Comment by bilekas
4 days ago
> Stephenson said the data center’s operations team had not seen any “abnormalities” on the day in question.
> “However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote
Absolutely no abnormalities because this is by design, but nobody wanted to pay attention when approving the building and zoning. Amazing what some money to politicians will get you.
I can't even imaging living within ear shot of these things. Horrific quality of life. I can't sleep when my water pump is active.
> Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.
Well then why were they allowed to vote on it ? It's incompetance ? Or just straight up corruption.
It's getting difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and corruption, as widespread as both of them are, and how their consequences always overlap.
One of the ways corruption hides its intentions is lying to make it look like incompetence. It takes a very long time for the truth to come out and it rarely does but corruption depends on people buying the lies and assuming its just incompetence.
Incompetence should carry liability as well. If some politician signs his name to random documents without understanding what he's doing and causes harm to people, he should simply pay the price to make the other party whole, whatever damage was caused should be undone to the fullest possible extent and he should be removed from office for good measure because he's clearly too dumb to exercise it responsibly.
That's the benign case. If it turns out he wasn't actually incompetent but was signing things in exchange for money or favors he should go to literal death row. Proven corruption should result in the death penalty for all involved.
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Or they don't see the problem. Someone's paying 600-900k to live in a townhouse 1000 ft from the runways at Dulles Airport
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?category=SEMANTIC&sea...
Reminds me of former Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner’s suggestion that deaf people buy homes near the airport.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19941105/1939991/oh...
What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all.
The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.
> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
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Bending over backwards and giving zero tax rates will sure make our area prosper! It has never worked before, but this time, maybe it will!!
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I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.
A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.
It's due to lack of investment in the power grid on a generational timeline. We used up every bit of slack and extra capacity in the name of efficiency and not needing to spend the money on building stuff.
It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky.
We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years.
I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected!
A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal.
We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.
Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio.
But I guess this isn't how the world works.
As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?
There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.
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Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power.
The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.
I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents.
The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.
It's bad for my quality of life if some of the economic inputs to things I use (like "the internet", writ large) get made deliberately more expensive to build via regulatory fiat. Indeed, this is basically deliberate NIMBYism, and NIMBYism is why housing is scarce and expensive where I live. I don't want policymakers to be able to assert that the only possible use of a datacenter is something they find silly and then change the law to make them more expensive to build.
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My wife and I travel in our RV a lot and used to full time. Some RV parks - even when full - are often totally quiet and peaceful at least enough to not notice a slight background noise of cars driving around here and there.
Then a family will arrive that seems like they're at a Disney theme park and you just hear screaming kids non-stop. It's like a tornado is hitting for days. We always joke if you ask a tornado if it's quiet it will answer of course- I don't hear anything. Because there is NOTHING louder than the tornado and that's all it knows.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to vote on it? How does a zoning rule about gas turbines get enacted at all, except by some body noticing that it's a problem and then voting to create such an ordinance? (Or by voting not to do so, if they think it isn't actually that much of a problem or if there's a way to mitigate it or if the benefits outweigh the costs, just like with any other issue that's within the purview of the county officials?)
Towards the end of the article:
> "It was only after the data center was operating, following a tour he took of the facility, that Turner said county officials realized the data center was “running in island mode.”
> “It was very impressive, but it was obvious that this is not what we thought was allowed,” Turner said."
Youve stated its corruption by officials. Its rather clear, however, that when the company were told that a grid connection would take 3 years that they found a way around it that didnt require further approvals.
Conspiracy theories are fun, but this isnt one.
Maybe there's corruption by officials at the local electric power company and that's why it takes 3 years to get an industrial grid connection. Or maybe there isn't actually any corruption happening and the local electric power company is just building out infrastructure slower or less efficiently than it could in principle be, for the ordinary sorts of reasons why things in this world are not perfect.
A consequence on our focus on legislation rather than the more natural legal apths of addressing these problems, e.g. easements and tort law.
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> Point is, if you ban anything that makes noise you’ll be left with nothing, it’s pure selfish nimbyism
The US is large enough country and it should be possible to build DC far away from homes. That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY. I lived in 1km from a gas fired power station and did bot notice any noise at all. If a DC can be heard it is either too close or too loud.
> That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
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Some thing which get described as NIMBYism are better described as NIBYism.
A state housing complex is just housing. Not wanting that nearby is NIMBYism because it's about not wanting it specifically near your home even though it's, by definition, going to need to be done in a spot zoned for homes.
The question around a e.g. jet engine test site is very different though - more like "why would we need the jet engine test site to be within a mile of anyone's back yard in the first place"? Usually the answer is "we don't, it just kinda happened that way as the city grew".
There's no reason to torture the acronym just to avoid a perceived stigma. Not wanting something developed near you is NIMBYism. NIMBYism can be reasonable or unreasonable. You can label an opinion NIMBY as an implied insult or with no judgement at all.
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Not wanting a data center next to your home is now "pure selfish NIMBYism". This is how sick we are becoming. It's hideous that this is now how we treat people with homes in the US. Everything must get worse, and worse, and worse, and if you cry out against any single thing, you must be a selfish asshole.
It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
> It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
Same. We used to be a country that could get things done. Stuff like power generation and transmission lines were built out well ahead of expected demand, with resiliency baked in. Negative impacts were there, but understood as part of the whole living in society thing. Reasonable minds came together and made the best choices possible at scale and mitigated negative externalities to individuals as much as possible. We understood spending a decade on impact studies and lawsuits helped no one.
We decided to protect the absurd, so we shall get the absurd as workarounds. Folks (collectively speaking) didn't want transmission lines running through their farmland or whatnot, so now we get absurd workarounds like standing up gas turbines in datacenter parking lots.
It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, since this has become the only way to get anything done.
Sorry, NIMBYism is on the way out. We are building high density housing, cafes, restaurants, shops, data centers, and offices all next to each other. Nothing you can do about it.
I used to live near a busy street. I eventually got used to the noise but when I bought my house I made sure to find a quiet spot. Now, its dead quiet at night and the difference in my quality of life is significant. I also made the city put shades on the street lights so they wouldn't shine on my house. Another huge improvement.
Peace is the dream, which is being slowly killed. People who value peace are being pushed farther and farther out. You used to be able to find peace in neighborhoods, but more and more people have to choose between community and peace.
Seems a bit harsh. Have you experienced the noise being described here first hand? How can you be sure it is the same as what you are experiencing and find acceptable?
For extra amusement, try living near a farm or a school. Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.
Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.
I once lived across the street from a public park with a court. One day the judge burned her thighs on the hot metal slide, and now it's a parking lot.
That industrial noise at night isn't required; it's just cheaper than being quieter.
The choices are not ban anything that makes noise and allow everything that makes noise.
> Also a state housing complex nearby with mentally unwell people screaming all night outside.
I think this would be the greatest annoyance to me, the other stuff becomes background noise eventually