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Comment by forgetfreeman

10 hours ago

I'd rather see legislation banning crypto mining and AI data centers from the public grid entirely. No sense in forcing the broader public to subsidize them.

11 comments

forgetfreeman

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MBCook  10 hours ago

The problem with that is one of the best things we have to control pollution at power plants is the rules that go into place when connecting to the US grid (I know TX is different).

I really don’t want to incentivize private power plants that aren’t on grid. Or just running tons of industrial sized generators instead.

If we’re going to allow enough of this stuff to be built that it can destabilize things why not require they behave and don’t stop off like that? Some sort of organized draw down?

And if they don’t? Mandatory cutoff for X amount of time. Weeks/months.

rickydroll  10 hours ago

If they weren't on the public grid, they would just slap in a bunch of gas turbines and run one of the noisier, more polluting sources of electricity. I think it would be better if we required them to replace the power they used, but do so on the grid so that it benefits everyone.

  • doodlebugging  8 hours ago

    The newest one that I know of will use gas turbines as generators and will connect to the grid. [0] It is sited conveniently to operating natural gas compressor stations out in the Barnett Shale field and near to a local lake for water. That lake is effectively a deep mud-hole that has an agreement with a larger regional lake to pipe water from the larger lake to the local lake to help meet local demand.

    If you ever visited the town and hit the restaurants during the summer you get a nice taste of the lake bottom when it flips. Pretty nasty yet few restaurants use water filtration to deliver fresh-tasting tea and water to their customers.

    That's OT though.

    The county will have a special meeting on data centers this Tuesday, June 9 where they are seeking public input. I expect that there will be plenty of people and hope they have time to give people an opportunity to speak. I visit this county regularly for grocery shopping, fuel, etc and if you go south one county there are already plenty of people who are sick and tired of the bitcoin operations and how they have disrupted life in that county. I hope we have a good turnout for this meeting so that this new operation gets canned before they build anything.

    [0]https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article315770666.ht...

    Here is a quick overview of the proposed site. [1] You can see in yellow the 200 acre section where turbine generators will be sited. In the light blue area adjacent you can see a small part of the larger parcel where the data centers will be built. This is part of one of the last large ranches in this part of the county. The others are actively being developed for large (>50000 residents) developments that were supposed to be self-contained communities but which have evolved to be large residential areas that dump traffic onto undersized freeways which are currently under construction to handle the huge volume of new traffic and traffic from all the other losers who will live out there.

    The red polygon show existing grid substation intertie where high tension power lines converge or radiate out across the countryside. The light blue polygon is an active natural gas production and compressor station. There is more natural gas infrastructure just below the red polygon too. The lake is obvious in the lower left corner. The natural gas wells and compressor station date to early Barnett Shale production in the county, before 2008. The electrical substation is legacy and has been expanded more than once during the last 15 years.

    The black polygon is a small rural subdivision of 8 ~2.2 acre ranchettes around one original ~4.2 acre home site. Those people bought a small plot of ranchland for their own slice of rural Texas. That section was subdivided into lots about 9 years ago so every one of those people bought homes next to an operational gas compressor station. I wonder whether they will be at the meeting.

    [1]https://i.postimg.cc/0NVn0ch9/datacenter.png

protocolture  8 hours ago

I'd rather see legislation banning everyone from the grid. Why have a common resource if its no longer common. Just get rid of it. Ban everyone from using the roads, who knows, they might be transporting evil computer hardware to an evil data centre using a road. Farms obviously have to go, they supply food to people who write code that gets run in datacentres. In fact, just ban all trade and commerce to be on the safe side*

*The US should implement this policy for real for my personal amusement.