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50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
- swader999 5mo agoBiosacks will be pushed to the margins as more GDP share is created by tokens and corporations are able to lobby for votes.
- pstuart 5mo agoPower should be a public utility, just like water and sewage.
- dylan604 5mo agoPrivate companies can operate more efficiently offering better service and competitive pricing. How do you not know that privatization is the solution? /s
- prepend 5mo agoIn the US, power is a public utility. And regulated as such. The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location. Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
- dylan604 5mo agoThat is not 100% true though. In Burbank, CA the power is city owned. https://www.burbankwaterandpower.com/ https://www.burbankwaterandpower.com/
- jeffbee 5mo agoA somewhat more prominent example of this model would be Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
- dylan604 5mo agoDoes prominence really matter when providing supporting evidence to contradictory statement?
- jmalicki 5mo agoIn the bay area, Santa Clara has city owned power, and residents pay something like a third of what the rest of the bay area does per kilowatt hour. Part of the inspiration for why SF is trying to kick out PGE and have municipal power.
- jeffbee 5mo agoSVP delivers over 90% of their energy to commercial customers, making it a bit of a special case. However it does prove the hypothesis that large-scale consumers tend to lower, not raise, the local retail price for energy. As for SF, there is no real sense in which they are trying to kick out PG&E. While there is and always has been a vocal group of SF residents who want a free pony, when it comes down to paying the bills SF has voted in 12 separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. They have a demonstrated history of failure to invest in their own utilities stretching back 100 years.
- prepend 5mo agoI didn’t say it was 100% true and there are exceptions. I don’t know the true distribution, but I’d wager the vast majority of the US is served by either a corporation or some non-government organization. Now I know and it’s 1/7 or about 15% of Americans have government or community owned power. [0] [0] https://www.publicpower.org/public-power https://www.publicpower.org/public-power
- josteinhylin 5mo ago[flagged]
- lacy_tinpot 5mo agoPalo Alto's power is city owned as well. I think we're building out fiber too. Public infrastructure shouldn't be private. Imagine the nightmare of privately owned roads and highways.
- toast0 5mo agoThat there are city owned utilities doesn't seem to refute any of prepend's statement. > In the US, power is a public utility. A city owned utility is both a public utiliy because it offers a utility service to the public and a public utility because it is municipally owned. > And regulated as such. I expect Burbank W&P is regulated by the CPUC, same as other power utilities that operate in California. > The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location. Many providers are private; this one isn't, and it depends on the location. > Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly. This is, like prepend's opinion, man. I assume they are truthfully expressing their trust and happiness. Even if they lived within the service area of Burbank W&P or another municipal power utility, they might not trust it. As to power being a natural monopoly, it's hard to tell exactly given that it exists in a highly regulated market; but I don't know of any US markets where there is a choice for electrical distribution. You get the utility that serves your property, or you get to pay them to build their network to serve your property, or you get no utility power (and in some locations, no certiticate of occupancy). I'm sure there's some exceptions such as a lot that stradles the service areas or a lot with a high availability use that requirea feeds from multiple substations and it makes more sense to wire to a substation from a neighboring utility. And there's the legacy DC power networks in some old cities. But generally, there's no overbuilding of competing distribution lines; unlike say telecom where many areas have at least two of copper telephone, copper coax cable, and fiber telecom; and often several vendors if you're willing to pay commercial rates for cabling.
- josteinhylin 5mo ago[dead]
- josteinhylin 5mo ago[dead]
- ecshafer 5mo agoConcord, MA, has a municipal power company and a municipal isp. I think they run a power plant, but I know they maintain the transmission lines.
- mistrial9 5mo agothis is a false statement. There are many kinds of business structures around power generating companies, across the USA.
- nradov 5mo agoYou can make a reasonable case for transmission and distribution to be a government operated public utility. But we need aggressive private industry competition on the generation and storage side in order to prevent shortages.
- Glawen 5mo agoWhy ? Many country have public generation without any shortages.
- nradov 5mo agoAnd do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
- palmotea 5mo ago> And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term. It's not the only reliable way. Also the free market has a bad habit of settling on "most profitable" (in the short-medium term) configurations by sacrificing resiliency.
- mmooss 5mo ago> Economic central planning always fails over the long term. So do businesses - capitalism has business failure built in and expected. Private industry in energy has failed the public dramatically at times. Economic planning works in many respects - lots of places do fine with roads, energy, healthcare, water, gas, other transport infra (airports, subways, etc.). The question is, which tool does what well, and how do we apply them? Private industry is good for rapid innovation and development, and for keeping things off the public ledger - smartphones, etc. It isn't good when failure isn't an option, such as police, water, ... look at hospitals, for a current example. > central planning These are bogey scare words - what is central about it? It's not a 5 year plan for the entire economy of the entire country.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ageitgey 5mo agoIt's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- vasco 5mo ago"Breaking: Smartphone producers known to rely on slave labor keep doing it. Posted from my iPhone"
- mystraline 5mo agoThat isnt the slam you think it is. https://truthout.org/art/mister-gotcha/ https://truthout.org/art/mister-gotcha/
- tt24 5mo agoHypocrites just can’t let go of this comic. They love it. It’s like they have one thing that they hold onto for dear life. I don’t think they’ll ever stop posting it lol
- mystraline 5mo agoIm sure you are very intelligent.
- slg 5mo agoIt's truly ironic the way this comic is now primarily used as part of the same behavior it's criticizing.
- vasco 5mo agoThat's subjective my friend. The fact that you draw an opinion doesn't make it more valid. I think there's merit to confronting people on high horses to their own lies.
- jeffbee 5mo agoSame content: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nearly-50-000-lake-tahoe-170925969.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nearly-50-000-lake-tahoe-1709... TL;DR Libertarian separatists, who went so far as to name their utility "Liberty Utilities", organized their utility in 2009 under a temporary agreement with Nevada, which was extended twice, and now after almost two decades of failing to invest in their own generating assets they will be deprioritized by their ex-partner.
- bos 5mo agoYour backstory is complete nonsense. Liberty Utilities has nothing to do with libertarian separatists. It's a brand name of Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp, a boring Canadian infrastructure conglomerate that buys regulated water, gas, and electric systems across North America. They bought this chunk of rural California grid from NV Energy in 2009. That's it.
- mikestew 5mo agoI see that a sibling comment beat me to it, but "Libertarian separatists"? They're well-organized separatists given they're spread across, what, a couple dozen states? It's quite the narrative you've spun, and it would be almost as interesting if it were true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Power_%26_Utilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Power_%26_Utilities
- infecto 5mo agoThis is an interesting problem. I have been wanting to dig deeper on some of the complaints around water and power. This one is unique though. Doesn’t read much like a problem so much with data center growth as it does with Liberty mismanaging their business/assets. For almost 20 years liberty acted as nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation. They should have been figuring out this problem long ago.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoI would think that a lot of rural electrical cooperatives are "nothing more than a transmission operator" i.e. they own/manage/maintain the lines from their providers out to their customers, but don't have the capital or expertise to run generating plants.
- infecto 5mo ago“nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation” don’t take the quote out of context now. I would bet most coops have fairly concrete contracts on generation. This one is unique because they were using usage from a grid they have no standing in. Weak agreement, folks should have been figuring it out 20 years ago.
- freediddy 5mo agoThis is like the movie Chinatown, where people were fighting over water, but now it's all about electricity. It sounds like Lake Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road and didn't care about electricity for so long that now they have to pay the piper. I think it's entire just that they have to bear the costs of their own electricity.
- infecto 5mo agoThat’s how I read it too. Liberty alongside constituents had 20 years to figure it out. Data centers are just the new shock titles that people eat up.
- colechristensen 5mo agoEh, not really. Few years ago everybody was talking about the inadequacies of our aging electricity distribution infrastructure and how it was a shame it wasn't being fixed and the risks it entails. Now folks are wailing about the terrible AI come for our electricity and how awful the burden of the upgrades are. When the upgrades were for solar they were good, when upgrades are for AI they're bad. It's almost like people just want to complain about anything associated with something they don't like regardless of relevance.
- mikestew 5mo agoIt's almost like people just want to complain about anything associated with something they don't like regardless of relevance. I've noticed that we don't hear a lot about the EV boogyman taking down our electric grid now that AI has come to town.
- shigawire 5mo agoI'd say the people complaining about AI likely see EVs as having some utility. While AI may have some utility, the amount of resources invested seems to make it more of a ponzi scheme waiting to pop.
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- redwood 5mo agoNorthern Nevada would be such an obvious place to build out large amounts of solar energy as well
- eitally 5mo agoThere are quite a few already (though not as many as in the southern part): https://cleanview.co/solar-farms/nevada https://cleanview.co/solar-farms/nevada
- nvitas 5mo agojust as a thought experiment, say you're an entrepreneur, how would you solve this problem? whether it AI, Data Centers, EVs...I'm seeing this problem more and more, we need more energy/power. I'm curious to see what others think are possible viable solutions.
- bix6 5mo agoNuclear has a ton of VC interest right now. Or the robinhood dude with his space beaming stuff. I think anything you can do to add to the energy mix is worthwhile atm. Does America produce any domestic solar panels? I’m talking wafers not assembly.
- jeffbee 5mo agoEntrepreneurs know exactly how to solve this issue: panels, batteries, and wires. But it isn't so simple when you face 20 years of permitting between BLM, USFS, tribes, states, counties, cities, and individual litigation. If you want an example of how bad this is look at the permitting timeline for SunZia in New Mexico and its transmission line to California. Gas pipelines don't have the same problem because the federal government exercises centralized permitting and eminent domain powers for fossil fuels under a 1938 law, and there is no corresponding statute for electric lines.
- niwtsol 5mo agoHas there been any attempt for some sort of legislation that would allow utility solar or electric lines to be included in that?
- infecto 5mo agoI still think decoupling generation from transmission is part of the problem and I don’t know if I love the construct of a single legislated monopoly. In this specific case, Liberty and constituents should have come up with a plan on the first contract term for generation. Maybe it meant spinning up their own generation plant within CA or NV. It’s not a popular idea here but I still think energy markets can help solve this problem. If you have multiple producers and a market rate for electricity you can more quickly incentivize new generation and innovation compared to the single operator monopolies that exist.
- xnx 5mo agoRelated coverage without invoking the AI bogeyman: "Liberty Utilities needs to replace 75% of Tahoe power supply as NV Energy deal ends soon" https://mynews4.com/news/local/liberty-utilities-needs-to-replace-75-of-tahoe-power-supply-as-nv-energy-deal-ends-soon https://mynews4.com/news/local/liberty-utilities-needs-to-re...
- Noaidi 5mo ago> without invoking the AI bogeyman If AI is the cause of these data centers, why is it not the bogey man? This sounds like you personally want to use AI with out acknowledging the externalities and the burden your use of AI puts on your fellow citizens.
- zzzeek 5mo agofrom the article: "NV Energy plans to end its contract with Liberty in May 2027, citing growing demand and its own resource constraints." the "growing demand" is the AI datacenters (the linked story goes into detail). it's the direct result, so while it might feel soothing that this other story doesnt actually mention "AI" it's mostly just an omission. (edit) the issue is that there's a sudden tight timeline and yes as other comments mention it's too bad the issue wasn't addressed sooner, but that's not very unusual when there's no major impetus to force a change. and that whether or not AI/LLM is a net good for society (I literally have Claude writing code for me as I type this), the energy issue is one that seems to be a real one (unlike the water issue which mostly seems to be not so real). the town^H^H^H^H region (edit) is already in the process of expanding their infrastructure to get power from elsewhere so things will be "fine", but this is a terrible time to have a government that is rabidly cancelling non-fossil energy projects as fast as possible.
- maxk42 5mo agoTahoe is not a town. It is a region containing many towns. Most of it will continue to have power (mostly through NV Energy). This is a single utility that has failed to plan for this planned transition for 17 years. Invoking the data center bogeyman for political sympathy is the only thing going on here. Liberty has failed repeatedly to address this problem for nearly two decades and it's beyond time they were cut loose. I have sympathy for the people who have to suffer from their failure but this is not NV Energy's fault nor is it related to data centers at all: NV energy has been rapidly expanding capacity faster than growth in consumption and has 19 active geothermal plants in the area with more on the way as well as wind and solar.
- outside2344 5mo agoIt will be hilarious if Google built a data center in Nevada only to run Incline Village out of power (where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge).
- jedberg 5mo ago> where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge It's not just Brin who lives there. The median wealth of that town is at least 10x everywhere around it. It's the closest city in Nevada to the Bay Area. Back before California changed the law, if you had stock options you earned in CA and then moved to NV before you sold them, you could avoid paying income tax. Or if you sold your company. I know multiple people who moved to Incline right before vesting or selling. They would come back to the Bay Area each weekend to see their wife and kids and work remotely during the week. As long as they spent more than 1/2 their time in NV they didn't have to pay CA tax. CA has since closed that loophole -- if you earn it in CA they will come for the tax even if you live in another state when you sell it. But for the last 20+ years, it was a tax strategy that a lot of people used.
- reducesuffering 5mo agoIt's not just personal wealth either, Apple uses a shell company in Reno, NV to tax dodge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital
- palmotea 5mo agoGood. I don't think any electricity should be used for homes. It's wastes resources on people who will soon be economically unviable, and really constrains the data center build-out.
- arm32 5mo agoYou win the sarcasm award.
- hannahstrawbrry 5mo agoA lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents, companies engaging in mass layoffs only for the stock prices to climb. AI adoption aggravated the symptoms, the root causes remain the same.
- moritzwarhier 5mo agoThe difference is whether the government or the people are complaining then, right? Or do you have something else in mind? To me it's a classic "commons" problem. All our wealth in the end comes from extracting common resources and "making the best" of it. Whether "the best" is to sustain population levels or to maximize private capital is a political question. As of now, demanding things like free access to clean water is considered ideological and misguided by many people, maybe even "extreme".
- hannahstrawbrry 5mo agoI don't think it's that clear of a delineation especially in situations like this with utilities and governments wrestling over regulations. I believe that a lot of the folks who have been in the drivers seat and ignored the chips in the windshield that is the fabric of our society are happy to have something to direct blame towards no matter their affiliations or underlying beliefs about how resources ought to be managed, or even their own attitudes about AI usage.
- moritzwarhier 5mo agoi understand your point, however your "driver's seat" metaphor blurs the accountability of political representation IMO. Are voters in the "driver's seat"? Local governments? What I see as a valuable point is that federal governments with subsidies that "distort" markets for public goods and externality regulation, worsen the "tragedy of the commons". Explaining many things to a naive person, or a kid, boils down to this type of issue, you can even extend it to nation states. Without experience of violence, most people would intuitively understand that a "competition" between governments is problematic. Same issue, different undertones: tax havens.
- arjie 5mo agoIt’s not clear that these high wildfire risk places should be populated. They’re like the flood plains of Texas. I don’t think any utility under CPUC pricing can reasonably supply them for a long time. The price comes out of something: defensible space clearing, lack of power generation contracts, or all this pushed to another vendor. The vagaries of American politics allow for failure and then bailout as a mechanism for these sorts of situations but I think we can see the writing on the wall. 50k residents at an average million dollars a resident is $50 b so it is not quite possible to have a buyout so I see why we just allow for the decline. But any more we allow for the place to be inhabited, the greater the risk. Otherwise it’s just an incredibly regressive use of our resources: taxing a lot of working age people in the more urbanized areas to fund wealthy retirees in the forest. The current tide of California politics favors that and we can do it so long as our economic productivity is powered by tech but a time will come after and it’s better now to do this than after when we will find ourselves unable to sustain productive capacity.
- instagib 5mo agoI didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada. Residential customers will mostly pay 70% for the transmission line costs. 12 data centers by 2033 with 5,900 MW of power. “NV Energy is building Greenlink West, a 525-kV, $4.2 billion transmission line from Las Vegas to Yerington, expected online in May 2027. Schwarzrock said Liberty would be “first in the waiting line” when Greenlink opens, giving it access to a wider pool of energy providers. But that timeline matches the contract deadline exactly, leaving almost no margin for error. About 70% of the project’s costs will be borne by Southern Nevada customers. But this is nothing new, at least according to NV Energy.”
- bragr 5mo agoAt lot of west coast datacenters have moved to Nevada in search of lower land prices and better seismic risk. Vegas is a major hub now too.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoI didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada. I also find it hard to wrap my head around the scale involved. Right now I'm putting together a home server with 4x GPUs. Never having worked with a real server chassis before, I didn't really think the logistics through. It weighs over 100 pounds and requires two people to move. It had to be delivered on a pallet and unloaded with a forklift, way too big for UPS. Takes up my whole desk at the moment. Needs a 220V 30A outlet. If I stuffed it full of RTX6000s, it would draw about 6 kW. And this article talks about a 6 GW project, so that's... a million of these giant power-slurping boat anchors. There's a similar data center project in Utah which is also causing a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. That one is 9 GW. 1.5 million huge-ass (to me) 4U servers. This just seems nuts.
- oooyay 5mo agoThere are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity: 1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers. 2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand. How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.
- Noaidi 5mo agoThe idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs. The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.
- jshen 5mo agoI think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
- tadfisher 5mo agoAbsolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory. Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.
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- Nifty3929 5mo agoProsperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?
- FuckButtons 5mo agoSure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is no way to build the power infrastructure in less time than it takes to build the additional data centers. It’s also not clear that there would be enough elasticity in the supply chain for building any of these generation methods that you even could strike ground on increasing us electricity production by the ~10% needed over the given time frame. The reality is, there is no way to build all the additional data centers without significant inflationary pressure, that will be borne by everyone except the well connected hyperscalers with excellent lobbyists unless average people actually realize that fact and force their dealing with the relevant municipalities and grid operators to be transparent.
- Nifty3929 5mo agoFine! So let's get started then! I don't care about data centers. I don't care about AI. Maybe it's here to stay, maybe it's a passing trend. I care about humans, and human prosperity. Human prosperity - ours and our grandchildren's - is to a large degree determined by how much power we produce. So let's get started producing more. The best time to have built a power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
- plun9 5mo agoSomething like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy_Server only takes a few months to install and only requires natural gas pipelines.
- cathyreisenwitz 5mo ago[dead]