4 ms·
I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777 https://arxiv.org/abs/260
by lordgilman 29d ago
I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.
- MatekCopatek 29d agoWhat exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true? Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-centers-use-and-why-does-it-matter/ https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...
- lokar 29d agoYeah, it’s one thing when SV runs the Uber script (ignoring the law to build big enough to buy politicians) to hurt cab drivers. It’s very different when it’s your neighborhood.
- jpalawaga 29d agoSome do, some use closed-loop systems that are essentially 'charge once'. higher energy use, but less water
- asciimike 29d agoNot sure why this is getting downvoted, most of the new facilities (e.g. Stargate) are running closed loop systems. PUE goes up a bit if you have to use chillers, but ultimately it's faster/easier to build a large facility in a closed loop fashion than get water (permitting, treatment, etc.). NVIDIA pushing 45C inlet temps is to allow facilities to run dry coolers instead of chillers and make this even easier! Two phase cooling (required above ~3kW TDP) would eliminate water use in the secondary loop (if not the primary, eventually).
- bluGill 29d agoThey do use water, and the numbers look very large which makes for big scary headlines. However people who actually know how water is used in a city are used to numbers much larger than that.
- ratelimitsteve 29d agoit's the demand delta, not the total demand, that's concerning. Also not all use cases are created equal: using water to keep people alive is legitimate and using water to build a machine that can automatically almost count the number of vowels in a sentence is not legitimate, especially when that usage drives up demand and makes it harder to use water to keep people alive.
- shepherdjerred 29d agoWhy do you get to choose what is and isn’t legitimate?
- estearum 29d agoWell "you" don't "get to", but this is precisely why we made the concept "states" and use "state power" to counteract other natural modalities of power. Which is being demonstrated by the use of state power to kill data center development.
- unknownfuture 29d agoYeah but it's all Chinese propaganda so it doesn't count this time. /s
- ratelimitsteve 29d agothere's a really special type of crowd to whom you can say "People staying alive is good" and their response is "SOURCE??!!!"
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- luxuryballs 29d agoWhy and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology so who is dropping the ball?
- estearum 29d agoYeah, all these stupid little municipalities have to do is shit they've literally never had to do before while getting sued out of their socks by literal trillion dollar companies. That's all it takes for them to do their part in generating gargantuan amounts of value for people who live 1,000 miles away and their uberwealthy hardly-human CEOs and investors.
- luxuryballs 29d agowhat is it that they have to do? I'm still confused as to what is causing the water to change
- estearum 28d agoHave you considered Googling? Or is this the type of curiosity that one just offloads to others? https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data-centers-impact-surface-and-ground-waters/ https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data...
- luxuryballs 27d agoit's social media, and a human who strongly signals they know something is usually much more reliable than a search engine for knowing the real upshot, 9 times out of 10 the person who already has a strong opinion has keyed in on the detail that even if I found a search result might not be so easy to decipher, or you could have some professional experience, anyways it was worth a shot, thanks for sharing
- semiquaver 29d agogolf courses use much more. But you don’t see massive resistance against new golf courses being planned. Farms use an order of magnitude more than either. You don’t see any demands whatsoever on agriculture to reduce water usage.
- citrin_ru 29d agoI would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event. And there is definitely no explosion of new golf courses. Total DC power consumption growth is practically exponential for the last 5 years.
- gruez 29d ago>I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event That's just status quo bias, given that they're an ongoing source of water consumption. "oh it doesn't matter that [thing] is guzzling water, because it's already there!".
- daveguy 29d agoExactly right. It's a lot easier to prevent an asshat venture than it is to dismantle it. Now that the public is aware, I wouldn't be surprised if new golf courses start getting the same treatment.
- semiquaver 29d agoThey haven’t been. I’m aware of new golf courses being planned in my area and I hear nothing but enthusiasm. Literally no one brings up water consumption as a concern. This whole thing is a sublimation of vaguer anxieties about AI (which are perfectly rational!) into areas where people feel like they can make more concrete objections that are likelier to succeed. The water thing is completely fake, whether people think so or not.
- daveguy 29d ago
- triceratops 29d agoPeople should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract. "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach." But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time. "We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect." There it is.
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- estearum 29d ago2015 to 2024...? Monthly private spending on data center construction: 2015: $168 million 2024: $1.59 billion 10x increase over 9 years (26% annual growth rate) 2026: $4.36 billion 3x increase over 2 years (73% annual growth rate) Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending. Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument. The 2015 - 2024 growth curve would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper. The latter growth (which is obviously accelerating), especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy. So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
- maxerickson 29d agoYou misunderstood I think. They aren't arguing water is a bigger problem than energy. They are arguing that negative perception is mostly focused around water use.
- estearum 29d agoThey suggested (and linked to paper arguing) that data centers are not causing energy prices to go up. I am saying the paper's scope of analysis (up to 2024) renders it pretty much irrelevant.
- zamalek 29d agoAnd that's very suspicious given that they published the paper in 2026. Was it somehow impossible to find energy prices for 25+26?
- mattkrause 29d ago
- vegetablepotpie 29d agoThere is a methodical issue with that study that the authors acknowledge. > How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand. [1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...
- ratelimitsteve 29d ago>your evidence for increasing energy prices it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.
- lordgilman 29d agoThere's a global market for energy. What you see at the pump translates into electricity prices in a slow and grinding process. Remember that most of our electricity is not generated from renewable sources! Three years ago Russia invaded Ukraine, that pushed up fuel prices and electricity prices have followed. Now, we have the Iran war and that will push up electricity prices even more. The issue here is that you do not understand these markets.
- muddi900 29d agoThe effects of Russian War had normalized by 2024. Or the paper would have shown an increase in Electricity tariffs. And the effects of Iran War are not apparent. I would recommend reading the actual paper where it acknowledges that it does not regard capacity payments. https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment
- ratelimitsteve 29d agoI was asked for evidence that energy prices have increased. I provided that. Now you're shifting the goalposts to ask for evidence that the increase in energy prices is solely due to data center demand, pretending you've proven that an increase in demand somehow didn't lead to an increase in prices, then retreating to "you don't understand markets" as a vague defense of your idea that increased demand doesn't drive prices up.
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 29d ago> In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, where I am the water is a part of it, but a big issue is electricity prices going up (which they will)
- muddi900 29d agoWell I don't have the data in front of me, but building power capacity leads to higher capacity payments, which are passed to all consumers. This has been an global industry standard for decades at far as I know. The study's authors acknowledge it in the text. > We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach. This is a good primer on capacity payments: https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment