At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar.
It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
A Chinese nuke on the coast of Britain might be hard politically. Even if it's benign, you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
There's a special line crossed by a 100% Chinese owned floating nuclear power plant, as opposed to a 24% Chinese owned fixed in place nuclear power plant like the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station?
You wouldn't even need it to be Chinese owned. Just Chinese built and indemnified. Hell, I'd take a guarantee from a consortium of Chinese SoE banks over the U.S. government today. (I'm American.)
Sort of like needing the US for F-35 parts? Given the choice between being dependent on China or the US, I know which one I'd choose - China is running a business, the US is running... God knows what it is they think they're running, but it's not something you want to get tied up in.
The government that keeps rejecting offshore wind for bogus security reasons is probably a bigger factor.
Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.
They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.
On one hand Swedish government rejected applications for 11 offshore wind sites on national security grounds, on the other hand, wind investors state that they will not do wind investments in Sweden without subsidies.
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risk-sharing mechanism will be required, for example through two-sided Contracts for Difference and state-backed credit guarantees that reduce investment risk and unlock project financing.”
Pretty much every reply to the parent has now given a very different reason for why the problem exists. Anyone else want to give it a try? Bonus points for mentioning meatballs and/or lutfisk.
Power generation is 25% higher with 6 than with 12 reactors. Plenty of scaremongering around volatility, though. Consumers don't realize that one-hour price spikes are completely irrelevant since they pay monthly (or even quarterly) AVERAGE prices. Max, min, mean, and standard deviation. People don't know statistics and are so easy to fool by demagogues.
Large customers buy directly on electricity markets at hourly market price, or have direct power purchase agreements with power suppliers.
Most small customers are paying using average prices, but these average prices are calculated from the costs of power suppliers and these are affected by hourly market prices. So when many small customers consume use lot of electricity during hours with high hourly market price, the average price for small customers goes up.
Best solution is instalation of smart meters so that small customers pay according to hourly market price.
The bottleneck is the grid, not the production centers. Volatility is not more extreme in Sweden than other connected (Nord Pool) countries. Companies lament the lack of grid connectivity all the time. Then they get the offer "Pay for the cost of grid expansion to connect you" and they are not so interested anymore.
>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
This assumes that there is excess power at some point. This will soon become unrealistic: we either need power for data centers during the day or charging vehicles during the night.
The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
But isn’t that also because of not investing in the grid more than a production problem? Not cheap to upgrade the grid of course but having good transmission capacity makes a more stable and efficient energy system.
Not saying we shouldn’t produce more electricity. But from what I have understood it’s mainly about other factors than production.
> Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries
Some light research shows that Sweden has annual electricity exports of about 30 TWh (equiv to 2x EPR nuclear reactors). Sweden has plenty of excess power. Also, Sweden is part of Nord Pool. Its neighbor, Norway, also has massive annual electricity exports of about 30 TWh. Again: Plenty of excess capacity to supply Sweden. Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
Excess power is unevenly distributed both geographically and temporally.
In the SE1 region, which is the least populated and probably best candidate for a data center, there was a 400% price drop between February and March this year, then up 100% in May, then down 50% in July. Between summer 2025 and winter 2026, the same region saw a price hike of nearly 1000%.
China added 315 GW of solar and 120 GW of wind capacity in the year 2025.
There is a lot of hydro generation deployed (1455 GW) but only 30 GW capacity added worldwide in 2025, and 200 GW added worldwide during last 10 years.
Total geothermal capacity is 15 GW worldwide in 2025.
Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Agreed on all points, but you forgot to mentioned that Google pay close to no taxes in Norway (~1%). At the same time, their hyperscaler in Skien alone will, when finished, consume ~5% of total energy production. Put another way, 25% of what households use.
Now Google is planing another hyperscalar in Østfold, and other hyperscalars are being built in rapid succession (about 50 is planned), putting a severe strain on our power transfer net.
Germany became a net electricity importer after shutting down its final nuclear power plants in 2023.
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
In absolutely no way is that true. The EU price varies by renewables production. When it's dark and still that's when electricity costs the most, and that's when Germany imports energy. It exports when there's sun and wind, but then the energy is cheap. So Germany sells low and buys high. Doesn't matter if Germany is a net exporter because it exports at the wrong time.
This may be technically true at the moment, but the underlying reason for the high prices is fossil fuels: when renewable generation is low, natural gas peaker plants are generating, and these have the highest cost of any generation source, and by the merit order rules under which commodity markets such as electricity operate, the highest source price sets the price of the commodity.
The obvious and affordable mitigation for high prices is to build out massive battery storage capacities so that natural gas plants are needed far less often.
92 units (1 MW or larger) were connected in the first half of 2026 adding 842 MW/1.8 GWh, which is more than all of 2025 so this is both happening and accelerating. In addition small scale storage also seems to be adding a significant amount of capacity.
Germany has excess coal and gas capacity which they can turn on when needed. They, like most people import when it's cheaper than the local alternative.
Interconnected nations all importing when cheap electricity is available lowers costs for everyone.
Looking up the numbers Germany sells high and buys low when it's net importing
In the long term interconnected nations might make electricity cheap everywhere. Currently it's mostly making it more expensive everywhere else. (As someone living in south of Sweden.)
Edit: But to be fair... The biggest reason it's expensive is likely that companies like to make money.
For some reason the HN commentariat is very pro-nuclear, and it drives them INSANE that the shutdown had minimal consequences(as only a small proportion of power production was nuclear and it was entirely replaced by new renewable capacity).
I think no one outside of Germany particularly cares about their internal politics, energy prices, or what role the Energiewende placed in the long-term industrial slowdown. The criticism that Germany gets for the Energiewende is that they decided to shut down nuclear power plants while THEY WERE STILL BURNING COAL! I don't think this legally qualifies as a crime against humanity, but it was horribly negligent.
Coal is such a dirty fuel, that burning it should be a last resort. A properly running coal plant with all safety equipment working will kill people through pollution. Every year in Germany and all downwind countries people die due to the effects of burning coal. (See https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/dark_cloud_repor.... )
Long term, it is hard to know the loss of life that will come from this foolish policy. The Energiewende was implemented around 2010 - they knew about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and they. did. it. anyway.
So now 15 years later, how much dependent is Germany on coal? Last I looked it was about 20% of the electrical power generated. They estimate that sometime between 2030 - 2038 they will stop all burning of coal.
This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
A customer willing to make a multi-decade deal for half a reactor at a stable price is perfect for incentivizing new nuclear buildouts. The basic financial problem of nuclear is that it' capex heavy and opex-light, so the costs of the entire enterprise are set during the buildout stage, but the revenue is volatile.
What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
Google has been doing all of that for decades. I remember when they started building their first data center (back when almost no companies required enough compute for an entire data center) they chose the location due to the cleanest energy they could find (hydroelectric on a river that wasn't blocking fish migration).
Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
It is worth noting that Finland is a member of Nord Pool (for electricity) which includes all Nordic nations. You cannot consider Finland alone in your supply and consumption expectations -- you need to include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have massive annual electricity exports exceeding 30 TWh for each country. 60 TWh is the equivalent of four EPR nuclear power units that can produce about 14 THw per year! That is crazy over capacity in my view. The block has plenty of supply.
Further, the article specifically says:
> Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
That nuclear power plant has two reactors that each produce about 8 TWh in total per year. So Google bought 4 TWh per year. Meh, no biggie. The Nordic Pool has plenty of capacity.
You can't sum like that, though. Connections between regions and countries have capacity limits, so it would matter where in Finland you placed a data-center, if you wanted to take into account the electricity coming from Sweden and Norway.
Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:
Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.
> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
The new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
The city of Kajaani's district heating (northern Finland) is already completely covered by datacenter waste heat from CSC datacenters (and maybe some other ones).
there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture
For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
Microsoft's data centre in Espoo is used for district heating.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.
It reminds me of "640KB of RAM is enough for everyone". Look where we are right now. We always find a way to spend resources. I was frustrated with my last laptop because of frequent swapping/OOM, so I built a desktop with 64GB RAM during covid. I thought I would never have this problem again, I even disabled swap. Now I regret I didn't get 128GB instead to fit bigger local LLMs. But even without LLMs, my Firefox crashed with OOM just yesterday. Apparently I open too many tabs too quickly.
I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.
I predict that within 100 years, data centers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.
When Google was going hard on deploying renewables they stressed "additionality".
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
Finnish regulators are not better than American counterparts. This deal long time cost will be most likely paid by us common folk.
It is common trend currently here in Finland due to economic situations that data centers can basically get cheap electricity deals and common folks pay it.
I feel this will not end well… if we don’t continue building nuclear. I hope this will force us to continue building asap.
> Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala
Wow, these are really far north. I checked on Google Maps: They are all about as far north as Oulu. It must get incredibly cold during the winter. Wiki tells me the region is at or below freezing for about six to seven months per year! I am curious how much cheaper is cooling in these locations compared to more temperate climates in continental Europe.
It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.
Remarkably they are planning even higher electricity use from centers in Sweden, up to 3.5GW. They also have significant centers in Norway. They are going to consume a significant fraction of Scandinavia's total electricity production if these plans are completed.
Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
A quick search shows that there are plenty of alternatives. First, all nuclear power plants keep a excess supply of fuel on site, about 2-3 years. If Russia says tomorrow: "No more nuclear fuel exports to any 'unfriendly' European nations.", there are plenty of alternatives. US-based Westinghouse already produces nuclear fuel that is compatible with many Soviet-designed reactors. Plus France (Framatome and Orano), Netherlands (Urenco), Canada and Kazakstan can easily backfill any European needs, be it raw material or final fuel.
I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively.
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
This is a weird take. Before the rise of AI/LLMs, a lot of Finland's industry was paper products and high-end manuf'ing. Both of these require a lot of electricity. Did people say the same before? No (or much less).
I can see that I’m not going to convince you there is a scale and centralization difference here, but maybe you can vibe with the economic difference? Paper mills and manufacturing employs a lot of people. Data centers, once they are built, employ very few people.
If Philips Lighting (Signify) or Osram wanted to build new, fully-automated lightbulb plants in Finland, would you also be against those plans? I have seen some YouTube videos that show how modern automated lightbulb plants operate. They require very few workers to operate.
I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built
Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries?
I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.
Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
So, the problem in this case is that there's no gain for the country building the datacentre.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that basis. It shouldn't just be based on some vague intuition, that is largely a product of the virality of the arguments that circulate on social media platforms (like this one).
I'd err on the side of allowing development until a proper regulatory process can be implemented or unless there's a concrete reason to prevent it. If allocating scarce electricity resources to an AI-compete facility prevents the building of a steel plant, that would be a reason worth considering it. But there would need to be a concrete trade-off, not just a default assumption that the effect is net negative on account of the industry that the project falls under.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metrics that are relevant to the community like positive externalities, and negative ones like noise pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And all uses of private property should be judged on the basis of those criteria, not what industrial category the use falls under and the generalizations that are made about that category.
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
In general they just use a shitload of energy so prices go up for everyone and produce very little jobs. The worst part is that they don't generate any taxes for locals or Finland in general from services produced by datacenters there, which is very different from other industries.
They pay for the energy they use, which leads to the energy infrastructure scaling up, which generally reduces per unit electricity costs. They also fund, either directly or indirectly through their taxes, upgrades to transmission lines, which also improves the energy infrastructure.
They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.
What surplus? They basically only pay property taxes and for services they buy like electricity, like any other company does. But taxes for services they produce go to Ireland. A local industry would have loads of employees and also pay much more taxes that benefits the community.
The community benefit is nowhere close and I'm not sure why you're trying to pretend it is.
I'll try to find the analysis. It compared industries and showed the amount of taxes AI compute facilities pay (which is primarily in the form of property tax) relative to the cost of government services they use is the highest ratio of all industries.
This surplus is why the county with the highest concentration of data centers, which is Loudoun County, has been able to reduce its property taxes year over year. The property taxes the AI facilities pay is what enables that.
So you have no idea how different property taxes are in European countries compared to the US? At least your argument makes sense now that we know you're arguing from complete ignorance.
I think it should apply to all industries. But for many (or most?) countries where power generation is privatized in the first place, this shouldn't be a problem that we need to fix. The trickier question might be about the grid, which in most cases is publicly funded.
> I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
That's a fair point, but even this kind of "exception" to the electricity tariffs (which gives the appearance of a subsidy and elicits public opposition) can be done in a more agnostic way. E.g. a 100 megawatt AI compute facility can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt aluminum smelter, can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt manufacturing plant. Large concentrated consumers of electricity can be treated differently than smaller consumers, but should all be treated the same as each other.
The principle means reasoning about the harms that you want to reduce, and the benefits you want to maximize, and designing policy thoughtfully around optimizing on those two fronts, instead of basing policy on vague generalizations about industrial categories.
Bit late to build it now, we needed it 30 years ago. Now it's gonna take 10+ years and be 3x the budget. Even running the old plants we had couldn't turn a profit.
The question is how much they buy. It may not be enough to keep the plant running. Google will only buy up to 50% of what the plant can produce, but the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
> the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
That’s just PR spin. There is no way it would have shut down in 4 years, there has literally been no talk about doing so and all the political parties are okay with nuclear power as a means to combat co2.
So this is the actual long-term bet, where there's incentive to start building more power infrastructure? You'd prefer Finland gets the medium-term results where they don't find a way to finance more nuclear then have to buy gas from Russia like Germany?
Let’s not fix that problem, get better at doing the thing that Europe was quite capable of doing (see France, Germany before they decided to let the green ideological extremists less the energy strategy) standardise a design and begin solving the energy problem.
Funny you should mention sovereignty, something a country enjoys when it has a source of energy of its own, especially when we can mine our own uranium right on the continent. Alas, we chose not to.
Instead we listen to the green imbeciles and now we’re buying our uranium and hydrocarbons from abroad.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
Yes and Nordea has predicted housing prices will start to climb again every quarter for the last 3 years. Next quarter I guess!
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
Did Germany plan to increase electricity consumption? Gas heating is still king there, and Germany famously promotes hydrogen (mostly from gas) over battery vehicles.
Ah yes let’s ignore shutting down nuclear reactors replacing them with coal power plants in the name of green energy which was so successful the country goes through a period every year called Dunkelflaute.
But yes let’s strawman into cars and heating instead.
Btw excess heat from the reactor can be and is used for central heating.
Not really. Situation now is totally different to what it was when Germany made those decisions. In Finland shutting down nuclear hasn't really been something that has been discussed seriously in very long time.
> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
Everyone is rushing to send signals of AI growth to the market. Their continued valuation growth depends on it. There is no real use story that cannot be met by smaller distilled models which are far more energy efficient. I am convinced the next step will be scaremongering impending extinction level event followed by need to classify AI activities as national security related. Once you become part of the military industrial complex, it's all gravy baby!
Not everything is partisan, and land is only a small factor in where to decide to place a data centers. The top 4 out of 5 states with the most data centers are blue states.
The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
China is only building a token amount of nuclear compared to storage wind and solar. It makes a lot of sense for a large nation like China to waste a bit of money on nuclear power just to provide support for the core national security interest: nuclear weapons.
On time, yes, because China is great at construction. On budget, almost certainly, but we have very little visibility into true costs. China's labor costs are getting far higher as it becomes richer, and there's a good chance that it will reach a state of higher economic development where its costs for nuclear mirror those high costs in present day France.
A one party state where the plants are owned, insured, backstopped and cleaned up for free by the government doesn’t have the same economics as free market builds.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
> Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
From Wiki[1], I see:
> In March 2022, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish Government declared that a rapid independence from Russian energy production is desired, and that the construction of the plant should not continue. Mika Lintilä, Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs, declared that he would not issue a construction permit.
1. Consistent stable long-term energy
2. Controlled by Finland, to minimize all kinds of risks (war foreign influence, cut sea cables, worsening of relationships with other countries, market conditions and economic situation changing.
So what did Finnish politicians decided to do? To cancel the project for nonsense political reasons (let's see how much Finland will be forced to pay in damages), therefore INCREASING the reliance on foreign sources or unstable local sources.
This is the stupidity on the level of "Germany decided to run down all the nuclear powers for the sake of environment". With disastrous results!
"We don't want to allow Russians to build anything" is a statement full of feelings, but not a lot of sense, if one thinks even a little bit deeper.
Finnish oldest Loviisa nuclear station is Soviet based and this has not caused any problems. The nuclear fuel is also being provided by Russia, despite the war.
I think it is reasonable that the Finnish gov't cancelled the permit to build a Russian design reactor while NATO is deeply involved with the largest conflict with Russia since its founding in 1949. However, you raise some good points in your reply. They should have switched to a different design, such as EU, US, Canada, or Korea. All have modern, well-proven reactor designs.
You should read on the history of Finnish nuclear reactors. The disaster of Olkiluoto showed that French can't be trusted.
USA (Westinghouse) nuclesr development was/is in the gutter as well, plus there are risks giving it to the USA (the biggest hybrid and non-hybrid war wager in the world).
Then read about the history of Pyhäjoki/Hanhikivi. Finns really did try to get anyone else, RosAtom was not in the initial running. Unfortunately one after another each candidate was eliminated/wighdrew. In the end there were zero. It is at that point that RosAtom came in and saved Finnish nuclear future. They wanted to do that because the project in Finland (with a very strict Stuk government nuclear safety agency) would be a really good reference for the rest of Western Europe. Check the number of nuclear stations built by RosAtom. They really are very professional and a leader in the field.
What most people are missing in this conversation is that they think that building a Russian nuclear station in Finland would increase the amount of Finnish energy dependency on Russia. In reality it is the exact opposite, the dependency would decrease. There would be more energy produced in Finland, by Finns, instead of importing it via sea cables (can be cut) from other countries, including Russia (yes, Russia!). In case of Putin's malevolence, what would be easier for Putin, to stop providing energy via a cable, or to disrupt the work of the Finnish nuclear station?
The answer is clear. That's my point, the decision makes sense only if you don't think about it. With a little depth, you realize how incredibly emotional and stupid the decision was.
When your supplier is threatening to invade and kill your people, and has critical control over supply of parts of your reactor, and regularly commits acts of nuclear terrorism such as droning the newly completed sarcophagus around Chornobyl:
Well, avoiding business deals with that neighbor is the only rational action. Building a Russian nuclear reactor as one of their neighbors is suicidally stupid. At least go to South Korea instead.
The US is also finding out that when it threatens its neighbors and allies that it will lose out on crucial industrial deals, such as Canada and Europe moving away from US military contractors.
There would not be a critical control over the reactor, just the opposite. Finland would control everything and could have even bought fuel elsewhere.
Loviisa station is Soviet-built, has been working amazingly well and till this day has been supplied with the fuel from Russia, despite the war and all.
Nuclear station being a big target on its own is the only negative, among a pile of positives. That's why:
1. Mini-reactors should be developed
2. No, even nowadays, Putin has not really attacked nuclear stations for real in Ukraine. It's been a big no-no. All the rest of the energy infra - yes, but not nuclear stations.
3. If the real war starts with nuclear stations being bombed, it will not matter who build the station, Finland is going to be completely fucked, considering how much of the energy is nuclear. Taking this argument into a logical conclusion, Finland (or any other country) should not have any nuclear reactors on the chance that they will be attacked. This is a silly level of risk management, a very shallow and blind view.
This is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
Agreed, it makes sense for Finland, one of the very few places it does. But in the future of global energy supply, nuclear will be a far less serious player than it was in the 20th century.
The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
> Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron
That's your original point, which is wrong since, as you admitted, data center boom is clearly creating jobs.
If you meant those jobs are offset by the negative effect of AI in general if we believe AI companies, a study by Anthropic was actively discussed here a few days ago. TLDR: they don't believe there will be mass unemployment because of AI
“Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc. Building infrastructure of any kind has a temporary positive effect on employment. The builder jobs have nothing to do with the purpose of the infrastructure.
I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years. Or the mass layoffs blamed on AI that we have already seen.
> “Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc.
Such a bizarre logic. Since when a chamber of commerce or startup accelerators are infrastructure?
Railways or roads are job creating infrastructure, did you see road building or maintenance jobs disappear? Same with data centers, themselves and the infrastructure to support them such as energy.
> I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years
This is what you said earlier: "but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true"
Anthropic is evidently not saying that. Now you're saying maybe they are not but they imply to, or hope for that. Weasel words, don't you think?
I too believe that AI will cause massive uncertainty in society. However anyone who pretends to know with any certainty how our AI shaped future will be is just that, pretentious.
You must be misinterpreting. You believe that organizations that promote small business growth don’t count as underlying systems for job creation? Really?
Per Wikipedia:
> Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function.
Let me separate “job creating infrastructure” and “infrastructure that creates jobs” as distinct ideas. Infrastructure is not just physical. Railroads and highways are transportation infrastructure. Data centers are infrastructure, but their primary purpose is not job creation. Any jobs created are tangential to the purpose of supplying networked computer resources. Labor is a cost center for a data center, and their owners aren’t aiming to kill their profit margins.
I wasn’t aware of Anthropic’s recent statements on the matter. And frankly I don’t know why I’d believe that they are being honest when it seems pretty obvious that it’s a play to rehab their reputation. For years they said it would make a majority of jobs obsolete with the heavy implication that their B2B value prop is reducing labor costs.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
Yeah I know. Sadly, burning gas and coal is still the cheapest easiest way to rapidly deploy a lot of power, and Texas is all about it.
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
SMR are a pipe dream IMO. Proper modern reactors can be built relatively quickly (see China using French designs) but our lawyer-driven system makes it impossible to build infrastructure).
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
Does that change the math above if they're tied into the grid?
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
If it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
Ok, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Sure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
Oh god, they're actually going to directly hoover up electricity supply and cause it to get massively more expensive for us mere mortal domestic users trying to stay alive
Why does Finland want to make US companies stronger?
This is the biggest problem with the EU: the EU as well
as the member states, are not really thinking strategically
here. Not just with regards to nuclear power plants but in
general.
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland.
No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data.
... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.
Do you care to elaborate on what “this” is that is so bad?
And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?
Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?
If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.
For over a decade, Google's been wearing the environmentally-friendly / carbon-neutral label as part of their public-facing brand values. It's definitely been eating into their CapEx then, and this isn't much different.
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.
No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
> No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.
> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out
Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.
"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
Governments are extremely bad at calculating how much something "should" cost. Profits are revenue minus expenses. "Expenses" are revenue to someone else. Whenever you try to cap "profit" of some entity that isn't actually subject to competitive pressure, the next thing that happens is that the people running it start colluding or taking kickbacks from any of the people whose revenue constitutes their expenses.
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation? It seems less "heavy handed", since it's a proper investment for them.
I enjoy a particularly nasty utility monopoly where I am, in a dark blue state, where there is exactly zero political interest in breaking any monopolies. Any competition would probably have to be forced at a federal level. I think less bribing of politicians would happen if you tried to make them do something they were basically already going to do.
> Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation?
The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.
Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.
Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
> If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
I see. Thanks for understand! How do you motivate them to actually add capacity? With a monopoly, it seems that adding supply for something people have to use could just reduce rates/profits.
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.
Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.
> Currently, about 80% of the projects required to extend the service life and investments of EUR700 million still lack an investment decision. Fortum said the PPA with Google will generate a predictable revenue stream, enabling it to complete the life extension investments at Loviisa.
I think they requested the operating license extension before the actual decision to extend was made.
Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.
Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
By the definition of per capita. If only a small group of people have significant more emissions than the rest of the world, then they're only increasing the average by a small amount, but that's still worse, not better.
Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions.
And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people.
Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.
Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
> You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.
> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.
> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.
Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.
> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical.
Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.
China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.
BTW, LCOE isn't that good estimate. It doesn't account for the system costs. LFSCOE (Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity) does better in estimating the amount of money you actually need to spend.
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.
Where did you read this? What I read is that Fortum was considering extending to 2050 as early as 2018 and finalized those plans 2 years ago. I read nothing that indicates the survival of this plant is dependent on this Google deal.
> Those decisions would otherwise have been made year by year, but the long-term deal with Google ensures Loviisa will keep running through the end of its operating license
It's important to be able to read through PR in planted pieces. There's no indication that Loviisa was actually going to struggle. It's a guaranteed revenue stream which removes some risk for them, but Finland has seen a boom in data centers and such which is why Fortum went after the 2050 extension in the first place. They even wanted to build a third reactor which the government declined to authorize. That doesn't speak to them wondering if there's enough demand to keep the plant alive. It's highly unlikely Loviisa was going to close down even without the Google deal.
> It's important to be able to read through PR in planted pieces
Planted pieces? how about directly from the operator:
Without the lifetime extension investment program, the plant – which currently employs approximately 580 people and provides 10% of Finland’s electricity – could not continue operations beyond 2030. - [0]
That is not just year over year discussion. Of course it's PR, but do you happen to have insider information that contradict that?
More details:
Fortum has an ongoing, approximately EUR 1 billion investment programme in Loviisa with the aim of extending the lifetime of the power plant until 2050. To date, approximately 80% of the projects and EUR 700 million of the capital expenditure required to keep the power plant operational through 2050 are still pending investment decisions.
The PPA with Google will provide the revenue certainty to continue the investments associated with 100% of the lifetime extension of Loviisa. Furthermore, the agreement is expected to enable a new 10 MW power increase of the plant, in addition to the already planned 38 MW uprate which is expected to be live in 2028.
> That doesn't speak to them wondering if there's enough demand to keep the plant alive. It's highly unlikely Loviisa was going to close down even without the Google deal.
Your own link contradicts itself. If Google funding was so critical to the plant staying open at all, how come they were already planning a 38MW expansion independent of that? That doesn’t sound like it’s on the brink of closure.
You should read all news skeptically, doubly so for press releases.
> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
If I consume all the clean energy your country can produce with my data center, explain how cap and trade blocks a country from using other sources - I don’t think anyone will like news stories of people freezing to death in the winter.
That's the CAP part. The annual co2 emissions of electricity production and industries is capped to X gigatons per year. If a datacenter buys all clean electric production of the country, electric companies will have to either have to make up the gap by building more new clean energy or tell other customers "sorry all sold out".
Of course, would the latter happen, political actions would be done before people freeze. It will be unpredictable what the would be - allow fossil fuels "temporarily" or order datacenters to shut down during dunkelflaute? Interesting times (I would prefer less interesting times).
Generally speaking cap and trade is the most sure way to reduce emissions (emissions drop exactly at the pace the CAP drop annually) and the most cost-effective way also - the TRADE part ensures emissions are cut first by those who it easiest, while hard-to-decarbonize sectors have most time to sort their plan.
The only problem is "carbon leakage" where co2 emissions simply move to asshole countries like USA and China that do not utilize cap-and-trade. That should be dealt with hefty carbon tariffs. Oh wait, even china is building their own cap-and-trade system. Well, anyways, tariffs against the climate assholes.
The EU has a large problem with carbon leakage from electricity generation to oil and gas use.
For example, gas heating is exempt from the EU carbon trade, so people are encouraged to use that rather than electric heating. In countries like Germany, gas heating is popular largely for tax reasons.
Gas heating is a pre-existing issue in Germany. While there is handful on anecdotes of someone switching back to gas, the big trend is opposite. Majority of heating refurbishments are gas/oil -> heat pumps, and almost every new build is heat pumps.
carbon leakage is mostly industrial and data centers (why do so many europeans run code at us-east-1 ?)
If you study the heat pump adoption in various European countries, you will quickly notice that it's connected to the price ratio between electricity and gas.
The EU has a carbon tax on electricity but not gas. This pushes people towards gas heating. Germany has much higher taxes on electricity, although it does at least have a carbon tax on gas.
If a carbon tax on electricity makes people use gas heating, that's carbon leakage.
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.
Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
> Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear.
I don’t think that’s been true for some time now, batteries have fallen in price very quickly. LCOE for solar+storage was below nuclear a few years ago and batteries are cheaper still now. An estimate from 2025 put storage cost at $125 per kWh.
CATL estimates 10 usd per kWh from their sodium batteries, and just installed one in Germany.
At 10/kWh, batteries will make any other option seem fiscally senseless by comparison.
Note that when Fortum was declined it was because two others were given approval. Lack of new nuclear in Finland isn't because no permits, but because Olkiluoto 3 exposed the real costs so Olkiluoto 4 was cancelled. Russia was the partner in the other one so that went to hell with the attack to Ukraine.
Then why is California down to 25% fossil generation from 60% a few years ago? And still dropping fast as more and more batteries and renewables come on line. Tell me again how baseload generation is still a relevant concept
What do you think batteries are if not baseload generation? Batteries + renewables compete with nuclear for baseload. They take up substantially more land mass for the same amount of power though.
is is often repeated in these threads, baseload generation is an obsolete term. Base load itself is real - the minimum demand on the grid, usually in the early am. Base load generation was a term given to a class of generators (mainly coal) that were cheap but inflexible, so you built them to match the base load and had more expensive variable output generation on top. That economic setup no longer exists, variable generation exists 24x7. So base load exists, base load generators do not. And yeah, thats why nukes are no longer economical, their base load generation role is economically obsolete.
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
The Chernobyl disaster wasn't caused by a single person, as you note in your comment "proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience."
Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
That chart needs a companion chart showing “amount of effort needed to prevent deaths”. Since that is missing lots of people think nuclear is safe when it’s actually by far the most dangerous.
Such charts exist - they're the "costs per unit" charts; perhaps broken down into (say) capital upfront plant costs, ongoing running costs per unit generated, and decommissioning costs.
It's the decommissioning costs for both nuclear and fossil fuel plants that are most often missing or overlooked.
True enough but there's an order of magnitude difference in those costs. For nuclear the costs extend beyond out ability to predict the future, and they simply can't be ignored whatever they amount to.
A fossil plant can simply be abandoned, and the damage will be minimal compared to abandoning a nuclear plant.
Without this information the chart is repeatedly used as an argument that nuclear power is safe, which is of course the direct opposite of the truth. It is the option that requires the most money and effort to keep safe and nothing is even a close second.
Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant. Such cleaning at end of life has to be done also for many kinds of chemical plants, chemical storage tanks, otherwise you get a catastrophe like in Bhopal, India.
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
>Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant.
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
Civil nuclear power plants accumulate funds for decommissioning and disposal of nuclear waste. It's part of the electricity costs. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US are military/research facilities.
"Asse II: A lesson that is making modern deep repositories safer"
There were reports in 2008 about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium. I would be interested about the amounts of these isotopes in the brine, as we can detect extremely small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
For example for caesium-137 we can measure amounts as low as 5 Bq/kg, the decay of 5 atoms of caesium-137 per second in 1 kg of sample.
An adult person usually has activity of 3,000–6,000 becquerels (Bq) of potassium-40. 3,000–6,000 potassium-40 atoms decay and emit a beta particle in adult person every second.
We have developed cheap glass that can be mass produced and sucks electricity from sunshine, can be placed on already occupied surfaces to produce 100x more electricity than we are currently consuming. It requires basically no maintenance or operating costs for decades and is xheap enough for an average home-owner to meet at least half of their electricity needs.
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
Cheap solar, yes you can now buy PV quite cheap. How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies? Also subsidies in form of cheap Chinese coal electricity, polysilicon production is very energy intensive.
Costs estimates for Energiewende are in hudreds of bilions of euros.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better, but import all of it PV panels. And electricity only a part of primary energy consumption in both in China and Germany.
I'm interested how China could decarbonize, as they still building a lot of coal power plants. They are slowly decreasing coal electricity production, but ramping up syntetic fuel from coal production.
So if Germany wants to follow Chinas path, they should build a lot of solar, wind, coal, some nuclear and hydro power plants, stop building gas power plants. You don't want it, as coal burning still has significant health impacts in Germany.
Medium-term thinking in Germany is to import a lot oil, natural gas, PV. Long-term thinking in Germany to import a lot of hydrogen, PV. Nobody talks about Germany becomming energy independent.
Best place for batteries for decarbonization is in EVs, not grid stabilization. Even better for decarbonization are electric trains, electric trams, trolleybus, they run directly from electric grid.
>China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
We will see how the battery costs change over years, currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
But they start to make economic sense in regions with lot of sun and high electricity costs.
In China politicians give the way and whoever is in the way, is removed. It an error of Europe to make itself depend from China. The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
>currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
> Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs
You say that, but someone still has to pay those costs which are rarely factored in and are significant.
To the north of my state we are faced with the costs of decommissioning and removal of 35 platforms, 6076 km of pipelines and static umbilicals; 483 subsea lifts; 11 floating facilities, 120 risers and 548 wells to be plugged - in addition to kilotons of offshore steel and concrete.
eg: One project is the Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The Australian Government took responsibility for the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour after the liquidation of its owner.
These are non trivial undertakings with costs running into the billions.
You're absolutely correct that oil and gas extraction activities need to be properly decommissioned, and that is expensive.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.
Good on Google.
Finland has low emissions from electricity :
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
71 gC02eq/kwH
France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar.
It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
A Chinese nuke on the coast of Britain might be hard politically. Even if it's benign, you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
There's a special line crossed by a 100% Chinese owned floating nuclear power plant, as opposed to a 24% Chinese owned fixed in place nuclear power plant like the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station?
You wouldn't even need it to be Chinese owned. Just Chinese built and indemnified. Hell, I'd take a guarantee from a consortium of Chinese SoE banks over the U.S. government today. (I'm American.)
Even if you own it, you'll need the Chinese to run it for you and provide you with spares.
Sort of like needing the US for F-35 parts? Given the choice between being dependent on China or the US, I know which one I'd choose - China is running a business, the US is running... God knows what it is they think they're running, but it's not something you want to get tied up in.
> you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
The US has effective run this on itself for the past few years. The Chinese look fairly benign in comparison.
It doesn't come preloaded with fuel.
Not really. If something bad happens you can always just drag the boat back to China and say here you deal with this lol
Sweden main issue is that there is no transmission capacity between North and South, like now prices are 2x at south.
The government that keeps rejecting offshore wind for bogus security reasons is probably a bigger factor.
Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.
They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.
On one hand Swedish government rejected applications for 11 offshore wind sites on national security grounds, on the other hand, wind investors state that they will not do wind investments in Sweden without subsidies.
" risk-sharing mechanism will be required, for example through two-sided Contracts for Difference and state-backed credit guarantees that reduce investment risk and unlock project financing.”
https://www.renews.biz/offshore-wind/skyborn-calls-for-swedi...
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Pretty much every reply to the parent has now given a very different reason for why the problem exists. Anyone else want to give it a try? Bonus points for mentioning meatballs and/or lutfisk.
That's due to shutting down reactors in the south. Turns out "transmission capacity" is more complicated than having fat wires...
Shutting down => Not building new ones. All decommissioned reactors would have reached EOL by 2025 anyhow.
Swedens main issue is a political class disconnected from reality.
That is a global issue.
There is plenty transmission capacity, the issue is EU regulations not allowing Sweden to keep prices low in the south.
How is that a thing when the entirety of Finland is a single pricing zone?
Power generation is 25% higher with 6 than with 12 reactors. Plenty of scaremongering around volatility, though. Consumers don't realize that one-hour price spikes are completely irrelevant since they pay monthly (or even quarterly) AVERAGE prices. Max, min, mean, and standard deviation. People don't know statistics and are so easy to fool by demagogues.
Large customers buy directly on electricity markets at hourly market price, or have direct power purchase agreements with power suppliers.
Most small customers are paying using average prices, but these average prices are calculated from the costs of power suppliers and these are affected by hourly market prices. So when many small customers consume use lot of electricity during hours with high hourly market price, the average price for small customers goes up.
Best solution is instalation of smart meters so that small customers pay according to hourly market price.
There's a simpler solution, stop letting the AI turn everything into paperclips and there won't be a shortage of paperclip material.
Just change AI for Corporations and I agree.
Yeah please send some electricity to Germany it's so horrible here :'(
You certainly could use an alternative to gas heating during the upcoming winter. It doesn't look like Qatar will be able to deliver.
Still can’t believe the german voters were successfully convinced that replacing german nuclear with russian fossil was a green choice
It was a great idea*
*if you’re a seller of fossil fuels
It’s a great idea if you’re in reach of Russian drones
With Russia‘s aggression and the rise of drone wars it’s a pretty good idea to get rod of such big single point of failures like nuclear power plants.
And climate change also isn’t in favor of nuclear power plants that need external water sources for cooling
You didn’t need “hindsight”. It was painfully stupid at the time.
The bottleneck is the grid, not the production centers. Volatility is not more extreme in Sweden than other connected (Nord Pool) countries. Companies lament the lack of grid connectivity all the time. Then they get the offer "Pay for the cost of grid expansion to connect you" and they are not so interested anymore.
I’m starting to think that perhaps the government here in .se should support new reactors. It won’t be cheap though…
https://www.ans.org/news/2026-06-18/article-8133/new-sweden-...
>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
Well, we don't have fjords or mountains in Sweden, otherwise a great plan.
There are both mountains [0] and fjords [1] in Sweden, but not of the Norwegian kind they were probably picturing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Mountains
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullmarn
Build a dam in the fjord and pump the water out from it with excess electricity! Profit
This assumes that there is excess power at some point. This will soon become unrealistic: we either need power for data centers during the day or charging vehicles during the night.
The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
Is that really it? I thought Sweden was a net exporter and that the price volatility was much more related to the eu pricing and distribution?
the north exports, the south imports.
If you run datacenters in the north its substantially cheaper.
Places like Malmö have had issues with power costs, even though there's a lot of generation... because that generation happens in the north.
But isn’t that also because of not investing in the grid more than a production problem? Not cheap to upgrade the grid of course but having good transmission capacity makes a more stable and efficient energy system.
Not saying we shouldn’t produce more electricity. But from what I have understood it’s mainly about other factors than production.
Excess power is unevenly distributed both geographically and temporally.
In the SE1 region, which is the least populated and probably best candidate for a data center, there was a 400% price drop between February and March this year, then up 100% in May, then down 50% in July. Between summer 2025 and winter 2026, the same region saw a price hike of nearly 1000%.
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli... 12¤cy=EUR&aggregation=MonthlyAggregate&deliveryAreas=SE1,SE2
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...
I guess if you want a data center that only operates some months of the year that's fine.
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France recently announced for €93B of data center contracts to be deployed in the next few years.
The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.
China added 315 GW of solar and 120 GW of wind capacity in the year 2025.
There is a lot of hydro generation deployed (1455 GW) but only 30 GW capacity added worldwide in 2025, and 200 GW added worldwide during last 10 years.
Total geothermal capacity is 15 GW worldwide in 2025.
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Agreed on all points, but you forgot to mentioned that Google pay close to no taxes in Norway (~1%). At the same time, their hyperscaler in Skien alone will, when finished, consume ~5% of total energy production. Put another way, 25% of what households use.
Now Google is planing another hyperscalar in Østfold, and other hyperscalars are being built in rapid succession (about 50 is planned), putting a severe strain on our power transfer net.
This is because any 2x improvement in model capability requires 10x the compute
So Germany is a net exporter of energy and is somehow causing checks notes ALL of Europe's high energy prices?
Weird
Germany became a net electricity importer after shutting down its final nuclear power plants in 2023.
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
By the first quarter of 2026, Germany recorded net exports of 2.6 TWh. In the middle of winter. We are out of the lump.
In absolutely no way is that true. The EU price varies by renewables production. When it's dark and still that's when electricity costs the most, and that's when Germany imports energy. It exports when there's sun and wind, but then the energy is cheap. So Germany sells low and buys high. Doesn't matter if Germany is a net exporter because it exports at the wrong time.
> The EU price varies by renewables production.
This may be technically true at the moment, but the underlying reason for the high prices is fossil fuels: when renewable generation is low, natural gas peaker plants are generating, and these have the highest cost of any generation source, and by the merit order rules under which commodity markets such as electricity operate, the highest source price sets the price of the commodity.
The obvious and affordable mitigation for high prices is to build out massive battery storage capacities so that natural gas plants are needed far less often.
Yes, I agree, but first you need to get planning and connection permission for those battery storage locations. I wouldn't hold my breath.
92 units (1 MW or larger) were connected in the first half of 2026 adding 842 MW/1.8 GWh, which is more than all of 2025 so this is both happening and accelerating. In addition small scale storage also seems to be adding a significant amount of capacity.
https://modoenergy.com/research/en/germany-battery-buildout-...
Germany has excess coal and gas capacity which they can turn on when needed. They, like most people import when it's cheaper than the local alternative.
Interconnected nations all importing when cheap electricity is available lowers costs for everyone.
Looking up the numbers Germany sells high and buys low when it's net importing
https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/importexport/index.php
In the long term interconnected nations might make electricity cheap everywhere. Currently it's mostly making it more expensive everywhere else. (As someone living in south of Sweden.)
Edit: But to be fair... The biggest reason it's expensive is likely that companies like to make money.
When you look at the first half of the year, Germany was a net importer of electricity:
>Net imports amounted to only 1.3 TWh, compared with 9.6 TWh during the first half of 2025.
Though 1.3 TWH is a huge improvement over 9.6 by any standard.
https://energy-charts.info/?l=en&c=DE
For some reason the HN commentariat is very pro-nuclear, and it drives them INSANE that the shutdown had minimal consequences(as only a small proportion of power production was nuclear and it was entirely replaced by new renewable capacity).
I think no one outside of Germany particularly cares about their internal politics, energy prices, or what role the Energiewende placed in the long-term industrial slowdown. The criticism that Germany gets for the Energiewende is that they decided to shut down nuclear power plants while THEY WERE STILL BURNING COAL! I don't think this legally qualifies as a crime against humanity, but it was horribly negligent.
Coal is such a dirty fuel, that burning it should be a last resort. A properly running coal plant with all safety equipment working will kill people through pollution. Every year in Germany and all downwind countries people die due to the effects of burning coal. (See https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/dark_cloud_repor.... )
Long term, it is hard to know the loss of life that will come from this foolish policy. The Energiewende was implemented around 2010 - they knew about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and they. did. it. anyway.
So now 15 years later, how much dependent is Germany on coal? Last I looked it was about 20% of the electrical power generated. They estimate that sometime between 2030 - 2038 they will stop all burning of coal.
People outside Germany are just sad about it. German electricity production was at
339 gC02eq/kwH
for the past year. That's ten times the level of France.
Don't forget Iceland as they have renewable energy and loads of it. Many data centres are rising as we speak from top firms as well.
Unless the next drought forces a shutdown of the power plant again
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This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
A customer willing to make a multi-decade deal for half a reactor at a stable price is perfect for incentivizing new nuclear buildouts. The basic financial problem of nuclear is that it' capex heavy and opex-light, so the costs of the entire enterprise are set during the buildout stage, but the revenue is volatile.
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> they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price
If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply
What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
Google has been doing all of that for decades. I remember when they started building their first data center (back when almost no companies required enough compute for an entire data center) they chose the location due to the cleanest energy they could find (hydroelectric on a river that wasn't blocking fish migration).
I'm assuming that was when "don't be evil" still mattered to them?
Yes, it is just pr that now that Google invests with Fortum the price wont rise. Its basically just smokescreen.
Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
It is worth noting that Finland is a member of Nord Pool (for electricity) which includes all Nordic nations. You cannot consider Finland alone in your supply and consumption expectations -- you need to include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have massive annual electricity exports exceeding 30 TWh for each country. 60 TWh is the equivalent of four EPR nuclear power units that can produce about 14 THw per year! That is crazy over capacity in my view. The block has plenty of supply.
Further, the article specifically says:
That nuclear power plant has two reactors that each produce about 8 TWh in total per year. So Google bought 4 TWh per year. Meh, no biggie. The Nordic Pool has plenty of capacity.You can't sum like that, though. Connections between regions and countries have capacity limits, so it would matter where in Finland you placed a data-center, if you wanted to take into account the electricity coming from Sweden and Norway.
Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:
https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...
Sweden sent 10.6TWh in 2025:
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kraftsystemdata/elstatis...
This matches what Finland says about imports - imported 8.1TWh from Sweden but 0.2TWh from Norway in 2024
https://energia.fi/en/statistics/statistics-on-electricity/
Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.
https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
POV: you know nothing about how energy market works.
Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.
> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
Google already does this at their existing Hamina data center. The building is also a repurposed paper mill.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
The new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
The city of Kajaani's district heating (northern Finland) is already completely covered by datacenter waste heat from CSC datacenters (and maybe some other ones).
there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture
For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.
>the data center's waste heat
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
Microsoft's data centre in Espoo is used for district heating.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
Relatively uncongested…for now
Up to 50%
Google (or Tuike Finland as its known)
- paid 0e company tax in 2023/2024 (2025 hasn't been published yet)
- Doesn't generate any value added taxes as it only has one customer, Google Emea in Ireland
- Employs directly 120 persons
Somehow Hetzner saw at least part of it coming in 2018
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/five-years-helsinki/
These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
Will all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now?
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
The trillon dollars question is more, will the current GPUs still be relevant in 3 years? 5? 10?
Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?
The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.
For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It reminds me of "640KB of RAM is enough for everyone". Look where we are right now. We always find a way to spend resources. I was frustrated with my last laptop because of frequent swapping/OOM, so I built a desktop with 64GB RAM during covid. I thought I would never have this problem again, I even disabled swap. Now I regret I didn't get 128GB instead to fit bigger local LLMs. But even without LLMs, my Firefox crashed with OOM just yesterday. Apparently I open too many tabs too quickly.
I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.
I predict that within 100 years, data centers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
Probably yes, and if not, it can most likely be repurposed
Enough to pay back the investments on a sensible timescale? Press X to doubt.
Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.
We will all be happy with our local inference, but how will our overloards be able to surveil and control us en-masse without them?
It's a big bet to not have a plan for needing power.
I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
When Google was going hard on deploying renewables they stressed "additionality".
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
Finnish regulators are not better than American counterparts. This deal long time cost will be most likely paid by us common folk.
It is common trend currently here in Finland due to economic situations that data centers can basically get cheap electricity deals and common folks pay it.
I feel this will not end well… if we don’t continue building nuclear. I hope this will force us to continue building asap.
You can now melt polar ice directly with your AI prompts.
Only because the power company won't let them buy all of it, because their finance team wants a diversified customer base
It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.
> mainly produce consumer software to serve ads
Pretty reductionist. I don't know about tiktok, but Google does a lot more than serve ads
Oh no I’m aware that that’s a bit of a reduction of Google. I’m a GCP user and am even wearing a fit bit while writing this comment :)
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The power plant is about 1000 MW BTW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Missed opportunity for it to be 1.21 GW. I'm sure they can add another reactor.
Great Scott!
Remarkably they are planning even higher electricity use from centers in Sweden, up to 3.5GW. They also have significant centers in Norway. They are going to consume a significant fraction of Scandinavia's total electricity production if these plans are completed.
Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.
The plant mentioned in the article is by no means new, its two reactors began operation in 1977 and 1981, respectively (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant).
Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
You'd be surprised how many European power plants (not only with Russian/Soviet designs) relied and still rely on fuel from Russia (https://www.voiceofemirates.com/en/politics/reports-and-inve...).
A quick search shows that there are plenty of alternatives. First, all nuclear power plants keep a excess supply of fuel on site, about 2-3 years. If Russia says tomorrow: "No more nuclear fuel exports to any 'unfriendly' European nations.", there are plenty of alternatives. US-based Westinghouse already produces nuclear fuel that is compatible with many Soviet-designed reactors. Plus France (Framatome and Orano), Netherlands (Urenco), Canada and Kazakstan can easily backfill any European needs, be it raw material or final fuel.
in ur backyard not mine thx
I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively.
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
Pretty much anyone sharing anything with a megarich person ends badly for the people who are not megarich.
This is a weird take. Before the rise of AI/LLMs, a lot of Finland's industry was paper products and high-end manuf'ing. Both of these require a lot of electricity. Did people say the same before? No (or much less).
Did any one factory in those industries (paper and high end manufacturing) use 50% of the output of a nuclear power plant?
No, but one company (UPM -- paper mills) consumes 8-9% of all electricity produced in Finland.
And what percentage of finland does UPM employ?
The four planned data centers involved in this deal, after construction, will likely employ less than 1000 people.
Did you read the article? Google has mentioned four distinct locations. That means at least four separate data centers, possibly more.
I can see that I’m not going to convince you there is a scale and centralization difference here, but maybe you can vibe with the economic difference? Paper mills and manufacturing employs a lot of people. Data centers, once they are built, employ very few people.
If Philips Lighting (Signify) or Osram wanted to build new, fully-automated lightbulb plants in Finland, would you also be against those plans? I have seen some YouTube videos that show how modern automated lightbulb plants operate. They require very few workers to operate.
I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built
Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries?
I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.
Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
So, the problem in this case is that there's no gain for the country building the datacentre.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that basis. It shouldn't just be based on some vague intuition, that is largely a product of the virality of the arguments that circulate on social media platforms (like this one).
It's always good to set up objective criteria for decision so as to prevent corruption, yes.
But when ad-hoc deals are made anyway, then it is more important that principles like those have been applied than that everything is ideal.
I'd err on the side of allowing development until a proper regulatory process can be implemented or unless there's a concrete reason to prevent it. If allocating scarce electricity resources to an AI-compete facility prevents the building of a steel plant, that would be a reason worth considering it. But there would need to be a concrete trade-off, not just a default assumption that the effect is net negative on account of the industry that the project falls under.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metrics that are relevant to the community like positive externalities, and negative ones like noise pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And all uses of private property should be judged on the basis of those criteria, not what industrial category the use falls under and the generalizations that are made about that category.
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
In general they just use a shitload of energy so prices go up for everyone and produce very little jobs. The worst part is that they don't generate any taxes for locals or Finland in general from services produced by datacenters there, which is very different from other industries.
They pay for the energy they use, which leads to the energy infrastructure scaling up, which generally reduces per unit electricity costs. They also fund, either directly or indirectly through their taxes, upgrades to transmission lines, which also improves the energy infrastructure.
They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.
What surplus? They basically only pay property taxes and for services they buy like electricity, like any other company does. But taxes for services they produce go to Ireland. A local industry would have loads of employees and also pay much more taxes that benefits the community.
The community benefit is nowhere close and I'm not sure why you're trying to pretend it is.
I'll try to find the analysis. It compared industries and showed the amount of taxes AI compute facilities pay (which is primarily in the form of property tax) relative to the cost of government services they use is the highest ratio of all industries.
This surplus is why the county with the highest concentration of data centers, which is Loudoun County, has been able to reduce its property taxes year over year. The property taxes the AI facilities pay is what enables that.
So you have no idea how different property taxes are in European countries compared to the US? At least your argument makes sense now that we know you're arguing from complete ignorance.
I think it should apply to all industries. But for many (or most?) countries where power generation is privatized in the first place, this shouldn't be a problem that we need to fix. The trickier question might be about the grid, which in most cases is publicly funded.
> I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
That's a fair point, but even this kind of "exception" to the electricity tariffs (which gives the appearance of a subsidy and elicits public opposition) can be done in a more agnostic way. E.g. a 100 megawatt AI compute facility can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt aluminum smelter, can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt manufacturing plant. Large concentrated consumers of electricity can be treated differently than smaller consumers, but should all be treated the same as each other.
The principle prevents governments from taking actual realities of any specific scenario into account, so it seams bad.
The principle means reasoning about the harms that you want to reduce, and the benefits you want to maximize, and designing policy thoughtfully around optimizing on those two fronts, instead of basing policy on vague generalizations about industrial categories.
Title from the source: Google to fund Finnish AI with €13bn investment and nuclear power pact
Finland did the right thing with nuclear.
We have an election in Sweden tomorrow. The current government have started securing investments in clean energy (i.e nuclear energy).
Some opposition parties, including the "greens" (MP) are vehemently opposed to it.
Bit late to build it now, we needed it 30 years ago. Now it's gonna take 10+ years and be 3x the budget. Even running the old plants we had couldn't turn a profit.
The his will likely put a strain on neighbouring countries energy supply who used to buy that surplus before. Prices will go up even more.
Do you know the specific of which countries buying how much electricity from this plant, or just your wildly guess?
Quick Duck search away: this power plant exports energy to Estonia where energy production is 4x less CO2 efficient. Literally exporting energy right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
The question is how much they buy. It may not be enough to keep the plant running. Google will only buy up to 50% of what the plant can produce, but the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
Side note: Really nice dashboard.
> the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
That’s just PR spin. There is no way it would have shut down in 4 years, there has literally been no talk about doing so and all the political parties are okay with nuclear power as a means to combat co2.
I think that’s a good thing, they could also build a nuclear reactor or two or three. Wouldn’t hurt.
A nuclear reactor is takes years and years to build, this is again Europe selling it's sovereignty to big tech for some short term cash.
So this is the actual long-term bet, where there's incentive to start building more power infrastructure? You'd prefer Finland gets the medium-term results where they don't find a way to finance more nuclear then have to buy gas from Russia like Germany?
Its not like building massive amounts of data centers is a one and done in just a year or two either though.
Ah sorry, yes.
Let’s not fix that problem, get better at doing the thing that Europe was quite capable of doing (see France, Germany before they decided to let the green ideological extremists less the energy strategy) standardise a design and begin solving the energy problem.
Funny you should mention sovereignty, something a country enjoys when it has a source of energy of its own, especially when we can mine our own uranium right on the continent. Alas, we chose not to.
Instead we listen to the green imbeciles and now we’re buying our uranium and hydrocarbons from abroad.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.
Finland’s electricity consumption is not projected to rise rapidly.
Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
"Electricity consumption will increase from the current approximately 83 TWh to 103–123 TWh by 2030 and 104–159 TWh by 2035."
That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut...
In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear power.
Yes and Nordea has predicted housing prices will start to climb again every quarter for the last 3 years. Next quarter I guess!
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
You’d be surprised. Case in point Germany.
Did Germany plan to increase electricity consumption? Gas heating is still king there, and Germany famously promotes hydrogen (mostly from gas) over battery vehicles.
Ah yes let’s ignore shutting down nuclear reactors replacing them with coal power plants in the name of green energy which was so successful the country goes through a period every year called Dunkelflaute.
But yes let’s strawman into cars and heating instead.
Btw excess heat from the reactor can be and is used for central heating.
Not really. Situation now is totally different to what it was when Germany made those decisions. In Finland shutting down nuclear hasn't really been something that has been discussed seriously in very long time.
And yet here we, burning coal because god forbid we run a few nuclear reactors right, green energy for everyone! An amazing success!
> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
https://archive.ph/T0CVD
I guess Finland has strong geopolitical security motives here, to create more dependence of the US on them, like in Taiwan.
NATO membership notwithstanding, I don't think anybody in Finland expects the US to ride to rescue if Russia invades.
Finland has no natural resources Russia needs. What they would like is little bit of buffer land for Saint Petersburg, that’s all.
Why not? It would be easier to justify than the current war in Iran.
It would be incredibly easy to justify helping Ukraine against Putin's terrorism, yet here we are.
Everyone is rushing to send signals of AI growth to the market. Their continued valuation growth depends on it. There is no real use story that cannot be met by smaller distilled models which are far more energy efficient. I am convinced the next step will be scaremongering impending extinction level event followed by need to classify AI activities as national security related. Once you become part of the military industrial complex, it's all gravy baby!
like Peter Thiel said: competition is for losers. Monopoly is for winners
Its best for all these AI companies to invest in nuclear fission, fusion, dark energy, etc.
It implies we'll get cheap VPS and cloud services, right?
Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.
I don't know, I always feel these companies (including governments) are selling this kind of contracts too cheap.
They are not used to the aggressiveness of FAANG negotiators, they treat them as friends.
Far north cool places seem logical for data centers.
Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
Southern states have more republicans so it's easier to sell public land or draw this kind of contracts without a massive community backlash
Not everything is partisan, and land is only a small factor in where to decide to place a data centers. The top 4 out of 5 states with the most data centers are blue states.
The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
> new nuclear is not a serious technology
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
China is only building a token amount of nuclear compared to storage wind and solar. It makes a lot of sense for a large nation like China to waste a bit of money on nuclear power just to provide support for the core national security interest: nuclear weapons.
On time, yes, because China is great at construction. On budget, almost certainly, but we have very little visibility into true costs. China's labor costs are getting far higher as it becomes richer, and there's a good chance that it will reach a state of higher economic development where its costs for nuclear mirror those high costs in present day France.
A one party state where the plants are owned, insured, backstopped and cleaned up for free by the government doesn’t have the same economics as free market builds.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
Russia builds a lot of reactors as well. Hence, they were hired to build the Hanhikivi one in Finland, after the French disaster.
Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Because the idea of the nuclear plant was to get:
1. Consistent stable long-term energy 2. Controlled by Finland, to minimize all kinds of risks (war foreign influence, cut sea cables, worsening of relationships with other countries, market conditions and economic situation changing.
So what did Finnish politicians decided to do? To cancel the project for nonsense political reasons (let's see how much Finland will be forced to pay in damages), therefore INCREASING the reliance on foreign sources or unstable local sources.
This is the stupidity on the level of "Germany decided to run down all the nuclear powers for the sake of environment". With disastrous results!
"We don't want to allow Russians to build anything" is a statement full of feelings, but not a lot of sense, if one thinks even a little bit deeper.
Finnish oldest Loviisa nuclear station is Soviet based and this has not caused any problems. The nuclear fuel is also being provided by Russia, despite the war.
I think it is reasonable that the Finnish gov't cancelled the permit to build a Russian design reactor while NATO is deeply involved with the largest conflict with Russia since its founding in 1949. However, you raise some good points in your reply. They should have switched to a different design, such as EU, US, Canada, or Korea. All have modern, well-proven reactor designs.
You should read on the history of Finnish nuclear reactors. The disaster of Olkiluoto showed that French can't be trusted.
USA (Westinghouse) nuclesr development was/is in the gutter as well, plus there are risks giving it to the USA (the biggest hybrid and non-hybrid war wager in the world).
Then read about the history of Pyhäjoki/Hanhikivi. Finns really did try to get anyone else, RosAtom was not in the initial running. Unfortunately one after another each candidate was eliminated/wighdrew. In the end there were zero. It is at that point that RosAtom came in and saved Finnish nuclear future. They wanted to do that because the project in Finland (with a very strict Stuk government nuclear safety agency) would be a really good reference for the rest of Western Europe. Check the number of nuclear stations built by RosAtom. They really are very professional and a leader in the field.
What most people are missing in this conversation is that they think that building a Russian nuclear station in Finland would increase the amount of Finnish energy dependency on Russia. In reality it is the exact opposite, the dependency would decrease. There would be more energy produced in Finland, by Finns, instead of importing it via sea cables (can be cut) from other countries, including Russia (yes, Russia!). In case of Putin's malevolence, what would be easier for Putin, to stop providing energy via a cable, or to disrupt the work of the Finnish nuclear station?
The answer is clear. That's my point, the decision makes sense only if you don't think about it. With a little depth, you realize how incredibly emotional and stupid the decision was.
When your supplier is threatening to invade and kill your people, and has critical control over supply of parts of your reactor, and regularly commits acts of nuclear terrorism such as droning the newly completed sarcophagus around Chornobyl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...
Well, avoiding business deals with that neighbor is the only rational action. Building a Russian nuclear reactor as one of their neighbors is suicidally stupid. At least go to South Korea instead.
The US is also finding out that when it threatens its neighbors and allies that it will lose out on crucial industrial deals, such as Canada and Europe moving away from US military contractors.
There would not be a critical control over the reactor, just the opposite. Finland would control everything and could have even bought fuel elsewhere.
Loviisa station is Soviet-built, has been working amazingly well and till this day has been supplied with the fuel from Russia, despite the war and all.
Nuclear station being a big target on its own is the only negative, among a pile of positives. That's why:
1. Mini-reactors should be developed
2. No, even nowadays, Putin has not really attacked nuclear stations for real in Ukraine. It's been a big no-no. All the rest of the energy infra - yes, but not nuclear stations.
3. If the real war starts with nuclear stations being bombed, it will not matter who build the station, Finland is going to be completely fucked, considering how much of the energy is nuclear. Taking this argument into a logical conclusion, Finland (or any other country) should not have any nuclear reactors on the chance that they will be attacked. This is a silly level of risk management, a very shallow and blind view.
This is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
Agreed, it makes sense for Finland, one of the very few places it does. But in the future of global energy supply, nuclear will be a far less serious player than it was in the 20th century.
Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.
Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron tbh
The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
If everything the AI companies are saying is true, we'll all be living in a utopia while simultaneously annihilated by a rogue AI.
It will be pretty, but rather quiet.
> Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron
That's your original point, which is wrong since, as you admitted, data center boom is clearly creating jobs.
If you meant those jobs are offset by the negative effect of AI in general if we believe AI companies, a study by Anthropic was actively discussed here a few days ago. TLDR: they don't believe there will be mass unemployment because of AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626373
“Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc. Building infrastructure of any kind has a temporary positive effect on employment. The builder jobs have nothing to do with the purpose of the infrastructure.
I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years. Or the mass layoffs blamed on AI that we have already seen.
> “Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc.
Such a bizarre logic. Since when a chamber of commerce or startup accelerators are infrastructure?
Railways or roads are job creating infrastructure, did you see road building or maintenance jobs disappear? Same with data centers, themselves and the infrastructure to support them such as energy.
> I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years
This is what you said earlier: "but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true"
Anthropic is evidently not saying that. Now you're saying maybe they are not but they imply to, or hope for that. Weasel words, don't you think?
I too believe that AI will cause massive uncertainty in society. However anyone who pretends to know with any certainty how our AI shaped future will be is just that, pretentious.
You must be misinterpreting. You believe that organizations that promote small business growth don’t count as underlying systems for job creation? Really?
Per Wikipedia:
> Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function.
Let me separate “job creating infrastructure” and “infrastructure that creates jobs” as distinct ideas. Infrastructure is not just physical. Railroads and highways are transportation infrastructure. Data centers are infrastructure, but their primary purpose is not job creation. Any jobs created are tangential to the purpose of supplying networked computer resources. Labor is a cost center for a data center, and their owners aren’t aiming to kill their profit margins.
I wasn’t aware of Anthropic’s recent statements on the matter. And frankly I don’t know why I’d believe that they are being honest when it seems pretty obvious that it’s a play to rehab their reputation. For years they said it would make a majority of jobs obsolete with the heavy implication that their B2B value prop is reducing labor costs.
The important thing is that they think it is.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
Yeah I know. Sadly, burning gas and coal is still the cheapest easiest way to rapidly deploy a lot of power, and Texas is all about it.
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
SMR are a pipe dream IMO. Proper modern reactors can be built relatively quickly (see China using French designs) but our lawyer-driven system makes it impossible to build infrastructure).
1. Cheap natural resource 2. Fiber connectivity 3. Low population density 4. Favorable regulatory environment
Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it.
* easy permitting
* lots of space
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
New Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
I don't know if that's significant.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
Does that change the math above if they're tied into the grid?
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
If it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
Got an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
QTS is building a second campus in Chicago with closed loop
https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop...
Ok, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
North Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Agree with this. Natural gas is effectively free there. Maybe it’s the fiber connectivity that prevents them from being built? I genuinely don’t know.
Alaska has a speed of light problem.
Doesn't seem especially relevant for LLMs. Especially not for training, but even for inference.
Sure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
Traditionally you cared alot about internet connectivity and latency to your customer base. I imagine Texas comes out a lot better on that front.
That probably matters a lot less for AI.
Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
The requirement to use union labor for construction hasn't stopped datacenter buildouts here in Nevada.
> Texas … notoriously … anti-resident
What do you mean Texas is anti-resident?
If done correctly there’s a lot of free solar energy in sunny states.
Remember: don't be evil kids. Support AI data centres that need to produce nuclear waste so people can make AI cat vids.
Oh god, they're actually going to directly hoover up electricity supply and cause it to get massively more expensive for us mere mortal domestic users trying to stay alive
Why does Finland want to make US companies stronger?
This is the biggest problem with the EU: the EU as well as the member states, are not really thinking strategically here. Not just with regards to nuclear power plants but in general.
This is a way of transferring money to Finland for whatever the DoD wants to do!!!!
Note that no such deal is based on solar or wind power alone.
What a huge waste for humanity
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland. No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data. ... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.
Not sure of their business split, but maybe it makes financial sense purely supporting their European customers.
Surely it makes more sense for European data to be stored in the more local datacentre?
who gets the other half? i wouldnt want to share half of anything with Google
Is this like Coca Cola buying up natural springs in Spain?
So that local consumers start having to depend on bottled water?
What a shit show ...
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im amazed these countries just sit and let this be done to them. makes no sense. it looks like free money but it isn't
Do you care to elaborate on what “this” is that is so bad?
And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?
Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?
would one move willingly to a neighborhood close to a nuclear reactor or waste disposal? probably no. question answered without research.
1. Humans use AI
2. AI requires power^
3. AI companies purchase/produce power
4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)
^Same for water
This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
I don't choose to use all the AIs sites keep shoving at me.
If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.
> but continue to use AI
Not all humans
For over a decade, Google's been wearing the environmentally-friendly / carbon-neutral label as part of their public-facing brand values. It's definitely been eating into their CapEx then, and this isn't much different.
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
Oh good. Then Google will be "clean", while countless homes will be getting their power from coal or whatever instead of this nuclear plant.
The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...
Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.
First of all, are you willing to wait to find out?
Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?
If it costs only €1 billion to extend the lifespan by 20 years, then nothing else can compete with it. The capacity is 1 GW.
There are two completely different businesses.
OL3 will generate ~745 TWh over his life, from a total investment of ~€11bn.
Loviisa life extension will generate ~170 TWH, from an investment of ~€1bn.
Considering the capacity factor, we are comparing 6€/MWh for Loviisa against ~15€/MWh for OL3.
So, it is worth mentioning that extending the life of an existing power plant can be a really good investment.
Main difference is in initial setup/concrete installment!!
You can review all the maths using data from OL3 here: https://reactoratlas.com/en?y=2026&s=finland-olkiluoto-nucle...
No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
> No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.
> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out
Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?
Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.
But they export a substantial amount to Estonia, who do
Coal usage is rapidly declining in Estonia too: https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/estonia/
It's a market. Why can't someone buy it?
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.
"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
You'd get denied getting connected or expanding your business or adding a car charger, as is reality in parts of Scandinavia, if it was an issue.
I think government regulations to put a cap on utility profits is a better long term move. Force excess to be directed into green energy expansion.
> government regulations to put a cap on utility profits
I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?
Governments are extremely bad at calculating how much something "should" cost. Profits are revenue minus expenses. "Expenses" are revenue to someone else. Whenever you try to cap "profit" of some entity that isn't actually subject to competitive pressure, the next thing that happens is that the people running it start colluding or taking kickbacks from any of the people whose revenue constitutes their expenses.
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation? It seems less "heavy handed", since it's a proper investment for them.
I enjoy a particularly nasty utility monopoly where I am, in a dark blue state, where there is exactly zero political interest in breaking any monopolies. Any competition would probably have to be forced at a federal level. I think less bribing of politicians would happen if you tried to make them do something they were basically already going to do.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2026/03/22/uti...
> Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation?
The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.
Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.
Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
> If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
I see. Thanks for understand! How do you motivate them to actually add capacity? With a monopoly, it seems that adding supply for something people have to use could just reduce rates/profits.
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
You now have a PhD in your pocket.
Is that not the miracle of the free market?
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
> King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king.
I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.
Would you switch positions with King Richard II, then? That's a hypothesis we can test since you're here.
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Are you sure King Richard would do that? I don’t think he would do that at all. Being king is good because you’re above everybody else.
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King Richard II would look at those devices you're offering and have you flayed for heresy
You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.
Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.
From https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/google-signs-up-for-...
> Currently, about 80% of the projects required to extend the service life and investments of EUR700 million still lack an investment decision. Fortum said the PPA with Google will generate a predictable revenue stream, enabling it to complete the life extension investments at Loviisa.
I think they requested the operating license extension before the actual decision to extend was made.
Yes let's shame corporations for spending money on and supporting things that need more support. /s
Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.
Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.
I dont know why people bring this up. China has nowhere near the highest per capita pollution levels.
Per-capita can be bad and so can overall scale. It wouldn't matter if Norway was the highest per-capita because like 5 people live there.
Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
By the definition of per capita. If only a small group of people have significant more emissions than the rest of the world, then they're only increasing the average by a small amount, but that's still worse, not better.
Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-foss...
And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people.
Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.
Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Yeah, it's because of the above points.
> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
> You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
> Extremely expensive.
Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.
> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.
> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.
Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.
> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical.
Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.
China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...
BTW, LCOE isn't that good estimate. It doesn't account for the system costs. LFSCOE (Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity) does better in estimating the amount of money you actually need to spend.
Nah, it’s coz they were almost all built in an era before renewables became cheaper than coal in the last few years.
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.
> they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier
They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.
Where did you read this? What I read is that Fortum was considering extending to 2050 as early as 2018 and finalized those plans 2 years ago. I read nothing that indicates the survival of this plant is dependent on this Google deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652346
> Those decisions would otherwise have been made year by year, but the long-term deal with Google ensures Loviisa will keep running through the end of its operating license
It's important to be able to read through PR in planted pieces. There's no indication that Loviisa was actually going to struggle. It's a guaranteed revenue stream which removes some risk for them, but Finland has seen a boom in data centers and such which is why Fortum went after the 2050 extension in the first place. They even wanted to build a third reactor which the government declined to authorize. That doesn't speak to them wondering if there's enough demand to keep the plant alive. It's highly unlikely Loviisa was going to close down even without the Google deal.
> It's important to be able to read through PR in planted pieces
Planted pieces? how about directly from the operator:
Without the lifetime extension investment program, the plant – which currently employs approximately 580 people and provides 10% of Finland’s electricity – could not continue operations beyond 2030. - [0]
That is not just year over year discussion. Of course it's PR, but do you happen to have insider information that contradict that?
More details:
Fortum has an ongoing, approximately EUR 1 billion investment programme in Loviisa with the aim of extending the lifetime of the power plant until 2050. To date, approximately 80% of the projects and EUR 700 million of the capital expenditure required to keep the power plant operational through 2050 are still pending investment decisions.
The PPA with Google will provide the revenue certainty to continue the investments associated with 100% of the lifetime extension of Loviisa. Furthermore, the agreement is expected to enable a new 10 MW power increase of the plant, in addition to the already planned 38 MW uprate which is expected to be live in 2028.
> That doesn't speak to them wondering if there's enough demand to keep the plant alive. It's highly unlikely Loviisa was going to close down even without the Google deal.
You know that because?
[0] - https://www.fortum.com/media/2026/09/inside-information-fort...
Your own link contradicts itself. If Google funding was so critical to the plant staying open at all, how come they were already planning a 38MW expansion independent of that? That doesn’t sound like it’s on the brink of closure.
You should read all news skeptically, doubly so for press releases.
> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
If I consume all the clean energy your country can produce with my data center, explain how cap and trade blocks a country from using other sources - I don’t think anyone will like news stories of people freezing to death in the winter.
That's the CAP part. The annual co2 emissions of electricity production and industries is capped to X gigatons per year. If a datacenter buys all clean electric production of the country, electric companies will have to either have to make up the gap by building more new clean energy or tell other customers "sorry all sold out".
Of course, would the latter happen, political actions would be done before people freeze. It will be unpredictable what the would be - allow fossil fuels "temporarily" or order datacenters to shut down during dunkelflaute? Interesting times (I would prefer less interesting times).
Generally speaking cap and trade is the most sure way to reduce emissions (emissions drop exactly at the pace the CAP drop annually) and the most cost-effective way also - the TRADE part ensures emissions are cut first by those who it easiest, while hard-to-decarbonize sectors have most time to sort their plan.
The only problem is "carbon leakage" where co2 emissions simply move to asshole countries like USA and China that do not utilize cap-and-trade. That should be dealt with hefty carbon tariffs. Oh wait, even china is building their own cap-and-trade system. Well, anyways, tariffs against the climate assholes.
The EU has a large problem with carbon leakage from electricity generation to oil and gas use.
For example, gas heating is exempt from the EU carbon trade, so people are encouraged to use that rather than electric heating. In countries like Germany, gas heating is popular largely for tax reasons.
Gas heating is a pre-existing issue in Germany. While there is handful on anecdotes of someone switching back to gas, the big trend is opposite. Majority of heating refurbishments are gas/oil -> heat pumps, and almost every new build is heat pumps.
carbon leakage is mostly industrial and data centers (why do so many europeans run code at us-east-1 ?)
If you study the heat pump adoption in various European countries, you will quickly notice that it's connected to the price ratio between electricity and gas.
The EU has a carbon tax on electricity but not gas. This pushes people towards gas heating. Germany has much higher taxes on electricity, although it does at least have a carbon tax on gas.
If a carbon tax on electricity makes people use gas heating, that's carbon leakage.
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.
Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
> Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear.
I don’t think that’s been true for some time now, batteries have fallen in price very quickly. LCOE for solar+storage was below nuclear a few years ago and batteries are cheaper still now. An estimate from 2025 put storage cost at $125 per kWh.
CATL estimates 10 usd per kWh from their sodium batteries, and just installed one in Germany.
At 10/kWh, batteries will make any other option seem fiscally senseless by comparison.
Note that when Fortum was declined it was because two others were given approval. Lack of new nuclear in Finland isn't because no permits, but because Olkiluoto 3 exposed the real costs so Olkiluoto 4 was cancelled. Russia was the partner in the other one so that went to hell with the attack to Ukraine.
Then why is California down to 25% fossil generation from 60% a few years ago? And still dropping fast as more and more batteries and renewables come on line. Tell me again how baseload generation is still a relevant concept
What do you think batteries are if not baseload generation? Batteries + renewables compete with nuclear for baseload. They take up substantially more land mass for the same amount of power though.
is is often repeated in these threads, baseload generation is an obsolete term. Base load itself is real - the minimum demand on the grid, usually in the early am. Base load generation was a term given to a class of generators (mainly coal) that were cheap but inflexible, so you built them to match the base load and had more expensive variable output generation on top. That economic setup no longer exists, variable generation exists 24x7. So base load exists, base load generators do not. And yeah, thats why nukes are no longer economical, their base load generation role is economically obsolete.
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
> some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position
We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?
And died horrendous dead? Because guy who did this was in nuclear plant and was buried in lead coffin in closed zone.
His skin was falling from body while he was still breathing
The Chernobyl disaster wasn't caused by a single person, as you note in your comment "proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience."
And how many people who were on site survived and for how long?
There were lots on the site, which I thinks shows how weak your "which is safe" point is.
If there were lots of people there AND it still happened then.. not very safe right?
What is carbon based proton catching mechanism?
I suppose a graphite moderator would fit the description.
Exactly, sorry for bad description
Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
Also it worth mentioning deaths caused by respiratory diseases from coal power plant pollution. This goes in millions
Death rates per unit of electricity production
" Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity. "
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
That chart needs a companion chart showing “amount of effort needed to prevent deaths”. Since that is missing lots of people think nuclear is safe when it’s actually by far the most dangerous.
Such charts exist - they're the "costs per unit" charts; perhaps broken down into (say) capital upfront plant costs, ongoing running costs per unit generated, and decommissioning costs.
It's the decommissioning costs for both nuclear and fossil fuel plants that are most often missing or overlooked.
True enough but there's an order of magnitude difference in those costs. For nuclear the costs extend beyond out ability to predict the future, and they simply can't be ignored whatever they amount to.
A fossil plant can simply be abandoned, and the damage will be minimal compared to abandoning a nuclear plant.
Without this information the chart is repeatedly used as an argument that nuclear power is safe, which is of course the direct opposite of the truth. It is the option that requires the most money and effort to keep safe and nothing is even a close second.
Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant. Such cleaning at end of life has to be done also for many kinds of chemical plants, chemical storage tanks, otherwise you get a catastrophe like in Bhopal, India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
Finland is building Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
>Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant.
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
Civil nuclear power plants accumulate funds for decommissioning and disposal of nuclear waste. It's part of the electricity costs. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US are military/research facilities.
"Asse II: A lesson that is making modern deep repositories safer"
https://www.nagra.ch/en/news/asse-eine-lektion-die-moderne-t...
There were reports in 2008 about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium. I would be interested about the amounts of these isotopes in the brine, as we can detect extremely small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
For example for caesium-137 we can measure amounts as low as 5 Bq/kg, the decay of 5 atoms of caesium-137 per second in 1 kg of sample.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594677/
An adult person usually has activity of 3,000–6,000 becquerels (Bq) of potassium-40. 3,000–6,000 potassium-40 atoms decay and emit a beta particle in adult person every second.
https://stuk.fi/en/radioactivity-in-human-body
We have developed cheap glass that can be mass produced and sucks electricity from sunshine, can be placed on already occupied surfaces to produce 100x more electricity than we are currently consuming. It requires basically no maintenance or operating costs for decades and is xheap enough for an average home-owner to meet at least half of their electricity needs.
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
Cheap solar, yes you can now buy PV quite cheap. How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies? Also subsidies in form of cheap Chinese coal electricity, polysilicon production is very energy intensive.
Costs estimates for Energiewende are in hudreds of bilions of euros.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13705-017-0141-0
https://www.euractiv.com/news/blackout-the-battle-to-rewire-...
The Private and External Costs of Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out
https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article-abstract/20/3/1311/652...
>Cheap solar, yes you can now buy PV quite cheap.
This is what matters.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better, but import all of it PV panels. And electricity only a part of primary energy consumption in both in China and Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/germany
I'm interested how China could decarbonize, as they still building a lot of coal power plants. They are slowly decreasing coal electricity production, but ramping up syntetic fuel from coal production.
So if Germany wants to follow Chinas path, they should build a lot of solar, wind, coal, some nuclear and hydro power plants, stop building gas power plants. You don't want it, as coal burning still has significant health impacts in Germany.
https://caneurope.org/publications/coal-burning-eu-countries...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373512769_Environme...
The long-term political decission of China is to become independent of energy imports, they are well aware of their energy import vunerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_dilemma
Medium-term thinking in Germany is to import a lot oil, natural gas, PV. Long-term thinking in Germany to import a lot of hydrogen, PV. Nobody talks about Germany becomming energy independent.
Best place for batteries for decarbonization is in EVs, not grid stabilization. Even better for decarbonization are electric trains, electric trams, trolleybus, they run directly from electric grid.
>China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
Germany had higher solar production per capita then China, in 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
We will see how the battery costs change over years, currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
But they start to make economic sense in regions with lot of sun and high electricity costs.
https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/harnessing-the-sun-...
In China politicians give the way and whoever is in the way, is removed. It an error of Europe to make itself depend from China. The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
>currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
> Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs
You say that, but someone still has to pay those costs which are rarely factored in and are significant.
To the north of my state we are faced with the costs of decommissioning and removal of 35 platforms, 6076 km of pipelines and static umbilicals; 483 subsea lifts; 11 floating facilities, 120 risers and 548 wells to be plugged - in addition to kilotons of offshore steel and concrete.
eg: One project is the Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The Australian Government took responsibility for the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour after the liquidation of its owner.
These are non trivial undertakings with costs running into the billions.
You're absolutely correct that oil and gas extraction activities need to be properly decommissioned, and that is expensive.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.