buddy

@chaumian @starbased_ servers are outside the restaurant, i guess it’s possible but doesn’t appear to be an outdoor dining type joint

chinese friend just sent me this

@TheStalwart Same in the LA area

One thing I did not realize until having kids in NYC public schools is how much variable auxiliary fundraising occurs at each specific location. So even if you divide the tax pie in a perfectly egalitarian manner, schools with wealthier parents will still end up with more.

@clutch131313 @Ben_Inskeep no, and they can’t build it, and the data centers won’t get built

@Ben_Inskeep Do Indiana utilities have the power generation capacity to cover the addition requirements?

Indiana electric utilities now have ~8,700 MW of new data center load under executed contract with Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. That's equivalent to 2x all household electricity consumption in Indiana. Dozens of additional DCs have been proposed. We need a moratorium.

@ENaughtius @ErnestScheyder what chemistry do you expect grid scale batteries will use?

@ErnestScheyder Yeah, but the gridscale batteries won't be using lithium because there's much more cheaper and optimal materials for that. It's just the vehicles and small devices with less than a 10 year lifespan anyway that require the high power density of lithium.

My one big question here is this: Does anyone actually think Maine will ever permit an open-pit lithium mine?

@judgeglock @mnolangray @lymanstoneky NoVA is a unique area for DC development though, it has a talent pool unrivaled on earth and the best access to peering and transit in possibly the world. their bargaining position is naturally stronger than anywhere else’s can be. but i agree with you

@mnolangray @lymanstoneky Yes, but as I try to show in the piece, the local service costs for these are so low that it's still almost always a big fiscal boon for the local area (even with exemptions).

Wild to me localities are banning data centers when you could instead just get data centers and slash your residential property taxes and make literally everybody better off

@fredstaffordcs you’d think he had never heard of HJB before

That this cowardly wiener rebuts the arguments with claims they're "made in bad faith to punch left" should tell you a lot about the seriousness of the debate and about the role of NGO directors in defining themselves to be the left.

Current count of people who block me being RT'd into my timeline to complain about Holly Buck's Jacobin essay on data centers: 2

@SlBrandin Are you saying a better transmission end-state would extend beyond west Texas to extant industrial load centers?

This is part of why developing data center infrastructure in west Texas is preposterously short sighted and leaves all Texas ratepayers with a raw deal when considering the consequences of suboptimal transmission expansion Even if all new tx expansion is theoretically paid for privately, we waste time, resources and opportunity cost on what could’ve otherwise been expansion to support the load centers and core engines of the industrial economy which then would allow us to financing bringing all west Texas energy (gas, wind, solar) to locations where their use can be maximally utilized (and the costs can be maximally socialized)

For this to be even remotely possible, we need to optimize the expansion of the grid to maximize transmission hosting capacity serving both immediate data center demand and longer term industrial expansion while minimizing required circuit miles

@lithos_graphein @protokultur @Ben_Inskeep good or bad for Indianans?

Silicon Midwest. SK Hynix started construction of its ($4B) chip packaging fab in West Lafayette, Indiana. It's right next to Purdue University, which has positioned itself as a major player in semiconductor workforce training.

@KentleighE @bigboybokchoy @rob_mcrobberson ZZ

@bigboybokchoy @rob_mcrobberson Why not ":x"?

accidentally entered a tmux command into the managers gchat w like 200 ppl on it instead of my terminal hows ur day

@Ben_Inskeep Ben, doesn’t performing faster interconnection studies and building new grid infrastructure to support new generation increase utility rates for consumers, at least in the short term, much like data centers?

Infuriating to see 469 MW of I&M solar projects are delayed 2+ years due to an incompetent PJM interconnection process.🤬

@emmaalpern i was admitted to marlboro in 2019, went elsewhere and heard about their closure in the spring of the next year(?). i remember thinking “500 seems too small.”

goodbye Hampshire, Goddard, Marlboro, my high school, all the weird, small, utopian educational experiments we don't understand the value of anymore

@1031CRE @dirtcheapbanks em dash + “that’s not x, that’s y”:

@dirtcheapbanks I can’t tell if this schtick is real or fake. Legitimately asking @dirtcheapbanks are you for real?

Called the investor relations line for a $30M market cap bank and got transferred to the CEO's cell phone. He was at his kid's soccer game and spent ten minutes explaining their loan-to-deposit ratio while yelling "good hustle, Madison!

@1031CRE @dirtcheapbanks there might be a grain of truth in there, but i think all these posts are AI. same formula every time, subtly lackluster but witty one liners, perfect spelling and punctuation

@duncancampbell i havent seen any sound deadening walls around DCs. this is probably just too close. kind of like living next to the freeway i wonder if this is constant sound or facilities was doing gen testing that day

What went wrong here? Just too close? Missing a sound dampening wall? Something else?

@fredstaffordcs What do you mean when you say, “after decades of solar tax credits being denied to public power utilities”?

A few dimensions to this 40MW solar project in the Huntsville area, which falls in TVA territory, that are worth understanding for public power proponents. 1. The ~240 acres of land for the project are owned by the city of Huntsville and by the surrounding county. The deal is for solar developer EE Gemini Solar to rent the land in exchange for developing the project. 2. Huntsville's municipal utility, a "local power customer" (LPC) of TVA, will purchase the energy generated by the project at a lower price than the wholesale energy they purchase from TVA. 3. The project will not interconnect to the bulk power system; TVA is not managing that. Instead it's interconnecting to Huntsville's distribution system. 4. That arrangement is possible because TVA's newer contracts with LPCs allow them to locally generate up to 5% annual energy needs, up to some constraint on daylight load on each substation. So although TVA sells "all requirements" power service to LPCs, they do allow them to buy a small amount of local power from a third party. 5. The third party here, EE Gemini Solar, is a subsidiary of Toyota, which means celebrating the project is in part a celebration of private power taking over public power. Huntsville Utility could have developed the project themselves, thanks to IRA tax credit changes, but presumably lacks the institutional capacity to do so. 6. The solar project is not just generating power; it's also generating renewable energy certificates (RECs), which will be retained by the project owner. That means the project is being used by Toyota to claim that its facilities are X% renewable. Indeed they have another solar project nearby that generates RECs covering 70% of annual energy consumed by Toyota Alabama's manufacturing facilities. (Of course that's about annual accounting of certificates; the facilities operate around the clock, powered by TVA grid.) 7. Toyota is an industrial customer of Huntsville, so it buys retail electricity from the utility. The EE Gemini Solar subsidiary separately sells wholesale electricity to Huntsville. 8. Putting it all together, after decades of solar tax credits being denied to public power utilities, those utilities are left to procure private power instead, and the whole thing only pencils out to begin with because corporate customers voluntarily pay a premium for renewable energy certificates for their climate claims.

@Raen4657 @AndyMasley about six of the data centers are on Bombing Range Road. where there is a bombing range… imagine how that land looks

@AndyMasley Just constant violations and pollution, totally unrelated to the datacenters oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2022/05/19/wat…

I've noticed an uptick of people telling me data centers "poison water supplies" so I added a subsection to the water post. This problem is entirely fake.

@AndyMasley The Port of Morrow has already been sued AND SETTLED multiple times over this exact issue. Not to mention next door in Umatilla was a chemical weapons depot that had to be cleaned up over a 50 year process, and right next to the data center is an enormous Air Force bombing range!

I've looked into this more and this story is entirely 100% fake. A lot of people are as usual misrepresenting what happened here and not bothering to look at the details at all. First, as I argue in my water post, there seems to be no physical way for Amazon to be responsible for even 1% of the increase in nitrates in groundwater that are contributing to cancer. I'll post that as screenshots in the following comment and link it. What happened here is big ag let a ton of nitrates leak into water to the point that they're polluting local groundwater and increasing the rate of cancer. Amazon's role here is they operate a data center in the area that evaporates a small fraction of the water and leave the nitrates behind, so they very slightly increase the concentration, but it seems impossible for that increase to be anywhere near even a few acres of a normal farm in the area. But Amazon agreeing to pay this must mean they're guilty right? Not at all, the actual court case makes it look like the opposite is true. In the settlement documents, Amazon states explicitly that it is entering the agreement "solely to avoid the burdens and expense of litigation," and denies "each and every one of the allegations of wrongful conduct. Amazon's public statement says their data centers "don't add nitrates to that water, and the water we return represents a very small fraction of the region's overall system." If you do the math, it seems impossible not to agree with Amazon's statement here. Amazon is one of 17 defendants in this case. The others include the large farms and food processing companies (the groups that actually added the nitrates in the first place), and the wastewater facility that's been failing to deal with leakage into the groundwater. They've been building up the nitrate concentration in the water since the early 90s, way before the data center was opened in 2011. Amazon was the first to settle because its marginal contribution to the problem is the easiest to pay off and move on from! The agricultural defendants are still litigating because their part in this is way larger. But as usual people are entirely misreading this and now think that 1) A data center poisoned people and gave them cancer, and 2) It's so clear this happened that Amazon won't even fight it in court. The info environment around this topic is completely off the wall insane.

@john_dough @AdamThierer yes. generally speaking, all of the ratepayers in a utility’s service district have to share the cost of distribution and transmission upgrades precipitated by all new industrial construction

@mor0sey @AdamThierer Yeah, I know. Does all that cause the surrounding areas electric rates to go up because they are being subsidized by the electricity costs of the local population, or do they just pay their electric bill? I don’t give a fuck about data centers for what they are.

Is it a data center or a food & beverage distribution facility? I'm going to start going to planning meetings where people are protesting data center aesthetics and ask them to pick one out of a lineup.

@Lincoln_Osis @decent_shittalk “food”, meanwhile it’s corn alcohol to make plastic and gasoline lmaooooo

I don’t even care for data centers in particular but I need y’all to stop glazing farmers.

@john_dough @AdamThierer of course they do. it takes a lot of power to run food processing lines. and a lot of water too. the inside of an apple packing plant is huuuuuge and everything is driven with giant 3 phase AC motors, and there are giant flowing rivers inside

@AdamThierer Hey man, does a food and beverage distribution facility also cause the neighbors electricity bill to go up because they seek deals from local gov to build there? It’s not about the buildings you fucking tool.