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Power Cloud Earth United States

Data Centers Are Turning to an Old Source of Power: Coal (yahoo.com) 58

The Washington Post reports on a new situation in Virginia: There, massive data centers with computers processing nearly 70 percent of global digital traffic are gobbling up electricity at a rate officials overseeing the power grid say is unsustainable unless two things happen: Several hundred miles of new transmission lines must be built, slicing through neighborhoods and farms in Virginia and three neighboring states. And antiquated coal-powered electricity plants that had been scheduled to go offline will need to keep running to fuel the increasing need for more power, undermining clean energy goals...

The $5.2 billion effort has fueled a backlash against data centers through the region, prompting officials in Virginia to begin studying the deeper impacts of an industry they've long cultivated for the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue it brings to their communities. Critics say it will force residents near the [West Virginia] coal plants to continue living with toxic pollution, ironically to help a state — Virginia — that has fully embraced clean energy. And utility ratepayers in the affected areas will be forced to pay for the plan in the form of higher bills, those critics say. But PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, says the plan is necessary to maintain grid reliability amid a wave of fossil fuel plant closures in recent years, prompted by the nation's transition to cleaner power. Power lines will be built across four states in a $5.2 billion effort that, relying on coal plants that were meant to be shuttered, is designed to keep the electric grid from failing amid spiking energy demands. Cutting through farms and neighborhoods, the plan converges on Northern Virginia, where a growing data center industry will need enough extra energy to power 6 million homes by 2030...

There are nearly 300 data centers now in Virginia. With Amazon Web Services pursuing a $35 billion data center expansion in Virginia, rural portions of the state are the industry's newest target for development. The growth means big revenue for the localities that host the football-field-size buildings. Loudoun [County] collects $600 million in annual taxes on the computer equipment inside the buildings, making it easier to fund schools and other services. Prince William [County], the second-largest market, collects $100 million per year.

The article adds that one data center "can require 50 times the electricity of a typical office building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. "Multiple-building data center complexes, which have become the norm, require as much as 14 to 20 times that amount."

One small power company even told the grid operator that data centers were already consuming 59% of the power they produce...
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Data Centers Are Turning to an Old Source of Power: Coal

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  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Saturday April 20, 2024 @12:37PM (#64410504)

    build more nuke plants!

    • Specific to data centers, nuclear is perfect; great steady baseload, highly centralized load, intrinsic security perimeter, and plenty of open area nearby. The issue though is lead-time and cost. If one of the SMR companies could get to mass production it would be almost perfect. You even reduce cost by eliminating transmission voltages.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Mass production of something like this [copenhagenatomics.com] would be great, but so-called SMRs (only small in power output), are a joke. They make the worst problem yet worse: increasing the amount of on-site civil work per Watt, so power will be more expensive. They will make sense in some circumstances, but they are no panacea.

        We should be building more AP1000s now; even China is, after their bad initial experience with Westinghouse's (unfinished at the time) design. Meanwhile, we should be working on reactors that are suited

        • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Saturday April 20, 2024 @04:56PM (#64410942)

          Small modular reactors only increase the workload per watt if the number of reactors per site is low. Japan figured out real quick which nuclear power plants were worth keeping operational after the Tohoku tsunami in 2011, it was the power plants with the most reactors per site. I recall some nuclear power plants would have eight reactors on site, and that means less work per watt.

          With SMRs the plan is to keep costs low by economy of scale. Costs per unit are low because they can be mass produced in a factory, then costs lowered more by putting something like a dozen reactors per power plant. A dozen reactors on one site means one perimeter to guard, so security costs are saved. The reactors pretty much run themselves but we keep highly trained people on site in case something really out of the ordinary happens, one engineer can watch one reactor about as easily as one dozen.

          One big reason that nuclear power plants had such large reactors was that the licensing was very expensive and a fixed cost regardless of the watts produced. This meant building a reactor as large as people expected they could manage. For some reason the industry settled on about one gigawatt as the largest they dared to build. If the reactor is mass produced than built on site as a semi-custom unit each time then the licensing costs should come down, the licensing would be largely copy-n-paste from the last application.

          Another cost saver with SMRs has less to do with the size but more to do with that we've been here before. If the SMRs can fit on existing nuclear power plant sites then there's less cost in licensing the site, the power plant already exists so less paper work on that. Keeping the reactor small helps in finding a spot for a reactor on existing sites but the sites tended to be quite large to begin with since most of the power plants were sited with plans for multiple reactors on site to begin with.

          In short, if your SMR adds to the labor costs then you are doing it wrong.

          • I believe the GP was referring to the waste per MWh. You need to change the operating equation to burn more of the fuel to offset the reduced efficiency due to (IIRC) core poisoning. NuScale specifically has a less uranium-efficient design as I understand. There is also a component of pi*r^3 for reactor waste at end of life.

          • by dvice ( 6309704 )

            I tried to search for the cost of SMR, and I found values ranging from 55 dollars per MWh to over 500 dollar per MWh, but I think the lowest numbers are estimated price for 2030 and this is just guessing and estimating.

            In comparison, solar and wind is about 30 dollars per MWh on the cheaper end of the spectrum and from this we already have real data. In the Nordic countries the electricity price is negative few times a year (yes, they pay you for using electricity), when there is a lot of wind available. O

            • 10 times cheaper? What is that cost in $/MWh? The margins on costs between solar and nuclear fission is already pretty thin, what happens when there's so much solar on the grid that they need to buy a boatload of batteries to keep the grid stable? At some point solar doesn't look so cheap any more. Onshore wind is really cheap so there's not much room to compete there, the limiting factor on wind is more about finding places to put the windmills than anything else.

              What happens to the cost of nuclear fis

              • What happens to the cost of nuclear fission once people figure out that batteries can store electricity from nuclear power plants?

                Actually, the latest is to steal a bit of technology from reflective solar thermal systems - thermal storage.

                There's a push to switch to MSR - Molten Salt Reactor. There's a number of potential advantages to this, including reducing the pressure of the reactor and enabling much higher temperatures for efficiency. But in the context of balancing supply, if you build one of these, you can also build a relatively giant insulated tank. You fill it with the superheated molten salts, heated up by the reactor.

                • Forgot to state a couple points clearly:
                  1. An insulated tank full of molten salts is relatively cheap for the energy storage ability. It scales up very well, as the skin of the tank is where unwanted radiation/heat loss happens, and that goes up by the square, while the volume goes up by the cube. IE double the volume of the tank, surface area and heat loss should only go up 40%.
                  2. Power turbines are expensive, but not that expensive. Our standby natural gas turbines already have them, and having extra

            • Here's the thing: Datacenters are near-constant load (sure, maybe a little less cooling overnight, but negligible.) It doesn't make much sense to store energy to supply them. Same goes for manufacturing/industrial loads. Nuclear makes all kinds of sense for those loads, and the cost would certainly go down as a result. Yes, yes, lead times and all that. Some of that could be improved with more efficient regulation.

              Instead the calculation for storage should be for variable loads, like residential. The

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Japan's decisions about which nuclear plants to keep were mostly down to safety, which in turn was often down to how much money the owner was willing to invest in necessary tests and upgrades. So while that does mean that larger plants tended to do better, the bottom line was safety.

            After the triple meltdown at Fukushima, they discovered previously unknown geological faults at some plants, and re-evaluated the risk of tsunami and lateral forces at others.

      • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Specific to data centers, nuclear is perfect; great steady baseload,

        But what happens when the data centers get Slashdotted or when Taylor Swift publishes her new videos?

        • We're too small for readers to overwhelm a site. And we're definitely less relevant than Taylor Swift.

    • No. (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
      Not unless you fix the social problems with it. It's too expensive to build which results in cost overruns that are paid for by the taxpayer. That in itself is fine, but sooner or later we hand anything built by the taxpayer to private industry to profit from, and they cut corners.

      I don't Trust guys like Elon Musk with nuclear power plants, and that's exactly the kind of dodgy businessman who'd be attracted to a money losing proposition like nuclear.

      The government can do unprofitable things that ben
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Not unless you fix the social problems with it.

        Enjoy your coal!

        • I won't, but I also won't be forced to evacuate my city because the CEO who lives 500 miles away wanted a new yacht this quarter.
    • by kriston ( 7886 )

      Our nearest nuclear plants are Lake Anna and Peach Bottom.
      Both are hundreds of miles away, thus, the need for the "unsightly" high-tension power lines.

  • Carbon Taxes (Score:4, Informative)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Saturday April 20, 2024 @12:48PM (#64410524)

    Coal is cheap because the externalities aren't priced into it. Add those in and this probably isn't happening.

    And it's really too bad "clean coal" turned out to be a massive con because we have so much of it in the earth.

  • Despit all the talk of green power, data centers need lots of power and don't care where it comes from. It's not just Virginia, friends in the power industry tell me the data center owners want them to reopen mothballed coal plants so they can keep expanding.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The data centre owners are saying that they want to externalize their costs by re-opening coal plants, instead of investing in renewables and storage for themselves.

      • The data centre owners are saying that they want to externalize their costs by re-opening coal plants, instead of investing in renewables and storage for themselves.

        Exactly, and they use the lure of jobs and tax revenue to get cities to bring them in; meanwhile the grid gets stressed. The data centers also want to be the last one to get interrupted in the event of demand shortfalls, so guess who will get blacked out before them? Meanwhile, the power company has to fight to get new plants sited cause of NIMBY while the same locations invite data centers to their town. I'm just glad I get my power from a wall outlet...

  • so that we can take a bunch of people's jobs. That's just a thing we're gonna do as a species and there's no way to stop it because about half the world is currently in the throes of this weeks moral panic (I think it's trans kids right now, with a side of Drag Queen)...
  • by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Saturday April 20, 2024 @01:10PM (#64410566)

    There is a 3rd alternative: increase electric rates until demand matches supply.

    • We have three options on energy...
      - Fossil fuels and the global warming that comes with it
      - Nuclear fission
      - Rising energy costs

      I know there's someone already typing that there is a fourth option, solar plus storage. Well, if that was an option right now then we'd be doing that because that's a really popular option right now, that is it is popular until people see their utility bill.

      People don't like rising energy costs. People don't like energy shortages, which is synonymous with rising energy costs. S

      • by dvice ( 6309704 )

        > I know there's someone already typing that there is a fourth option, solar plus storage. Well, if that was an option right now then we'd be doing that

        Iron/oxygen batteries are estimated to be 10 times cheaper than Lithium, designed for solar and wind. They have the factory building up and they are expecting to starting operation at the end of this year, so "we" are already working on that.
        https://formenergy.com/form-fa... [formenergy.com]

        There are also already some Lithium batteries in use (most famous one in Australia

        • There are also already some Lithium batteries in use (most famous one in Australia), and those are profitable, despite being 10 times for expensive than this new technology. Fossil and nuclear (small or big) can not beat the price.

          Australia has a ban on nuclear power so in Australia the cost of nuclear power is effectively infinite, so there is no competing with that. Just reading the title of the fine article should tell you that fossil fuels are doing just fine on price when compared to wind, solar, and batteries. If solar and batteries were competitive on price then we'd not be reading stories about mothballed coal fired power plants being reactivated to keep up with demand for power.

      • It's a fucking steam engine - i.e. NEEDS FUCKING WATER COOLING.
        And guess what's influenced by droughts? And guess what gets shot down when it gets really hot everywhere - because there's no way to cool it? THAT'S RIGHT! YOUR STUPID FAT ASS! CAUSE YOU GET A HEART ATTACK FROM HEAT STROKE!

        Also, all you SUCKERS OF THE NUCLEAR COCK keep forgetting - you people are on your way out. Your countries, that is. Dead and decimated in a few decades.
        The ONLY, repeat, O-N-L-Y thing that's keeping population levels up is I

        • Doesn't work anymore unless you can dip it into ocean.

          So you are saying it does work.

          Most of the planet can't.

          What do you mean most of the planet can't reach the ocean? I guess that's true for the vast expanses of Africa and Asia but that is not where the people live, people tend to live near the ocean.

          And even oceans are getting a bit too hot lately.

          Seriously? Assuming a power plant is boiling water to run a steam turbine the ocean needs to be below boiling temperature to be an effective heat sink, and even in the tropics that is not happening. I've heard of ships that can't steam through tropical waters because the water is too

    • by jeadly ( 602916 )

      Or just charge these problem consumers the SAME as everyone else. Commercial electric rates are currently 28% LESS than residential rates in Virginia. Why give a discount for bulk purchases when there is a shortfall in supply?

  • Joe Manchin (Score:5, Informative)

    by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Saturday April 20, 2024 @01:24PM (#64410588) Homepage

    Brought to you by Joe " I Own A Coal Company " Manchin -US Senator of West Virginia.

    • Look the fact we had a Democrat in fucking West Virginia was enough of an anomaly to tolerate his positions. I don't imagine whomever he is replaced with is going to fare any better on that front.

      • by adrn01 ( 103810 )
        Both he and Sinema voted *for* all of Biden's judicial picks, though, did they not? That alone was a pretty big win.
        • Oh yeah, he was absolutely a pretty much like voted with the party 80-90% of the time guy, he and Biden I think actually get along pretty well. The whole rigamrole they went through was Manchin getting to play out his schtick to me and he got to be the guy everyone was courting.

    • Brought to you by Joe " I Own A Coal Company " Manchin -US Senator of West Virginia.

      Joe Manchin's job is to represent the people of West Virginia, so his votes on coal reflect that.

      The critical vote that Manchin casts is not for coal but for Chuck Schumer to be the Majority Leader. Joe is retiring this year and won't be casting that vote in January. He is 99.99% likely to be replaced by a Republican, making it likely that a Republican will also replace Chuck as Majority Leader.

      Democrats see a fellow Democrat who supports them on 80% of the issues and think, "Hey, let's demonize and destroy

      • This is true but also let's be honest, Republicans don't exactly have a better record on "in party fighting" especially now when we are facing yet another possible House Speaker removal.

        Manchin I fully suspect is also retiring because the writing is on the wall, I think he knew his chances of losing re-election are high with it coinciding with the Presidential as the conservative turnout in WV is likely to be higher than normal and his opponent would be likely to get full Trump endorsements. He definitely

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Move from the petrodollar to the kilowatt-dollar.

    Anyway, went you count the money, the environment is not discussed in polite company.

  • by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Saturday April 20, 2024 @05:11PM (#64410958)

    Computing power so sweet and so addictive, we're willing to add more big logs to the bonfire which is burning our civilization's future, just to keep the data flowing.

    Are the benefits of all this computing power going to be distributed more-or-less evenly? Or is this another "the rich get richer, the middle class gets a few scraps, the lower classes are still more screwed, and more people in third world countries die" scenario?

    Apologies for the rhetorical question - I'm coming a bit unhinged lately, thinking about our likely future or lack thereof, and about how utterly stupid and self-destructive we, as a species, have turned out to be.

    • Well we're not that self-destructive.... After all none of us are willing to sacrifice ourselves to prevent the destruction of everyone.
  • At the amounts of money being thrown around, I am amazed that these data center companies don't form a conglomerate and build their own power infrastructure.
    Collectively, the cost for individual companies would be small, and pay off in the long term massive.
    They'd be able to pool resources, and build power plants, sell surplus power to the grid and make profits.

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      > I am amazed that these data center companies don't form a conglomerate and build their own power infrastructure.

      Google put up solar panels on one of its data centers in 2018 already:
      https://sustainability.google/... [sustainability.google]

      And they are building more:
      https://eepower.com/news/googl... [eepower.com]

      • I am aware of these rather small scale deployments, there are some using wave energy generators to power data centers too, and some off shore wind farms.

        But I was thinking larger scale- at the rate they are deploying and growing, with the boom in AI necessitating massive computing and storage- they could stand up a nuclear power plant and with the money they have to back it with, pay off, i mean lobby the officials to get it done and out lawyer the NIMBYs. Sure, takes longer than solar or wind farm... but

  • The federal government wants its data centers, it doesn't care where the power comes from to power them. Basically, the government is only environmentally when it is convenient for them.
    • Sort of like the rest of us. Bill Gates is still heating thousands of square feet of empty living space while he flies around the world in his private jet going to meetings on what to do about climate change. The only way to stop emissions is to stop emissions. Instead of lowering the speed limit or requiring ICE vehicles to be junked, we are manufacturing electric cars that require huge emissions to produce and do nothing to lower emissions at all. They just allow people to go on with their lives unchanged
  • > One small power company even told the grid operator that data centers were already consuming 59% of the power they produce.

    That still leaves 41% available.

    How much power does a data center produce?

  • There must be some kind of anti-datacenter lobby behind this story because it is unfairly attacking datacenters and using hyperbolic climate change language as an attack method.

    PJM covers power usage for 13 states and DC. Of these service areas, Virginia as a state uses less power than Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio. Not only that, but that mix of energy sources is the same for all of PJM serviced states. You might as well blame North Carolina for all that coal usage too.

    So why is this story aimed

  • This is actually identifying the problem with relying entirely on the "grid" to deliver power from large centralized facilities to wherever it is needed. What is needed instead is more rooftop solar and other sources close to the point of consumption. This also creates a far more resilient power network that will still provide power even during natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes that take out the grid. Its irresponsible to allow data centers to connect to a grid designed to provide power to

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