Comment by mindslight
4 days ago
> doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone
Talking about motivations would seem to be a smokescreen, a politician still trying to grease the wheels to allow the project to continue despite the harm to local residents. The point is that any engineer overseeing the deployment of turbines would have said "these things are loud" - it's an externality eminently foreseeable by the owner.
And yes, my point is that the theories of liability that would make the county liable for any of these costs need to be drastically curtailed. The responsibility for a datacenter owner trying to force their externalities onto existing land uses and failing should rest on the datacenter owner, not on the people whom they attempted to harm.
Yes, we should definitely increase NIMBY regulation by retroactively changing the rules on industrial development. The US is doing such a great job at building such projects already.
No thanks. Instead lets fix our inability to build a thing in this country by reducing NIMBY regulation so things like power generation can be built where it makes sense, and we are allowed to do things like build long distance transmission lines again. Also start funding these societal-level projects like our grandparents and great grandparents did to invest in our futures.
No datacenter operator wants to deploy their own power plants. It's due to the inability for anyone to get anything done that is not directly under their control. You would be waiting decades for projects to happen otherwise, like many have. Utilities have abdicated their responsibility to build for the future, and regulators have let them. Just like anything infrastructure related in the country. You are now seeing the direct impacts of this, and they will continue to increase regardless of if the cause is AI datacenters or whatever other popular thing we want to argue about next.
It's only "retroactively" changing "the rules" because "the rules" are an instance of regulatory capture limiting the policing of externalities to only ones that have been enumerated. Otherwise the general principle is that if you cause harm to other people, you are responsible for that harm. And industrial noise at all hours of the day is harm.
You'll get zero argument from me about the need to build more power plants and transmission lines. But this of course must be done with proper compensation to those affected, not just a regulatory giveaway after finding some disenfranchised area. In fact one might say that such regulatory giveaways have artificially lowered the expected cost of building a new plant below the actual cost, thus discouraging investment at the true cost.
You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
> You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
This is an interesting point I have not considered as much as I should have.
I think it's somewhat circular. As regulations become more and more restrictive on a "global" scale, "local" workarounds are going to become more common and more obnoxious to the local population. If a few jet engines in a parking lot impact 10 people in an extremely negative manner, but a 400 mile transmission line impacts 900 property owners through 90 political districts in a very minor way; the latter is going to be getting far more political scrutiny and be far harder to pull off even though it's better overall.
This will then tilt development into screwing the tiny minority since it's far cheaper and faster (practical) to get done. I don't think this is a good outcome for society over the long term as it erodes the social contract, but it's very interesting to think about how to solve.
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