| ▲ | Nifty3929 a day ago | |||||||||||||
Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants? | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | FuckButtons a day ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||
Sure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is no way to build the power infrastructure in less time than it takes to build the additional data centers. It’s also not clear that there would be enough elasticity in the supply chain for building any of these generation methods that you even could strike ground on increasing us electricity production by the ~10% needed over the given time frame. The reality is, there is no way to build all the additional data centers without significant inflationary pressure, that will be borne by everyone except the well connected hyperscalers with excellent lobbyists unless average people actually realize that fact and force their dealing with the relevant municipalities and grid operators to be transparent. | ||||||||||||||
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