Utility Firms Go Nuclear Over Amazon Datacenter Power Deal (theregister.com) 48
Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: Utility firms American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon have filed an official objection with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over Talen Energy's nuclear power deal with Amazon. Back in March, Amazon bought a nuclear-powered datacenter from Talen Energy -- an operator of electricity generation and transmission facilities in the US. As part of the deal, Amazon would get 480 MW straight from the 2.7 GW Talen nuclear power plant in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and may even be able to upgrade to 960 MW down the line. However, that Susquehanna atomic plant also provides power to PJM Interconnection, the regional power grid operator for much of the eastern US. The two companies -- Talen and PJM -- have an interconnection service agreement (ISA) that sets the rules for how Talen should deliver power to PJM's transmission system.
To better accommodate the nuclear datacenter, Talen and PJM agreed to a new ISA, which has caught the ire of AEP and Exelon. The duo claim Talen and Amazon are basically getting a free ride that other PJM ratepayers will have to pay for, saying that even though Amazon's datacenter isn't directly connected to PJM, it still benefits from the power grid, meaning the other ratepayers are left holding the short end of the stick. Each of the station's two reactors has 1,350 MW available, and Amazon is already able to use 480 MW, and up to 960 MW in the future. If one of the reactors experiences an outage, the ISA says the datacenter is first in line for power from the other reactor, which leaves PJM with far less electricity than normal. That in turn would mean a lower energy supply for PJM's customers, who would have to pay more, at least according to the complaint's reasoning. The Talen-PJM ISA states that in this event, the nuclear datacenter will separate from the plant and get its power elsewhere, but AEP and Exelon are skeptical and want to know how exactly that would work.
The complaint argues Amazon's DC is essentially using the grid, saying the "premise" of the tweaked ISA "is that this datacenter co-located load is like load on a remote island -- one that simply has no impact on the PJM grid and would thus be properly excluded from economic and other responsibility for maintaining the PJM grid. But that storyline does not stand up to scrutiny." "They present their filing as no more than a replacement of older agreements with updated terms and 'clarifications' regarding the parties' roles and obligations," the two utility companies told [PDF] FERC, requesting a hearing over the matter. "The filing [new ISA] casts the submission as a mere housekeeping exercise, as if there is nothing to see here."
The protest adds: "The co-located load should not be allowed to operate as a free rider, making use of, and receiving the benefits of, a transmission system paid for by transmission ratepayers. We have no objection to co-location per se, but such load should pay its fair share of system use and other charges, just like other loads and customers." AEP and Exelon claim the new terms of the ISA contains a key loophole that hinges on the datacenter's co-location with the nuclear power plant, which allows its power usage to not be considered "in-network," even though the power load is synced to PJM's grid and could theoretically get power from it. [...] The end result, or so AEP and Exelon allege, is that Talen would be able to benefit from PJM's services without the associated cost. That would cost other customers between $58 million and $140 million per year overall, according to an analysis from Concentric Energy Advisors CEO Danielle Powers and chairman John Reed included with the filing. AEP and Exelon asked FERC to either hold a hearing to answer questions it feels are unresolved or to reject the new ISA outright. For its part, Talen claims the complaint's narrative is "demonstrably false" and that "transmission is not implicated."
To better accommodate the nuclear datacenter, Talen and PJM agreed to a new ISA, which has caught the ire of AEP and Exelon. The duo claim Talen and Amazon are basically getting a free ride that other PJM ratepayers will have to pay for, saying that even though Amazon's datacenter isn't directly connected to PJM, it still benefits from the power grid, meaning the other ratepayers are left holding the short end of the stick. Each of the station's two reactors has 1,350 MW available, and Amazon is already able to use 480 MW, and up to 960 MW in the future. If one of the reactors experiences an outage, the ISA says the datacenter is first in line for power from the other reactor, which leaves PJM with far less electricity than normal. That in turn would mean a lower energy supply for PJM's customers, who would have to pay more, at least according to the complaint's reasoning. The Talen-PJM ISA states that in this event, the nuclear datacenter will separate from the plant and get its power elsewhere, but AEP and Exelon are skeptical and want to know how exactly that would work.
The complaint argues Amazon's DC is essentially using the grid, saying the "premise" of the tweaked ISA "is that this datacenter co-located load is like load on a remote island -- one that simply has no impact on the PJM grid and would thus be properly excluded from economic and other responsibility for maintaining the PJM grid. But that storyline does not stand up to scrutiny." "They present their filing as no more than a replacement of older agreements with updated terms and 'clarifications' regarding the parties' roles and obligations," the two utility companies told [PDF] FERC, requesting a hearing over the matter. "The filing [new ISA] casts the submission as a mere housekeeping exercise, as if there is nothing to see here."
The protest adds: "The co-located load should not be allowed to operate as a free rider, making use of, and receiving the benefits of, a transmission system paid for by transmission ratepayers. We have no objection to co-location per se, but such load should pay its fair share of system use and other charges, just like other loads and customers." AEP and Exelon claim the new terms of the ISA contains a key loophole that hinges on the datacenter's co-location with the nuclear power plant, which allows its power usage to not be considered "in-network," even though the power load is synced to PJM's grid and could theoretically get power from it. [...] The end result, or so AEP and Exelon allege, is that Talen would be able to benefit from PJM's services without the associated cost. That would cost other customers between $58 million and $140 million per year overall, according to an analysis from Concentric Energy Advisors CEO Danielle Powers and chairman John Reed included with the filing. AEP and Exelon asked FERC to either hold a hearing to answer questions it feels are unresolved or to reject the new ISA outright. For its part, Talen claims the complaint's narrative is "demonstrably false" and that "transmission is not implicated."
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You forgot the vaccines.
Just the beginning (Score:2)
Re:Just the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
People have contracts, people have priority.
Some customers have priority because they pay for it. If you want reliable power 24/7, that's gonna cost you more than spot prices.
The market is actually for everyone else.
The market is for me. I have a smart meter and flex-pricing.
I get super-cheap power from 2 to 4 AM when I charge my EV. The dishwasher's timer is also set to run during this time slot.
I pay far more from 2 to 7 PM, so I run my AC at 1 PM to prechill my home office, and avoid other big loads during this time slot, such as my electric clothes dryer.
I can go to the electric company's website and compare my usage to the average for my neighborhood. I am paying way less than those on fixed pricing.
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If you want reliable power 24/7, that's gonna cost you more than spot prices.
Sure, reliability should be an optional part of the premium package. Everyone else should use power when the utilities think they should, rather than when they want to. Scarcity is what made our civilization great.
I can go to the electric company's website and compare my usage to the average for my neighborhood. I am paying way less than those on fixed pricing.
Maybe frugality matters less to them than convenience. Myself I work so I don't have to think about shit like that.
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I'd invest in much better insulation, if that's your strategy. Create an icebox, that's what I'd do!
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In sane countries they have caps on the price for consumers, and a grid that is stable enough to prevent the price ever getting that high in the first place.
It's a failure of the regulators, not of the policy of demand based pricing.
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That happens here, the price goes negative so I turn stuff on. It doesn't make a lot of profit, pennies only, but it does shift my demand away from peak times. If I wash my clothes in the morning I don't need to wash them again that afternoon, and as a bonus I can crank the temperature up to 60C.
That's the future for everyone, it just needs more renewable power to be installed.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:5, Informative)
Storing only 24 hours’ worth of U.S. electricity generation in lithium batteries would cost $11.9 trillion, take up 345 square miles and weigh 74 million tonnes and would take 10 years for 48(!) Nevada sized Gigafactories to produce the battery cells.. If you want to cover the months of snow and weather that makes solar and wind useless you will need to store at least 25% (3 Months) of the annual electricity to be able to overcome this so multiple those numbers by 90-100.
On top of this there are losses in any type of storage has its limitation pumped hydro needs appropriate geology for instance and can be very difficult (see the problems with Snowy Hydro 2 project in Australia https://theconversation.com/pu... [theconversation.com])
Nuclear starts to look quite cheap in comparison
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Nuclear starts to look quite cheap in comparison
It does not. Quite critically zero people are proposing building something new. Nuclear looks very cheap when you can write a contract that abuses the fact that someone else paid for the infrastructure, has already socialised the design and construction costs, and above all involved a plant built 40 years ago when the costs were quite different.
Re: Just the beginning (Score:2)
New nuclear is a part of several Integrated Resource Plans for major US utilities. Those documents aren't binding, they're more of a "vision" document on a 20-30 year horizon, but the interest is there. Integrated grid modeling shows grid wide cost benefits to small nuclear, both in terms of reliability and reduced transmission build (just slap a little one next to an industrial load and you don't need to build power lines). Not even long duration batteries match them in that regard, probably the closest th
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You jumped from "let's build something to support this data center" to storing the entire production of 24 hours (enough to shift the load several days) for the whole of US? Why?
The comparison you should make is: Data center needs XXX MW. How much does that cost with a new nuclear power plant you can build today (not vaporware), and how much does it cost with say PV and batteries?
Next problem is lead time. Nuclear plants seem to take 5-15 years.
On the renewable side, the situation we're facing today is that
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What a strange way of handling these issues. In the UK it's the exact opposite. High energy users pay a variable rate based on the spot price, while most consumers pay a flat rate that is usually lower. Big commercial users have to measure their power factor and pay based on that too, while consumers get a free pass to use whatever crap they like.
No idea why you are suggesting a whole country UPS system, that's crazy and not needed. For a renewable powered data centre they just need to spec the renewable ca
Let's see (Score:4, Insightful)
If the PA PUC will scotch this deal or if not, will Shapiro roll over and claim it's worth it for all the jobs which will be created, supposedly up to 600 [phillyvoice.com]. Then, when power outages occur during the hottest and coldest months, we'll see what excuses will come out to claim they have nothing to do with nearly the entire power output of a nuclear plant going toward a datacenter.
In addition to sucking up the power, Amazon is getting a 70% discount on its taxes for 10 years. In other words, the people of Northeast PA will have to suck it up and pay their share. And then some.
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The double whammy of legalized utility price gouging and spurning national grid infrastructure, combined with climate change related extreme weather events spells doom. Utility outages and unsupportable utility bills will knock huge holes in the Texas economy.
The down side is that a lot of people will die. Those who need reliable home power for me
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As to grid integration, I've sad this so many times I've lost count. TX(ERCOT) is interconnected to the national grid. But it is segmented, just
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Yes, the interconnects between ERCOT and Laredo, NM, Louisiana, and "some place to the North" are all HVDC links precisely due to AC synchronization issues.
According to ERCOT's own charts & data, none of those DC links goes over 300MW for any significant time (a few hours a day). Sometimes they rest right at 0MW all day long.
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And one more thing for those out there watching along at home...
Those DC inter-grid links in Texas would have to be significantly UPSIZED to match the links that flow into California from the Pacific Northwest, from power plants to the E-NE in Nevada and-or Utah, and from power plants in Arizona.
Yes, California A LOT of power from other states, otherwise why would they need all of those MASSIVE interstate links within the same Western USA grid region?
Pacific DC Intertie - 3100MW
Path 27 - 1920MW
So 5000MW rig
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This is Amazon, mind you. I believe they've finished putting solar panels on all their Fulfillment Centers (warehouses) that occupy over a million square feet and were going to start doing the same thing with their larger DCs. Between solar and their wind farms I believe they're the largest non-utility power generator in the US.
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God I'm getting old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps more to the point, I AM old. Amazon is buying almost 18% of a nuclear power plant's output - with an option to double that - for one service provider's cloud infrastructure. Even though I've spent my whole adult life working in tech, I find that utterly mind-boggling - yet for so many people here it's the equivalent of 'the sky is blue and water is wet'.
I know computers have brought enormous benefits to mankind; but when I compare the world of 30 years ago with the world of today, I don't see anywhere near enough of an improvement to justify the staggering increase in the rate at which we're burning the planet. Sometimes I feel like the main character in The Gods Must Be Crazy - something else that dates me, I guess.
On an intellectual level I understand what's going on, but on an emotional level I'm just confused, sad, and shaking my head.
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A lot of that is perception. After the turn of the century I was working for contractors that maintained the systems for small to medium sized offices, mostly doctors and small clinics. Each office had an email server, a DB server, and a file server, and generally another app server for the records and billing, and another half dozen desktops and laptops. Each server would burn through $500 in electricity per year, plus we charged $120 to $150/hr to do maintenance, backups, updates, etc. Gods help them
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All good points. But:
-- There are still a lot of computers in the hands of consumers and small businesses - probably more than 30 years ago
-- Almost everybody has at least one cell phone - I have two in daily use - and a lot of power is consumed charging them all
-- All the cloud infrastructure to support those devices is a huge power drain
-- Online shopping, social media, video and audio streaming - buckets of energy
-- LLMs, crypto-mining, high-speed trading - all essentially economic parasites, and al
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Or perhaps more to the point, I AM old. Amazon is buying almost 18% of a nuclear power plant's output - with an option to double that - for one service provider's cloud infrastructure.
Well, a few things. First, taking a quick look at the top ten power plants in America, three of them are in Susquehanna, PA, or close to it. It's entirely possible that Amazon built a particularly large datacenter there expressly because of the availability of massive amounts of power, with an added bonus that the power generation is minimally polluting. If I wanted to put a server rack in my home that has 100A service, I'd barely be able to fill a single rack before I'd start causing issues in my home. If
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It would be interesting to find figures for per-capita electricity consumption, fossil fuel consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions for the last three decades. My sense is that they've increased a lot, though I'd be VERY happy to be wrong about that. I don't know how to find that data - current info is easy to get, but a quick search hasn't revealed historical numbers. I'll see if I can chase it down though.
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Amazon isn't just one service provider, AWS sits underneath a ton of other services.
At this point there must be 1/5 or 1/4 of the entire internet on AWS.
shame we just neutered the FERC's authority (Score:2)
Exelon (Score:5)
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How does that make Exelon the "jackasses" here? The state didn't have to give them any money. If wind and solar power would have cost less money for the same power output then that makes the state politicians the jackasses for wasting tax dollars. If keeping the nuclear power plant open was the least cost option then they just saved taxpayers and ratepayers money.
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why should the taxpayers subsidise a failing system ?
That is an excellent question. I would think the taxpayers should not be subsidizing a failing system. I'd think that worse than just wasting tax dollars since by subsidizing a failing system they made it more expensive for viable systems to compete. I suspect that electricity generation is a market with low profit margins so it would be easy for any subsidy for an expensive power plant to chase off investment for inexpensive power generation.
I don't know as much about Illinois but I read that in Califor
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How does that make Exelon the "jackasses" here? The state didn't have to give them any money.
That's a nice bit of electricity you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it. /s But on a serious note when a state is subsidised it should be illegal for the company to seek any PPAs with private third parties. That is literally a company socialising the cost. It's one thing for the state to keep the lights on for its citizens, quite another for them to subside an Amazon datacentre indirectly.
Now maybe it was in the state's interest to subsidise Amazon, but if that's they case they shoul
So Amazon is going to use ... (Score:2)
... its obscene wealth to cross-fund nuclear fission and take care of the waste problem? Nice. What a kind and unselfish move.
Oh, you say no, that's not how it's going to work? Fission plants are going to be funded by taxpayers as is the questionable cost efficiency of fission? And the billions burned are going to cross-fund poor Amazon and its operations? Nice. I'm sure US taxpayers are glad to pitch in and help out their favorite megacorps.
Good luck with that (Score:2)
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
With the Ceveron Ruling, the FERC has no power now. So get ready for AI brown-outs as these mega-corps buy more power producers.
But one good thing about it, the EPA has no power either. We will get to see heavy air pollution like we had when I was a young child, the good thing about that is it blocks Sun Light, so will help with global warming. Who cares if we all have asthma (like me) and Lung Cancer /s
It won't matter (Score:2)
Trying to sue Amazon won't have any effect whatsoever, after last week's Loper-Bright decision [supremecourt.gov] by the Supreme Court. If Amazon lose, they will appeal and cite that case, and the courts will de-fang the FERC and let Amazon buy as much power as they want, because the courts are now the final arbiters of regulations, and the actual regulatory agencies are just decorative puppet theatre.