It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly.
Front and center is the data center that Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania.
The arrangement between the plant’s owners and AWS — called a “behind the meter” connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant’s capacity — to the data center. That’s enough to power more than a half-million homes.
Well it makes sense. The problem is not this specific issue, it’s the ever increasing AI use and Bitcoin mining. And bidding war for electricity.
I mean there is possibly an opportunity to use water from cooling data centers to feed back in to steam powered power generation (like nuclear or fossil fuel stations), or is that not how it works?
According to my cursory research, cooling loops run somewhere between 10 and 50 °C with the difference of inlet and outlet between 5 and 10 K.
Steam power generation uses the phase change of water, so you need above 100°C.
On the high end of the temperature range, you could possibly run some small district heating while the lower temperatures require active cooling.
My thinking was more about the initial heating of the water. What happens to the steam after it’s used to turn turbines? Does it float back down to a settling area ready at 50°C or something ready to be picked up for another loop, or is the water lost and and endless supply of new water is pumped in? If the latter, you could save on fuel by using the data center outflow as the inflow of water to the system (starting from 40°C or something, instead of from room temp or colder).
It seems both types exist, though the ones that reuse water do so by feeding cooler water into wet cooling towers and cooling the steam with some new water. I don’t think having warmer starting water would help here, most likely it would be bad.
The kind that use a continuous supply of fresh water do exist and are common, but it seems like they don’t build them anymore due to environmental impacts. There’s possibly an opportunity with existing ones to build a data center next door and pump the warmer water to the power station for reduced fuel usage in heating the water?
Something else I have seen is building a data center next to a water park, using the warmer water to provide heated swimming pools. I thought that was a brilliant way to reduce energy wastage.
How about we just let the data centers build their own gd power sources instead?
And if they don’t want to do that they can go fuck themselves.
Data mining isn’t necessary for life.
If we were intelligent we would have put those installations way up north where they could be powered by hydro and the heat could have been reused to warm up greenhouses in order to grow food locally for populations that need to pay a ridiculous amount of money for anything that isn’t procured via hunting.
Bitcoin’s energy usage is not ever-growing, in fact it’s currently below its all-time high.
That’s because nobody is using it.
Who’s paying for the electricity that it is using, then?