3 ms·

What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them? It also seems worth noting

What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them? It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all. The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.

ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.
- hunter2_ 8mo ago
  Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio. But I guess this isn't how the world works.
- fwip 8mo ago
  There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.
  - saltyoldman 8mo ago
    KWh, but yes. I'm in CA so we don't have data centers because the cost of a Kwh is already like $123134^100
- taeric 8mo ago
  A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.
- ikiris 8mo ago
  Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power. The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
  As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?
- phil21 8mo ago
  It's due to lack of investment in the power grid on a generational timeline. We used up every bit of slack and extra capacity in the name of efficiency and not needing to spend the money on building stuff. It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky. We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years. I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected! A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal. We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.
bilekas 8mo ago
> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them? Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
  The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
  - mindslight 8mo ago
    The fundamental problem is that adjusting the regulations for new operations still delivers no equitable relief for people around the site that was let through. An industrial operation shouldn't get an indefinite pass of grandfathered use for finding tricks in the current regulations. Rather the turbines should be shut down in short order (~weeks), and then owners can figure out how to proceed with the foreseeable contingency - wait for the grid operator (or properly incentivize them), deploy their own solar and batteries or some other type of power generation that doesn't produce noise and air pollution externalities, and so on.
    - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
      The article says that Michael Turner, the vice chair of the county's government, doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone. That makes it a lot harder to justify shutting them down. And potentially quite expensive, if they or their users can argue the county is liable for the costs. You mention properly incentivizing the grid operator, but this is also not so simple. As Dominion describes in their FAQ (https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-services/data-center-requests https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-servi...), providing power to a large datacenter is itself a substantial construction project, requiring its own permits and specialized components. It's not just a matter of paying enough to get some guys working overtime.
squibonpig 8mo ago
There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.
- zardo 8mo ago
  Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
  I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents. The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
- JuniperMesos 8mo ago
  It's bad for my quality of life if some of the economic inputs to things I use (like "the internet", writ large) get made deliberately more expensive to build via regulatory fiat. Indeed, this is basically deliberate NIMBYism, and NIMBYism is why housing is scarce and expensive where I live. I don't want policymakers to be able to assert that the only possible use of a datacenter is something they find silly and then change the law to make them more expensive to build.
  - 8mo ago

ToucanLoucan 8mo ago

I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.

hunter2_ 8mo ago
Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio. But I guess this isn't how the world works.
fwip 8mo ago
There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.
- saltyoldman 8mo ago
  KWh, but yes. I'm in CA so we don't have data centers because the cost of a Kwh is already like $123134^100
taeric 8mo ago
A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.
ikiris 8mo ago
Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power. The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?
phil21 8mo ago
It's due to lack of investment in the power grid on a generational timeline. We used up every bit of slack and extra capacity in the name of efficiency and not needing to spend the money on building stuff. It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky. We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years. I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected! A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal. We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.

bilekas 8mo ago

> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them? Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.

SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
- mindslight 8mo ago
  The fundamental problem is that adjusting the regulations for new operations still delivers no equitable relief for people around the site that was let through. An industrial operation shouldn't get an indefinite pass of grandfathered use for finding tricks in the current regulations. Rather the turbines should be shut down in short order (~weeks), and then owners can figure out how to proceed with the foreseeable contingency - wait for the grid operator (or properly incentivize them), deploy their own solar and batteries or some other type of power generation that doesn't produce noise and air pollution externalities, and so on.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    The article says that Michael Turner, the vice chair of the county's government, doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone. That makes it a lot harder to justify shutting them down. And potentially quite expensive, if they or their users can argue the county is liable for the costs. You mention properly incentivizing the grid operator, but this is also not so simple. As Dominion describes in their FAQ (https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-services/data-center-requests https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-servi...), providing power to a large datacenter is itself a substantial construction project, requiring its own permits and specialized components. It's not just a matter of paying enough to get some guys working overtime.

squibonpig 8mo ago

There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.

zardo 8mo ago
Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.
SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents. The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
JuniperMesos 8mo ago
It's bad for my quality of life if some of the economic inputs to things I use (like "the internet", writ large) get made deliberately more expensive to build via regulatory fiat. Indeed, this is basically deliberate NIMBYism, and NIMBYism is why housing is scarce and expensive where I live. I don't want policymakers to be able to assert that the only possible use of a datacenter is something they find silly and then change the law to make them more expensive to build.
- 8mo ago