Comment by idiotsecant 9 hours ago
They're just purchasing power from existing nuke plants. All this is doing is making a formerly publicly available resource private. This will drive up energy prices for everyone else. These datacenters need to build their own generation. When people talk about how important it is that the US lead innovation in AI what they're really saying is how important it is for their quarterly results
If history repeats itself ... tax payers will be fitting the bill. Ohio has shown to be corrupt when it comes to their Nuclear infrastructure. [0] High confident that politicians are lining up behind the scenes to get their slice of the pie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
Well, private investment is a great way to avoid subsidy nonsense.
You know that there's no actual private investment in nuclear in the US.
The nuclear industry is indemnified by the taxpayers. Without thar insurance backstop, there would be no nuclear energy industry.
The weasel wording is strong here. That's like me saying that buying a hamburger will help advance the science of hamburger-making. I'm just trading money for hamburgers. They're trying to put a shiny coat of paint on the ugly fact that they're buying up MWh, reducing the supply of existing power for the rest of us, and burning it to desperately try to convince investors that AGI is right around the corner so that the circular funding musical chairs doesn't stop.
We got hosed when they stole our content to make chatbots. We get hosed when they build datacenters with massive tax handouts and use our cheap power to produce nothing, and we'll get hosed when the house of cards ultimately collapses and the government bails them out. The game is rigged. At least when you go to the casino everyone acknowledges that the house always wins.
Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives.
Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors.
Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.
But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
> New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission.
That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.
And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
>Unlocking Up to 6.6 GW
You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment.
What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates?
To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else.
Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.
I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"
We in Ohio don't need more nuclear. The costs for maintaining what we have is already falling behind solar and wind (including batteries). Then there is the ecological costs that rarely get factored in.
And all these new datacenters are pushing up our electric bills. Maybe this deal could be competitive long term with newer reactor designs and if they are competently executed, but I'm very skeptical.
Maybe PA situation is different
> Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032.
> Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region.
It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants".
Perhaps I'm misreading it though.