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If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next? Power prices will go up, since
by kennywinker 1mo ago
If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
- mitxela 1mo agoPretty much anyone sharing anything with a megarich person ends badly for the people who are not megarich.
- throwaway2037 1mo agoThis is a weird take. Before the rise of AI/LLMs, a lot of Finland's industry was paper products and high-end manuf'ing. Both of these require a lot of electricity. Did people say the same before? No (or much less).
- kennywinker 1mo agoDid any one factory in those industries (paper and high end manufacturing) use 50% of the output of a nuclear power plant?
- throwaway2037 1mo agoDid you read the article? Google has mentioned four distinct locations. That means at least four separate data centers, possibly more.
- kennywinker 1mo agoI can see that I’m not going to convince you there is a scale and centralization difference here, but maybe you can vibe with the economic difference? Paper mills and manufacturing employs a lot of people. Data centers, once they are built, employ very few people.
- throwaway2037 1mo agoIf Philips Lighting (Signify) or Osram wanted to build new, fully-automated lightbulb plants in Finland, would you also be against those plans? I have seen some YouTube videos that show how modern automated lightbulb plants operate. They require very few workers to operate.
- warkdarrior 1mo agoNo, but one company (UPM -- paper mills) consumes 8-9% of all electricity produced in Finland.
- kennywinker 1mo agoAnd what percentage of finland does UPM employ? The four planned data centers involved in this deal, after construction, will likely employ less than 1000 people.