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.
I’m not saying the increased demand would make them build more. I’m saying if companies are forced to rely on the grid they will help pressure/fund new expansions or maintenance on the power grid as if it fails they’re gonna lose money. If they’re not reliant on the grid anymore through things like this they would have no interest in making it better and they would stop applying pressure to make things better. And also atleast in my area increased demand from data center has caused attempts to build more transmission lines. Without these data centers having to use the public grid those investments wouldn’t be happening. Now there’s arguments to be had there about whether we should be encouraging data centers like this at all with the environmental cost of them using this much energy but if managed correctly it could lead to more investment in the power grid to make it better. Whereas if we allow companies to make their own power grid essentially then our current grid will be allowed to continue to fail.
And yet your hypothesis is clearly false, since until now they all used the grid and the grid was not improved.
Also, vast majority of companies will keep using the grid. It just doesn’t make sense for a data center that uses a good chunk of nuclear powerplants output.
Well I can provide examples near me of the grid being improved, now it’s often hard to directly link these to data centers as the power utilities will often focus on reliability and reducing costs as the reasons but based on where these are being built and where new data centers have been opening it does match up a bit with them trying to beef up connections to the west side. And again like I said these things do have environmental impacts that should be considered and all kinds of other reasons why they may not be the best thing to do but it does show that the network is being improved atleast indirectly because of data centers using more capacity.
https://www.portlandgeneralprojects.com/projects/harborton-reliability-project/
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/portland-general-allete-grid-united-north-plains-transmission/717312/