The Germans? Not so much.
- kulahan 1y agoAh yeah, now that you mention it I’ve heard BYD is doing well in most markets (plus others, I assume). Even ignoring current tariffs, I’m not sure an overtly Chinese car would catch on in the US, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been wrong before.
- pstuart 1y agoThere's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
- kulahan 1y agoGeothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
- croes 1y agoIf demand spikes nuclear power plants aren’t fast enough
- kulahan 1y agoThey are when the power spikes for the day, in a typically predictable fashion. I’m not sure of anything more available that isn’t really dirty.
- rootusrootus 1y ago> baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
- edbaskerville 1y agoYeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants. Check out: https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
- pstuart 1y ago
- fuzzy2 1y agoIf AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
- V__ 1y agoI willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them.
- bluGill 1y agoI'm sure the bubble will burst. However we have already found a few uses for AI and those uses will continue after the burst (if they are economical)
- i5heu 1y agoNot with a tech that needs 15 years to be build
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ThinkBeat 1y agoA country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise. The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point. SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
- parhamn 1y ago> who knows what demands AI will have at that point This is true for any investment pretty much.
- LinXitoW 1y agoWell, not really. Investing in heating homes or powering light bulbs is, outside of extremely extreme situations, always a good investment, because people will always want to do that. AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
- kccqzy 1y agoThis is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
- croes 1y agoThe wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy. AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.