The ecological and societal costs of data centers are hidden from the FAANG companies. It's very important to be well informed about it so society can regulate it. This podcast series, "Data Vampires" is really informative about the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm-sqZXTqq9oIG_d0P7aT...
You can find it in your favorite podcast player. Everybody should listen to it.
Yes I'm sure "Data Vampires" is an unbiased evaluation of empirical evidence.
Datacenters are not appreciably different than other industrial operations in the scale of their water usage and I'm more curious about how this meme spread than about how evaporative cooling works.
If you don’t trust it, look up videos on YouTube of people whose water has changed color, or who have terrible noise pollution 24/7 now, or whose rural landscape got completely destroyed and paved over. There is real negative impact on people’s lives, ones who will never gain from tech companies getting rich.
I am not OP, but, sure, here are the specific facts on "ecological costs" from this podcast (with some help from Perplexity's amazing youtube summary feature):
• Data centers consume lots of water. The example they start with is that Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon used 355 million gallons of water in 2021, which was 29% of all water consumed in the city (its population is 15K though, but they neglect to mention that).
• By 2023, hyperscale data centers used 66 billion liters of water in the U.S.—triple their volume from less than a decade earlier.
• They quote estimates that ChattGPT consumes 500 mL of water for every 10-50 user prompts (or 10-50 mL per prompt).
• in Ireland datacenters in total draw "over 20% of national electricity", which outstrips the total energy usage of all urban homes in the country.
• In Cerrillos, Chile local residents blocked Google's plans to build a datacenter there after discovering the scale of water use the centers would require (169 liters per second iand its a drought-stricken area).
• Power consumption of data centers is enormous and puts a very high load on energy grids across the world.
My impression is that this is clear example of politically-biased podcast with alarmist and accusatory tone, where none of the facts presented are particularly damning in the grand scheme of things.
In data centers with large water consumption, the water mostly (90%) goes to evaporative cooling (they let hot water turn into vapor carrying away the heat) with the rest going to 10% humidification systems (getting to 40-60% humidity inside to prefect static electricity buildup).
Let's take a moment to recognize what a dream "ecological cost" it is - turning water into vapour - compared to the old timey industries and real environmental problems people have had to deal with. Old timers in Cleveland can tell you how until 1970s (before first serious ecological enforcement), Cuyahoga river running through the city would once in a while BURN WITH FIRE Bible-style from all kinds of unprocessed oil-based waste being dumped by plants and factories on its course. It's the unfortunate reality that many of our vital industrial processes that make our civilization possible rely on dissolving all kinds of most dangereous and toxic compounds in water.
Also, the cost of evaporation cooling is not something fundamental to data centers and is not something that cannot be altered with some known engineering solutions and manageble cost overheads if there is a need. For example, in Belgium they built a two-loop water cooling system that can use industry waste or even sea water. You can also get a fully closed-circuit zero running water cooling system (fridge-style) if you absolutely must.
As for high power consumption and "climate change impact", none of this is specific to data centers. We might like it or not but our society runs on energy and electric power. This whole mindset showcased in this podcast that all energy consumption is something bad and its all about reducing it is so 2010s. I think, its obvious by now that this the road to pure economical if not civilizational suicide. A society that does not prioritize building for plentiful, cheap and hopefully clean energy is doomed to wither and stagnate.
As you might imagine, a two-hour-long podcast in a series named "Tech Won't Save Us" has time to explore many avenues of criticism.
Obviously, to summarise I have to remove the supporting examples, and the dozens of different people being interviewed. To be clear, the journalists aren't personally making all the criticisms, just interviewing other people, so if some of the following seems to contradict itself, that's why.
A fair chunk of the podcast involves explaining the context to a broad audience. You know, explaining what a data centre is, outlining the cloud market and its major players, etc.
The criticisms outlined in the podcast include:
* Data centres produce very few jobs for the communities they're located in.
* They are often built in struggling communities where 'enterprise zones' offer big tax breaks, hoping to attract employers.
* They consume quite a lot of power - not as much as, say, an aluminium smelter, but perhaps as much as 150,000 homes. Few cities have that much spare grid capacity, and some have warned about risks of rolling blackouts.
* 20 percent of Ireland's electricity is used for data centres (they're something of europe's data centre capital due to their attractive tax rates)
* Energy demand at data centres leads to greater emissions at power plants. Even if the data centre contracts to only buy renewable power, that might displace less-eco-friendly buyers of renewables onto non-renewable power sources. And a lot of things like 'carbon credits' are based on rather creative accounting.
* One high-profile data centre (in The Dalles, Oregon) is in a town suffering a drought, and consumes quite a lot of water, considering it's a drought area. Grass on the local golf course is completely dead.
* Land and tax breaks are often acquired through secretive shell companies that insist on secrecy agreements with desperate local governments; in one case the government didn't even know they were dealing with Google. This secrecy extends to agreements about things like water usage.
* As you can imagine, a local community suffering a drought sees the local data centre's water consumption being kept secret by elected officials, they assume the worst.
* Some data centre builders, like Elon Musk, have a history of making legally non-binding promises, then not bothering to keep them. And of running large gas generators without permits.
* The kind of distressed post-industrial communities that welcome data centres often have high levels of pollution and cancer, making those unpermitted generators particularly bad.
* Many of the hyperscalers are also big AI boosters, so it's not like the datacentre operators can disclaim responsibility for the power needs of AI.
* Many people have criticisms of AI, beyond energy consumption. Such as huge centralised LLMs transferring more control to huge tech firms; getting things wrong; AI friends being an alienating concept; having heavy-handed censorship; widespread use of bots on platforms like twitter and reddit; risks of job losses; being trained on pirated ebooks without authors' permission; being a really shitty therapist; producing mediocre art; producing porn depicting real people without their consent; producing creepy underage porn.
* Or AI might be a bubble that's about to burst, which would also be bad but for other reasons.
* Tech business leaders like Sam Altman are on record saying some pretty wacky things about AI power consumption, like that the high power demands of AI will force us to invent fusion power. A load of them also have weird, messianic ideas about "the singularity", or think we're all in a simulation already, or think living in a Matrix-style simulated 'metaverse' sounds like a great thing.
* Many of the highest-profile tech folks - the billionaires - have very right-wing politics. Such as opposing all regulation as a matter of principle, except on the occasions when it works for their benefit. Some people think expecting these folks to regulate themselves isn't the best idea.
Overall this is all stuff that followers of tech industry news will probably have heard before; the podcast just adds context, draws it together, and finds sources in the form of interviewees.
Since it's over 3 hours total, here are the specific examples of "ecological costs" from this podcast:
* Data centers consume a lot of water. The example they start with is Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon, which used 355 million gallons of water in 2021. This amounted to 29% of all water consumed in the city (they did not bother to mention that the city's population is only 15K though).
* In 2023, hyperscale data centers used 66 billion liters of water in the U.S.: 3x the volume from ten years ago!
* They quote estimates that ChatGPT consumes 500 mL of water for every 10-50 user prompts (or 10-50 mL per prompt, which again sounds less dramatic).
* In Ireland, data centers collectively draw "over 20% of national electricity," which outstrips the total energy usage of all urban homes in the country.
* In Cerrillos, Chile, local residents blocked Google's plans to build a data center after discovering the scale of water use it would require (169 liters per second and its a drought-stricken area or something).
* The power consumption of data centers is enormous and places a very high load on energy grids worldwide. No specific numbers mentioned though.
My impression is that this is a clear example of a politically-biased podcast with an alarmist and accusatory tone, where none of the facts presented are particularly damning in the grand scheme of things.
In data centers with large water consumption, most of the water (90%) is used for evaporative cooling (letting hot water turn into vapor to carry away the heat), with the remaining 10% going to humidification systems (maintaining 40-60% humidity inside to prevent static electricity buildup, basically evaporation as well).
Let's take a moment to recognize what a dream "ecological cost" evaporating water is compared to old-time industries and the real environmental problems people have had to deal with. Old-timers in Cleveland can tell you how, until the 1970s (before the first serious ecological protection enforcement), the Cuyahoga River running through the city would CATCH FIRE and BURN Bible-style because of all the unprocessed, oil-based waste being dumped by plants and factories along its course. It is an unfortunate reality that many key industrial processes of our civilization dissolve dangerous and toxic compounds with water.
Also, the cost of evaporation cooling is not fundamental to data centers. You can change things around with some known engineering solutions and the costs for it would not be a deal breaker. For example, in Belgium, they built a two-loop water cooling system that can use industrial waste water (or even seawater in principle).
If you absolutely must, you can also build a fully closed-circuit liquid cooling system (think big fridge). The thing is that some water drawn from municipal system in a little city in the middle of nowhere isn't a problem.
As for high power consumption and "climate change impact," none of this is specific to data centers.
(And, this whole mindset about climate change in this podcast is just so 2010s. No, energy consumption is not inherently bad and sinful. No, the math of solving climate change with consuming less, putting on a sweater and saving does not work. A society that does not prioritize building for plentiful, cheap, (and yes,clean) energy is doomed to stagnate and wither economically. I see even most leftist people change their mind about this over the last few years, tired of never-ending green washing. If only political orthodoxies were able to change with the times...).
> Data centers consume a lot of water. The example they start with is Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon, which used 355 million gallons of water in 2021.
For comparison, one acre-foot of water is 325,850 gallons. Google’s data center used around 1090 acre-feet in 2021. One acre of alfalfa requires 4-6 acre-feet of water per harvest, so another way to look at it is Google’s data center used as much water as 218 acres of alfalfa. There are a million acres of alfalfa growing in California.
I was just looking at water usage in the Las Vegas area and found that one Google data center in Henderson consumes 320 million gallons a year. Just for comparison I looked at golf courses in the area and 1 golf course consumed 450 million gallons.
I see quite a few golf course near The Dalles, Oregon. (“The” is actually part of the town name).
I'm not sure open loop cooling is really possible in those parts of the South. The idea that water consumption on the West Coast and South East is comparable is probably flawed.
Great podcast, highly recommend it. Paris Marx is writing a book now on data centers. Between him and This Machine Kills it feels great to finally find some high quality tech journalism.
No. Meta is spending $10B to build its largest data center in rural Louisiana.
I guarantee you that a lot of that $10B will be spent out of state. This is yet another corporate handout with the thin veil of "technology investment" Louisiana loves.
Myth: It has computers, therefore we are investing in technology and hi-tech jobs.
Fact: This will be built by out of state contractors, staffed by mostly out of state workers, and far less than anyone expects or claims. And will essentially transfer local resources out of the state while making those resources more scarce for residents.
Louisiana let EA run their QA from here to severely underpay people and pay fewer taxes. They courted IBM to do the same with Salesforce jobs. And now Meta gets to exploit the state to enrich another out-of-state corporation.
Access to very cheap power in the MISO region is likely one of the top driving factors for this location. It extends partially into Texas and I've found that my rates are sometimes as little as half of what ERCOT customers are paying.
The #1 thing that makes MISO so cheap is the fact that it has the heaviest coal generation mix (>40%) out of all US regional grid operators. Any talk about natural gas or renewables pales in comparison.
I would guess the 20 year 'tax break' (AKA the other taxpayers are footing the bill) is the real reason for the building. shell game
Meta built a data center in North Kansas City. I'm not sure details of their break (Mayor loves to hand out money), but power is likely cheaper, & def much greener (1/3 from wind farms in Western Kansas state last I checked).
"take advantage of a new Louisiana incentive program, established by Act 730, that offers qualifying projects a state and local sales and use tax rebate on the purchase or lease of data center equipment"
Curious as to how you reached this conclusion. No taxpayer funds are going towards construction or operation of the data center. The lack of tax revenue from Meta is nothing spent, and they're still going to be paying into the local economy. The energy infrastructure is going to be built by Entergy, who've projected it to cost customers ~$1 more or less per month.
As someone who lives here, this is one of the few times I agree with our government. We're one of the least competitive states in the country, our tech sector is almost non-existent. It's reasonable to offer what you can to attract business. I think Landry's LED efforts so far have been a respectable attempt at improving the state of things.
Because all of the plants are fully amortized. If they were brand new, the total cost would be excessive. Customers are mostly just paying for operations, fuel and maintenance. There is no capital recovery needed.
I'd be curious to test the GP's point. Since electricity maps doesn't have cost data for most US balancing authorities, you maybe could try figuring out power costs per balancing authority to end customers by using something like the https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/ "Sales to Customers Customer Sited" data. Revenue over Megawatthours for Industrial service.
While Meta has a non-binding promise to build more renewable energy, the Louisiana Legislature passed a new law that adds natural gas to the definition of green energy, allowing Zuckerberg and others to count Entergy’s gas turbines as “green.”
As much as I prefer burning gas over coal, conflating it with zero(-ish) emission energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear is bad.
Due to all the methane leaks, gas isn't even as much cleaner than coal as it was purported to be... But hey monitoring programs got cut so I guess that solves the problem...
Anyone who has to live in a fairly closed system (i.e. this planet) in which fossil fuels are burned for power would be beyond a fool to not strongly prefer gas over coal seeing as their greenhouse emissions are close enough to be within arguing distance. It's all the other stuff coming out that's the problem with coal.
I agree methane leaks (and monitoring programs cuts) are a problem. But even with them, methane burns much more cleanly than coal. The former primarily emits CO2 and H2O, while the latter emits SO2, NOx, heavy metals and more.
I have to imagine it's just a complete lack of care and classifying it as "green" helps push through something that they're being lobbied to push. I can't imagine this is anything but nonsense.
> Meta has a non-binding promise to build more renewable energy
Also the people working for that company. Unimaginable wealth, both at the corporate and personal level, everyone aware at this point that the climate is breaking down and yet, they just can't do the right thing because they are just too damn greedy.
Looks like Louisiana is all aboard the "internal colonialism" that seems to be all the rage at the state level lately. In this case, flouting national/international renewable energy policy so the good people of Louisiana can get the long term benefit of... Having to deal with the fallout of another datacentre project?
Come on Louisiana legislature, at least make them pay for resurfacing a highway or something.
Look, I love to be pedantic as much as the next person on this site, but let's not miss the forest for the trees. State level legislature relabeling fossil fuels so they count as "green" is not the path to a better future.
Reliability is king. Why not just buy 50 sq mi of ranch land in Arizona for a data center complex, install a solar and battery storage system and eliminate electricity concerns for the next 20 years? Using LFP or sodium-ion batteries for storage effectively eliminates fire risk.
Have there been any formal studies looking at OpEx ROI for offgrid carbon free generation + storage for data centers? Exiting the grid and vertically integrating on site generation eliminates a lot of risk when dealing with an external utility.
FAANG has the market cap to drive down costs for reliable carbon-free generation and storage, like Alphabet is doing[1].
Microsoft is demonstrating water-free cooling solutions[2]. As long as there's a fiber backbone nearby, FAANG can slash energy OpEx and not worry about the rest of the grid. Or natural gas prices.
I'm not super-familiar with Louisiana, but my general impression is there's a lot of climate/weather events that are gonna impact power reliability. Hmmm.
If you've not paid attention to the recent hurricane damages to the US, it wasn't just coastal cities that were hammered. Lots of places "far enough away from the coast" saw lots of flooding. A hurricane doesn't just evaporate. The hurricane reverses the process back to Tropical Storm, Depression, etc while continuing to bring lots of rain minus all that wind
The major tech companies are all scrambling to snap up cheap energy right now. The result is that we are dumping a whole lot of additional carbon in red states and adding a while lot of additional extremely expensive per MWh sources in blue states. In both cases, the winners will be tech company shareholders and the losers will be the people who actually live in these communities who will end up with dirtier, more expensive power.
The losers are going to be the energy companies who think they’re getting long-term energy sales but probably won’t be, since these techniques will get more efficient.
The techniques will get more efficient, but the quantity of training will increase monotonically. We aren't going to use less energy overall. The ratepayers are absolutely the ones who will lose out on this.
Readit News
You can find it in your favorite podcast player. Everybody should listen to it.
Datacenters are not appreciably different than other industrial operations in the scale of their water usage and I'm more curious about how this meme spread than about how evaporative cooling works.
Vampires might be a loaded term, but it might also apply as a conclusion of an unbiased study.
And burning fossil fuels is pretty shady considering how cheap solar has gotten.
• Data centers consume lots of water. The example they start with is that Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon used 355 million gallons of water in 2021, which was 29% of all water consumed in the city (its population is 15K though, but they neglect to mention that).
• By 2023, hyperscale data centers used 66 billion liters of water in the U.S.—triple their volume from less than a decade earlier.
• They quote estimates that ChattGPT consumes 500 mL of water for every 10-50 user prompts (or 10-50 mL per prompt).
• in Ireland datacenters in total draw "over 20% of national electricity", which outstrips the total energy usage of all urban homes in the country.
• In Cerrillos, Chile local residents blocked Google's plans to build a datacenter there after discovering the scale of water use the centers would require (169 liters per second iand its a drought-stricken area).
• Power consumption of data centers is enormous and puts a very high load on energy grids across the world.
My impression is that this is clear example of politically-biased podcast with alarmist and accusatory tone, where none of the facts presented are particularly damning in the grand scheme of things.
In data centers with large water consumption, the water mostly (90%) goes to evaporative cooling (they let hot water turn into vapor carrying away the heat) with the rest going to 10% humidification systems (getting to 40-60% humidity inside to prefect static electricity buildup).
Let's take a moment to recognize what a dream "ecological cost" it is - turning water into vapour - compared to the old timey industries and real environmental problems people have had to deal with. Old timers in Cleveland can tell you how until 1970s (before first serious ecological enforcement), Cuyahoga river running through the city would once in a while BURN WITH FIRE Bible-style from all kinds of unprocessed oil-based waste being dumped by plants and factories on its course. It's the unfortunate reality that many of our vital industrial processes that make our civilization possible rely on dissolving all kinds of most dangereous and toxic compounds in water.
Also, the cost of evaporation cooling is not something fundamental to data centers and is not something that cannot be altered with some known engineering solutions and manageble cost overheads if there is a need. For example, in Belgium they built a two-loop water cooling system that can use industry waste or even sea water. You can also get a fully closed-circuit zero running water cooling system (fridge-style) if you absolutely must.
As for high power consumption and "climate change impact", none of this is specific to data centers. We might like it or not but our society runs on energy and electric power. This whole mindset showcased in this podcast that all energy consumption is something bad and its all about reducing it is so 2010s. I think, its obvious by now that this the road to pure economical if not civilizational suicide. A society that does not prioritize building for plentiful, cheap and hopefully clean energy is doomed to wither and stagnate.
Obviously, to summarise I have to remove the supporting examples, and the dozens of different people being interviewed. To be clear, the journalists aren't personally making all the criticisms, just interviewing other people, so if some of the following seems to contradict itself, that's why.
A fair chunk of the podcast involves explaining the context to a broad audience. You know, explaining what a data centre is, outlining the cloud market and its major players, etc.
The criticisms outlined in the podcast include:
* Data centres produce very few jobs for the communities they're located in.
* They are often built in struggling communities where 'enterprise zones' offer big tax breaks, hoping to attract employers.
* They consume quite a lot of power - not as much as, say, an aluminium smelter, but perhaps as much as 150,000 homes. Few cities have that much spare grid capacity, and some have warned about risks of rolling blackouts.
* 20 percent of Ireland's electricity is used for data centres (they're something of europe's data centre capital due to their attractive tax rates)
* Energy demand at data centres leads to greater emissions at power plants. Even if the data centre contracts to only buy renewable power, that might displace less-eco-friendly buyers of renewables onto non-renewable power sources. And a lot of things like 'carbon credits' are based on rather creative accounting.
* One high-profile data centre (in The Dalles, Oregon) is in a town suffering a drought, and consumes quite a lot of water, considering it's a drought area. Grass on the local golf course is completely dead.
* Land and tax breaks are often acquired through secretive shell companies that insist on secrecy agreements with desperate local governments; in one case the government didn't even know they were dealing with Google. This secrecy extends to agreements about things like water usage.
* As you can imagine, a local community suffering a drought sees the local data centre's water consumption being kept secret by elected officials, they assume the worst.
* Some data centre builders, like Elon Musk, have a history of making legally non-binding promises, then not bothering to keep them. And of running large gas generators without permits.
* The kind of distressed post-industrial communities that welcome data centres often have high levels of pollution and cancer, making those unpermitted generators particularly bad.
* Many of the hyperscalers are also big AI boosters, so it's not like the datacentre operators can disclaim responsibility for the power needs of AI.
* Many people have criticisms of AI, beyond energy consumption. Such as huge centralised LLMs transferring more control to huge tech firms; getting things wrong; AI friends being an alienating concept; having heavy-handed censorship; widespread use of bots on platforms like twitter and reddit; risks of job losses; being trained on pirated ebooks without authors' permission; being a really shitty therapist; producing mediocre art; producing porn depicting real people without their consent; producing creepy underage porn.
* Or AI might be a bubble that's about to burst, which would also be bad but for other reasons.
* Tech business leaders like Sam Altman are on record saying some pretty wacky things about AI power consumption, like that the high power demands of AI will force us to invent fusion power. A load of them also have weird, messianic ideas about "the singularity", or think we're all in a simulation already, or think living in a Matrix-style simulated 'metaverse' sounds like a great thing.
* Many of the highest-profile tech folks - the billionaires - have very right-wing politics. Such as opposing all regulation as a matter of principle, except on the occasions when it works for their benefit. Some people think expecting these folks to regulate themselves isn't the best idea.
Overall this is all stuff that followers of tech industry news will probably have heard before; the podcast just adds context, draws it together, and finds sources in the form of interviewees.
* Data centers consume a lot of water. The example they start with is Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon, which used 355 million gallons of water in 2021. This amounted to 29% of all water consumed in the city (they did not bother to mention that the city's population is only 15K though).
* In 2023, hyperscale data centers used 66 billion liters of water in the U.S.: 3x the volume from ten years ago!
* They quote estimates that ChatGPT consumes 500 mL of water for every 10-50 user prompts (or 10-50 mL per prompt, which again sounds less dramatic).
* In Ireland, data centers collectively draw "over 20% of national electricity," which outstrips the total energy usage of all urban homes in the country.
* In Cerrillos, Chile, local residents blocked Google's plans to build a data center after discovering the scale of water use it would require (169 liters per second and its a drought-stricken area or something).
* The power consumption of data centers is enormous and places a very high load on energy grids worldwide. No specific numbers mentioned though.
My impression is that this is a clear example of a politically-biased podcast with an alarmist and accusatory tone, where none of the facts presented are particularly damning in the grand scheme of things.
In data centers with large water consumption, most of the water (90%) is used for evaporative cooling (letting hot water turn into vapor to carry away the heat), with the remaining 10% going to humidification systems (maintaining 40-60% humidity inside to prevent static electricity buildup, basically evaporation as well).
Let's take a moment to recognize what a dream "ecological cost" evaporating water is compared to old-time industries and the real environmental problems people have had to deal with. Old-timers in Cleveland can tell you how, until the 1970s (before the first serious ecological protection enforcement), the Cuyahoga River running through the city would CATCH FIRE and BURN Bible-style because of all the unprocessed, oil-based waste being dumped by plants and factories along its course. It is an unfortunate reality that many key industrial processes of our civilization dissolve dangerous and toxic compounds with water.
Also, the cost of evaporation cooling is not fundamental to data centers. You can change things around with some known engineering solutions and the costs for it would not be a deal breaker. For example, in Belgium, they built a two-loop water cooling system that can use industrial waste water (or even seawater in principle).
If you absolutely must, you can also build a fully closed-circuit liquid cooling system (think big fridge). The thing is that some water drawn from municipal system in a little city in the middle of nowhere isn't a problem.
As for high power consumption and "climate change impact," none of this is specific to data centers.
(And, this whole mindset about climate change in this podcast is just so 2010s. No, energy consumption is not inherently bad and sinful. No, the math of solving climate change with consuming less, putting on a sweater and saving does not work. A society that does not prioritize building for plentiful, cheap, (and yes,clean) energy is doomed to stagnate and wither economically. I see even most leftist people change their mind about this over the last few years, tired of never-ending green washing. If only political orthodoxies were able to change with the times...).
For comparison, one acre-foot of water is 325,850 gallons. Google’s data center used around 1090 acre-feet in 2021. One acre of alfalfa requires 4-6 acre-feet of water per harvest, so another way to look at it is Google’s data center used as much water as 218 acres of alfalfa. There are a million acres of alfalfa growing in California.
https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk12586/files/...
I see quite a few golf course near The Dalles, Oregon. (“The” is actually part of the town name).
I guarantee you that a lot of that $10B will be spent out of state. This is yet another corporate handout with the thin veil of "technology investment" Louisiana loves.
Myth: It has computers, therefore we are investing in technology and hi-tech jobs.
Fact: This will be built by out of state contractors, staffed by mostly out of state workers, and far less than anyone expects or claims. And will essentially transfer local resources out of the state while making those resources more scarce for residents.
Louisiana let EA run their QA from here to severely underpay people and pay fewer taxes. They courted IBM to do the same with Salesforce jobs. And now Meta gets to exploit the state to enrich another out-of-state corporation.
The #1 thing that makes MISO so cheap is the fact that it has the heaviest coal generation mix (>40%) out of all US regional grid operators. Any talk about natural gas or renewables pales in comparison.
Meta built a data center in North Kansas City. I'm not sure details of their break (Mayor loves to hand out money), but power is likely cheaper, & def much greener (1/3 from wind farms in Western Kansas state last I checked).
"take advantage of a new Louisiana incentive program, established by Act 730, that offers qualifying projects a state and local sales and use tax rebate on the purchase or lease of data center equipment"
https://www.opportunitylouisiana.gov/news/meta-selects-north...
Curious as to how you reached this conclusion. No taxpayer funds are going towards construction or operation of the data center. The lack of tax revenue from Meta is nothing spent, and they're still going to be paying into the local economy. The energy infrastructure is going to be built by Entergy, who've projected it to cost customers ~$1 more or less per month.
As someone who lives here, this is one of the few times I agree with our government. We're one of the least competitive states in the country, our tech sector is almost non-existent. It's reasonable to offer what you can to attract business. I think Landry's LED efforts so far have been a respectable attempt at improving the state of things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
It looks like natural gas is usually the biggest source of electricity.
[0] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-MIDW-MISO/72h/hourly...
I'd be curious to test the GP's point. Since electricity maps doesn't have cost data for most US balancing authorities, you maybe could try figuring out power costs per balancing authority to end customers by using something like the https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/ "Sales to Customers Customer Sited" data. Revenue over Megawatthours for Industrial service.
https://miso.singularity.energy/realtime
I am seeing 39.1% right now
It is bounded by Fortenberry Rd on the N, LA183 on the E, US80 on the S and Jaggers Ln on the W. It overlays Burn, Wade and Smalling roads.
https://www.richlandparishdatacenter.com/blank-5
It has 6 reviews and a 3.7 rating on Google. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pxXR5zxfiiBDDNrB7
construction website: https://www.richlandparishdatacenter.com/
It's a pretty piss poor location to invest a boat load of money without putting servers in actual boats.
As much as I prefer burning gas over coal, conflating it with zero(-ish) emission energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear is bad.
Anyone who has to live in a fairly closed system (i.e. this planet) in which fossil fuels are burned for power would be beyond a fool to not strongly prefer gas over coal seeing as their greenhouse emissions are close enough to be within arguing distance. It's all the other stuff coming out that's the problem with coal.
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I was much more concerned that it will be expensive to cool because it's situated in a state with a lot of hot and humid days.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Also the people working for that company. Unimaginable wealth, both at the corporate and personal level, everyone aware at this point that the climate is breaking down and yet, they just can't do the right thing because they are just too damn greedy.
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Come on Louisiana legislature, at least make them pay for resurfacing a highway or something.
I don't understand. What are the specific risks facing the people of Louisiana?
Dead Comment
Nuclear for base load and gas for peak/flexible demand is the most climate friendly solution available.
All of them require that; but not all of them require it during the production. Some, like natural gas, do.
Have there been any formal studies looking at OpEx ROI for offgrid carbon free generation + storage for data centers? Exiting the grid and vertically integrating on site generation eliminates a lot of risk when dealing with an external utility.
FAANG has the market cap to drive down costs for reliable carbon-free generation and storage, like Alphabet is doing[1].
Microsoft is demonstrating water-free cooling solutions[2]. As long as there's a fiber backbone nearby, FAANG can slash energy OpEx and not worry about the rest of the grid. Or natural gas prices.
[1]https://dataconomy.com/2024/12/11/why-googles-800m-bet-on-cl...
[2]https://datacentremagazine.com/news/how-are-companies-pionee...