The authors shared a replication package with all of the data, which more researchers should do: https://zenodo.org/records/23019736

I find their methodology misleading, though. They're basically taking the cost of transmission infrastructure upgrades and then assigning the cost of those upgrades proportional to peak energy demand of the customer base, not the cost of the infrastructure upgrade.

So if, for example, they estimate that residential customer demand will grow by 10%, then they suggest residential customers should only be paying for 10% of transmission infrastructure upgrades.

That's not how infrastructure upgrades work, though. Connecting 100,000 new residential addresses and areas can cost more than a couple data centers that are close to the power station.

The problem is they don't have access to, or at least they didn't look very hard, to find the actual data about transmission line upgrades and how much data centers actually pay to get connected. Contrary to what I see in a lot of the comments here, big customers do actually get billed for their infrastructure upgrade costs after utilities do their analyses. This paper is ignoring the utilities' analyses and substitutes their own highly simplified proportional-to-peak-demand estimates, and that's how they get their headline number.

One very surprising discovery was that they show data center construction incentives to actually be a good deal:

> State incentives for data centers have provided returns on the investments, if inconsistently, the researchers found. Some states, such as California, reaped $180 in worker income for every dollar spent, while Virginia increased income $2 for every dollar invested. The researchers determined that the presence of an existing, qualified workforce was a stronger indicator of high returns than the amount of incentive spending.

That's not what I expected to read.

This is a topic where details basically don't matter for public opinion, though, so I'm not sure it matters. It aligns with what people

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thepryz a day ago | parent [-]

I appreciate this if only because most people seem to take things at face value rather than really thinking about the methodology and whether it makes sense or is potentially flawed.

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bethekidyouwant a day ago | parent [-]

“If only“ is this your way of signalling that you remain against datacenters?

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thepryz 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Quite the contrary. I’m actually more familiar with hyperscalers than the average person for a number of reasons that aren’t worth getting into.

Fair to say there’s a lot of misinformation about data centers, that I think in many ways is driven by people’s fear of AI. It also doesn’t help that data centers have opened a lot of eyes to how poor our utility infrastructure is and how corrupt many local governments are.

A lot of the concerns people seem to have about datacenters is largely solved by local governments creating and enforcing sensible building codes, tax policy, and utility regulation. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that the citizens themselves hold the greatest responsibility for not being engaged in their communities, educating themselves and holding their elected officials accountable.

	▲	bethekidyouwant 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		En ajoutant rien, la plus bonne réponse que j’ai jamais eu chez hacker news