Should Big Tech Plug Its Data Centers Directly Into Power Plants? (apnews.com) 85
"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.)
But the idea of bypassing the grid is "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." 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... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."]
In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else...
Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be "extreme" if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory. Energy prices would increase significantly and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.
But the idea of bypassing the grid is "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." 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... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."]
In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else...
Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be "extreme" if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory. Energy prices would increase significantly and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.
Some of you may suffer- (Score:2)
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Re:Some of you may suffer- (Score:5, Insightful)
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What exactly do you see as the difference between whether they own the power plant or someone else does?
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Indeed also, the closer to the source you are, the less energy loss you get so it makes a lot of sense to connect directly to the source. They'll use less power that way than having to go through the grid so more grid capacity and power available to regular citizens. It's not like them having to go through the grid makes more energy available to anybody.
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This is what is regularly done with supercomputers, so I don't see why they wouldn't just do the same here.
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What are the consequences of a super computer melting down?
Oh, I am sure they'll follow all the regulations!! (Score:2)
They could build their own power plant and not interfere with the public infrastructure by putting the public at risk
Yup, I trust Meta, Google, and Microsoft to fully follow all local regulations!..there will be no unintended consequences from shifting the operation from a regulated utility to a private sector producer!!!
Re:Some of you may suffer- (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. The question is about the grid itself. It has power from a number of sources, increasingly intermittent wind and solar. So when a large user wires directly into one constant base load generator the effect is not just to change the point at which power is drawn while leaving everything else the same. The effect is to raise the proportion of of the grid that is being supplied by intermittent sources.
You notice that they are not approaching the operators of wind or solar facilities with a request to connect directly.
The underlying phenomenon which no-one will talk about is that attempting to migrate the grid to intermittent power generation technology, while at the same time increasing demand of a sort that requires consistent base performance is not going to work. Is not working. And the result is that the largest and most sensitive users are looking for ways to bypass what they can see is a disaster coming down the line at them.
Object to this? Go ask them why they are not building or connecting to wind farms, and you'll get your answer instantly. As long as you ask in private, because no-one will admit to this publicly.
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You might also ask why they aren't building their own nuclear reactors but rather building next to existing ones.
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I don't think it works the way you think it works. The sources are connected to the grid thus part of the grid. They say, "connected directly to the source" but in reality, it just means really close to the source. Wind and solar would still be able to feed them.
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> Your grid is older and crustier than most and you seem to have little motivation to do much about it
Little profit in grid ops. Thus little investment.
> Perhaps you're already at the point where people put generators next to their sheds because the grid is too unreliable?
Works in Kenya.
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It depends on your assumptions. If you assume the tech giants are going to get as much power as they want, and everyone else will just have to do without, this is the most efficient way to give it to them.
I don't agree with that assumption. Demand for power is increasing faster than supply. Increasing supply is a slow process, especially if you want to do it in ways that don't add to climate change. Taking power away from everyone else to give it to the companies with the deepest pockets is not right.
Extension lead (Score:3)
Or, they could just invest in the grid itself... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just wanting to skip to the front of the line to feed the AI bubble. So, I do a search now and get a summary shoved in my face that is worse than I could do by just looking at links.
The right thing to do is invest in the grid itself and let everybody benefit and compete on merit in the space. So, of course, that won't happen.
Re: Or, they could just invest in the grid itself. (Score:2)
Then again
Re: Or, they could just invest in the grid itself. (Score:4, Interesting)
Next, put something next to it that uses the waste heat.
That was the case behind the Iron curtain - the waste heat of most NPPs was used to heat huge greenhouse complexes and large consumers, typically metal production facilities - were located nearby when possible. Turned out it is unsustainable. The setup must be huge, centralized and well-managed, and that turned out to be very expensive, especially in the face of a market where prices move up and down quickly and unpredictably.
Ironically, that might be a huge problem with a nuclear power plant NOT hooked to the grid. In the classical, tried-and-tested configuration, the heat output of a reactor is matched to the optimal mode of operation of the electric power plant and it is in this, nearly constant, most efficient regime that you get simple, safe and cheap operations. But you need a constant, or nearly constant demand for safe operations.
Introduce some imbalances and the need to change output, and your setup becomes either economically problematic or much harder to operate, or both. The grid gives you some opportunity to level stuff off to an extent, especially if you have systems that can accumulate power - for example, pumped storage hydro plants. But these are serendipitous and unavailable in many places, and I am not aware of any battery project that can compare.
With "AI" loads, you're basically tied to the stock market valuation of the word of Sam Altman that scaling power consumption to levels untold will give you a breakthrough, producing a suitable LLM that can replace all the brains in your organization for the price of a license.
What happens to your plant infrastructure when the value decays as the truth about LLMs and their "AGI"-ness becomes obvious even to your average "investor"?
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Speaking of storage, this is probably the key feature of the TerraPower proposal - they keep a lake of molten material nearby created by the reactor heat output, and this is the interface between the reactor and the power generation system that can absorb demand fluctuations. It adds a lot of complexity, however, and it remains to be seen how useful and efficient it will be, especially in the face of large fluctuations.
All in all, IMHO it is likely that to stay nuclear-powered (as the "tech industry" propo
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> they keep a lake of molten material nearby created by the reactor heat output
Its a terrible idea.
First off, you can do this with any power source. You could, for instance, put an electrical resistance heater in the same lake, pump power into it from the grid, and then use that as storage. And the number of people doing that? Zero.
Why? Because the efficiency of the conversion back to power from heat is a function of the temperature of the working fluid. You can keep the temperature up for little cost wh
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China installed 101GWh (yes, gigawatt hours, not megawatts) of grid scale storage in 2024. It's both technically and economically feasible... Just maybe not in locations where they want to locate these datacentres for political reasons.
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You believe what China says? I'm amazed.
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They could be lying like Trump does about the size of their installations, but we can see them from space on satellite imagery so... They aren't.
If you really want to know, just get a visa and go look for yourself. Lots of photos of the sites already from Western journalists and on social media, but you can go see them with your own eyes.
While you are traveling, come to Europe as well, your mind will be blown at how different it is to how it is depicted in US media.
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but we can see them from space on satellite imagery
Really? How do you check that, do you count the hand-welded 18650 cells on the google maps? That would be impressive.
If you really want to know, just get a visa and go look for yourself.
No, thanks, I'm quite full of traveling to dictatorial shitholes.
your mind will be blown at how different it is to how it is depicted in US media
I have no idea how Europe is depicted in the US media. Which place would you recommend for full color, Saaksum, Wixhausen or perhaps Titovo Uzhice?
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I suppose they could have built large farms of empty battery boxes, complete with fake roads, fake grid connections etc. Seems kind of insane though when there is basically nothing to be gained from it. What is the benefit of lying about this? It only affects their own grid.
What do you think is going on here? It's some nefarious scheme to make us think that battery storage works and is affordable, so we will buy it at presumably below the true cost and the Chinese manufactures will lose vast amount of money
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Stop feeding the trolls.
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I suppose they could have built large farms of empty battery boxes, complete with fake roads, fake grid connections etc. Seems kind of insane though when there is basically nothing to be gained from it.
Seems "kind of insane", but it is done nevertheless. Money is wasted on projects that do not complete, and the amounts are monstrous.
https://www.news.com.au/financ... [news.com.au]
What do you think is going on here? It's some nefarious scheme to make us think that battery storage works and is affordable, so we will buy it at presumably below the true cost and the Chinese manufactures will lose vast amount of money?
Yes, it is a nefarious scheme. The money of the Chinese population is moved from their bank accounts into the pockets of the Chicom party leadership. Happens all the time, really.
It's not greenwashing because emissions can be detected from space
Not yet, really.
But dream on.
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You are projecting. It's your government that robs its own people.
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You're quite like the soviet apparatchiks of yesteryear.
They loved to whatabout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, what about my government? You can start by telling me which is it :)))
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Hmm, maybe that explains why DeepSeek just responded to my programming query with 'print("Help me, I'm in the Shayar Facility #3 reeducation camp in Xinjiang, and they're making us work as sysadmins - send help!")'
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co-generation is common in Europe where they have district heating. waste heat from power generation heats water that is piped to homes and businesses for heating.
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These were most common in the former Socialist bloc, but it was my impression that quite a few, if not most of these have now been converted to producing only hot water. But these are typically small-scale, ~100MW. Sam Altman apparently needs an order or two of magnitude more.
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With "AI" loads, you're basically tied to the stock market valuation of the word of Sam Altman that scaling power consumption to levels untold will give you a breakthrough, producing a suitable LLM that can replace all the brains in your organization for the price of a license.
What happens to your plant infrastructure when the value decays as the truth about LLMs and their "AGI"-ness becomes obvious even to your average "investor"?
Very good point. So now that the AI bros essentially want their own nuc plants, and want to restart TMI's number 1 reactor for their AI boondoggles, https://www.theenergymix.com/m... [theenergymix.com] at the same time the Chinese DeepSeek model "Rattles Wall Street" - we just have to understand that we're creating a bubble that is going to have hella lot of money that is going to disappear just like it did when the dotcom bubble burst, the subprime bubble burst. AI so far is looking like it has the same problems looming, on
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> Turned out it is unsustainable.
I dunno about what happened behind the iron curtain. But on our side of the curtain, CoEd has been selling its waste heat (in the form of steam) sustainably and profitably since before our grandfathers were toddlers. So it can definitely be made to work.
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The grid really doesn't have much transmission losses. Usually like 5-10% or so, less for major consumers.
But it still makes sense to not waste even a couple percent of your power, nor to build and maintain grid infrastructure needlessly. If you have a point consumer of hundreds of megawatts, it might as well be at a generation site.
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its not about physical efficency, its about cutting out the middle man.
The NPP can charge a higher rate, and amazon gets cheaper power at the same time.
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If the transmission loss is 5%, then every 20th power station is running only to handle losses.
We're planning on having congress take a vote on eliminating Ohm's law. That'll fix the loss problem....
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Why bother? Just make another executive order.
Re: Or, they could just invest in the grid itself (Score:2)
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> The grid had quite some transmission losses
The total loss in the USA is about 7% and falling year over year. Most of that loss in the last mile on the lower voltage sections.
No, not, it does not have large transmission losses, especially for large users that get high voltage feeds.
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The grid had quite some transmission losses. Putting a high consumer next to a powerplant makes sense. Next, put something next to it that uses the waste heat. Then again ... if it is just for AI, it is not worth it, in my opinion. We 'll just get stupider if AI takes more of our hand.
That's kinda the whole point. The AI industry is human greed personified through technological means. It needs more data, it needs more power, it needs more money for building datacenters to gather still more of everything else. IT NEEDS MORE. Why? Best we've been able to sort out so far is empty promises of taking away all work. Which, if it works, would mean taking away a means of providing for ourselves for the vast majority of us, while enriching the few folks who promoted the greed in the first place.
I guess climate change (Score:2)
fuck no (Score:1)
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As long as they're willing to pay for new generation, fuck yes let them bypass the grid and plug straight into power facilities.
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As long as they're willing to pay for new generation, fuck yes let them bypass the grid and plug straight into power facilities.
The concept of businesses buying their own nuc plants, then going out of business and abandoning them is a tad scary.
You don't just walk out and shut the door when you leave. Those badboys need a lot of decommissioning.
Assuming that the AI bubble doesn't burst and billions disappear overnight, it might make more sense to see if power requirements end up being much lower over time.
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If it's a good plant, the operator can then hook it up to the grid and sell power.
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If it's a good plant, the operator can then hook it up to the grid and sell power.
Yeah - I was thinking about that part. It will be kind of an oversupply at that point. I don't have the figures of what that might do at that point.
I know what PG&E would prefer (Score:2)
Force the data centers onto the grid, so that PG&E can inflate the cost of power before selling it to the data centers. Even if the data centers are right next to the power plants.
PG&E. The pharmacy benefit manager of the power grid.
Is this even possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
A power-grid also serves as a gigantic short-term buffer and load equalizer. Data-centers can have strong variations in power-consumption. Hence if you do this "direct" connection, you may end up with a need for massive fast battery storage.
Reactors (Score:2)
You use reactors, basically giant inductors that smooth out current variations:
https://www.gevernova.com/grid... [gevernova.com]
Giant car factories used to be plugged directly into dedicated power plants. They used huge banks of these things to smooth out the extremely variable loads of a factory.
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I very much doubt that works for data-center loads.
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I'm not sure this will answer your question, but if it doesn't then maybe you can expand on it a bit and I will try again.
In a typical DC you have both the utility feed and (diesel) generator feed coming into an automatic transfer switch (ATS) which automatically switches the load over from one to the other if the utility feed fails. But these are then typically run to an on-line UPS which (again, typically) has a run-time of 4-5 minutes. So the power is conditioned by the UPSs in the facility all the tim
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That is not the problem. The problem is that the power plant may need to go into emergency shutdown if the load varies too much and that is expensive. On a nuke it is pretty much a small catastrophe and, to make matters worse, a nuke is about the slowest to react among all options, hence the most likely to need to do that shutdown. Also, we are talking about DC loads that are in the size of that external power-plant, and that would mean the backup generators are also in that size. A bit larger than the norm
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Does it have to be that way, or could they do more AI training during times of low electrical demand?
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Theoretically yes, but the problem is that you need to keep consumption up. Essentially you need to consume pretty much exactly what that power plant produces. With a grid-connection, you have a few minutes to adapt the output (not enough for a nuke to react, but a power-grid with more than 70% nuclear becomes unstable anyways, so you have fast reaction power plants in the mix) and if you cannot, you need to switch off the power to protect the equipment. But with a direct connection? That is probably going
Lava Tube, Boiler, Steam Generator, Profit! (Score:1)
Lava has been here since before humans. Maybe we should use it! It's free!! It's in a cave where nerds like to hang out! Prisoners can do the manual labor!
Life (Score:5, Insightful)
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AI uses an order of magnitude less power than video gaming. Should we ban video gaming?
Re: Life (Score:3)
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An order of magnitude more power plants exist to power gaming than AI, so by your logic, yes, we definitely should.
Re: Life (Score:2)
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Nonsense. Gaming GPUs keep getting more powerful and power-hungry [pcgamesn.com], the industry has grown rapidly [dfcint.com], and is projected to keep growing rapidly [precedenceresearch.com] as economic growth makes gaming (and increasingly powerful gaming hardware) increasingly available to the developing world.
This is (A) physically impossible, and (B) outright wrong.
With regards to (A), most games generally peg the GPU at near 100% all the time. You ca
District heating (Score:1)
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Unfortunately, the waste heat from datacentres is too cold to use for district heating. Chilled water systems might see a 10-14C rise, while a DX system is more like 8C.
Good thinking, though!
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Depends on the datacentre. There are several connected to heating systems already. The idea of a hot-loop datacentre is that by making the connection to the components using a means that has a low delta-T e.g. direct watercooling. You can run your cooling loop hot, i.e. feed your CPUs and GPUs 45C water and have 70C in the return line all while keeping the chip under the throttle position. You can't do it with air cooling since the delta between chip temperature and cooling system is too high.
The other opti
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No AI training datacentre is going to be running a 45C coolant loop and letting the temperature rise to 70C. That's far too little margin. Standard is 30-40C with a 10-14C rise. Hotter also shortens lifespans, and these are very expensive pieces of hardware.
It's just not worth it to try to run a datacentre like that, esp. one doing very intensive compute loads. That's not how they're generally run.
As for your "datacentres in operation", the only one I can think of is Meta's datacentre at Odense. They do n
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No AI training datacentre is going to be running a 45C coolant loop and letting the temperature rise to 70C. That's far too little margin.
That is plenty of margin. GPUs don't have IHSes and are cooled incredibly efficiently, far more so than CPUs. With a 45C feed water a fully utilised GPU will still be way within its thermal envelope. CPUs will struggle a bit.
Hotter also shortens lifespans, and these are very expensive pieces of hardware.
You should see the cost of running an large cooling system. But you've begged the question due to your lack of understanding of cooling efficiency. Using hot loop cooling results in the same temperatures of final components than using a hot/cold aisle air cooled system which is the trad
This is not a new thing (Score:3)
Aluminium smelters need lots of electricity, and it is very normal for them to be sited next door to a power plant.
The one in Fort William, Scotland, for example, they actually built a hydro-electric plant specifically for the smelter, and the reason it was sited there, nowhere near the raw materials nor the customers, nor anything really other than a load of mountains and sheep farms, was because it was a good site for a hydro-electric plant.
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its not just about being near power generation, its about having a private connection direct to the power station, and not involving the grid at all.
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In Iceland, we basically "export power" by importing alumium ore, refining it with local power, and exporting the alumium.
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Not the same thing in the slightest. Fort William's power plant was *built* by the Aluminium company and was owned and operated by Rio Tinto for most of its life. It was also co-located.
What is being discussed here is existing public power plants reaching deals with larger companies to provide power behind the grid meter - i.e. sell existing capacity to a preferred customer.
This activity actively should be regulated against, as it prioritises the richest people rather than achieves the goal of the governmen
mr burns cuts the town off and starts mining bitco (Score:2)
mr burns cuts the town off and starts mining bitcoin at the plant.
Self inflicted wounds. (Score:2)
The data center owners are exploring these options because they started getting rejected by municipalities when trying to bring (more) power into their data centers.
If they build near a power plant or have one built as part of their data center then the municipality has no jurisdiction.
It also means both sides can ignore state utility regulations, price mandates, etc. This is not part of the grid it is a private direct connection.
Nothing really new (Score:2)