Comment by toast0
1 year ago
> At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
I don't think these industries get power for free.
It's typical for high capacity customers to be paying a flat fee monthly for capacity in addition to the rates for usage. And when they desire things like redundant feeds from separate substations, that's likely to require payment for engineering and construction as well as extra cost for maintenance.
OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs. It's a benefit to the grid operator if they can have large users rapidly reduce their load if needed to maintain grid stability... it's historically been much easier to reduce demand significantly at a few large user sites than to reduce demand across a large number of households ... and the alternative to opt-in reduction is brownouts and rolling blackouts.
A sophisticated multi-region datacenter operation is a good candidate for demand response, as it's relatively simple to quickly migrate traffic away from a power constrained data center.
No, I know the plant will pay for its usage. But to me, the net benefit of the dam is effectively zeroed out from the onset. The province was barely able to carry the project through to completion in the first place. Now we gotta start the process over again with a new government and people on both sides are upset at the completion.
Likely, we'll simply build a bunch of LNG facilities which kind of defeats the purpose of the dam in the first place.
The LNG facility will presumably produce some jobs, and bring in a lot of taxes (from exporting large quantities of natgas overseas.) So, the dam is basically an investment for the state, which will pay dividends for decades to come. That’s on top of what the plant will pay for electricity, which, presumably, in itself is enough to, over time, pay off the investment and then some.
> OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs.
In a lot of countries companies also pay much less for electricity, usually due to a lower tax on said electricity.