842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave (abcnews.com) 200
As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat.
That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households, meaning that the number of people impacted by these outages is likely to be much larger... Millions of Americans, however, will be contending with a heatwave that is blanketing much of the country, including in Philadelphia where the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade that had been set for Friday was canceled due to the dangerous heat wave, according to Philadelphia ABC station WPVI. Elsewhere, America's Independence Day Parade, which was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on July 4 in downtown Washington, D.C. was canceled by organizers late Friday evening due to the extreme heat in the District of Columbia... Amtrak announced it will be canceling a number of trains due to heat-related conditions.
The outages seemed to last throughout the day, with 790,103 household outages still in effect by 4:30 p.m. EST. Ironically, the power outages hit several American states that were among the country's original 13 freedom-declaring colonies, including New Jersey (143,072 outages), Pennsylvania (40,944 outages), and Virginia (27,392 outages).
CNBC adds that America's largest power grid operator said Friday "it was under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as it battled generator outages, massive overloading on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering heat." PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot wholesale electricity prices in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt hour this week. That compares to about $40 per MWh when PJM is not in distress.
The outages seemed to last throughout the day, with 790,103 household outages still in effect by 4:30 p.m. EST. Ironically, the power outages hit several American states that were among the country's original 13 freedom-declaring colonies, including New Jersey (143,072 outages), Pennsylvania (40,944 outages), and Virginia (27,392 outages).
CNBC adds that America's largest power grid operator said Friday "it was under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as it battled generator outages, massive overloading on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering heat." PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot wholesale electricity prices in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt hour this week. That compares to about $40 per MWh when PJM is not in distress.
Power infrastructure (Score:4, Funny)
And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.
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And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.
To be fair, the AI companies are more realistic about nuclear power than government agencies. So letting them build their own power stations is probably a good thing, so long as they are not allowed to use oil or coal.
Re:Power infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
AI companies have been caught lying to investors on numerous occasions. More regulation on data centers is the right action, not less.
In principle, a nation should not permit the private ownership of vital infrastructure. Such as the national grid or large scale power generators. Privatizing everything is a way for corporations to conceal everything, and pass their costs onto consumers and taxpayers. Public transparency of vital infrastructure ought to be a goal for any society, but there are some wrong-headed weirdos that scream "communism" any time we want to look at their books.
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While your point is correct, the problem is when you get a government who really believes private is always better, sabotages the public utility to show how bad public ownership is and sells it to their friends cheap. It happened here where the government balanced their books by getting the electric utility to borrow massively and pay huge dividends to the government. Luckily there was a change in government before the sell part. Took years to fix the issues.
Then there is the example of the UK when Thatcher
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Then there is the example of the UK when Thatcher ruled. Most all public stuff sold off and the country has been fucked since. They did briefly lower the taxes though.
Kind of ironic from the "running out of other people#s money" person.
Oh who am I kidding. That seems to be the core tenet of conservatism: loudly yell about how the other guys are doing whatever it is you're actually doing.
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I don't see any reason to let data centers run their own wind mills, solar, and nuclear power on-site. Your justification that we (hand waves) used to do it is flimsy at best. That reasoning disappeared half a century ago when much of industry was connected to the grid. I mean seriously, why did my grandparents have to let the power company run 3 phase lines over our property if every factory could have just setup their own on-site power. Technically feasible, but such a stupid idea.
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It also seems hypocritical to be saying companies should be putting solar on their building roofs, over their parking lots, etc; but they can't have other types of onsite power generation. If there is excess power from the on-site generation there is no reason not to sell that access back to the grid, just like with solar.
Re:Power infrastructure (Score:4, Informative)
Every data centre should be covered in solar as an absolute minimum. It provides shade and generates energy.
In Europe commercial customers typically pay a rate that is based on the price of energy at the time of use, and their power factor. So they will want batteries, to help avoid peak costs and to make their power factor as close to 1 as possible. Plus UPS, of course. But maybe it's different in the US.
If they have the space then windmills make sense too. Nuclear is obviously a no-go because a) SMRs don't exist yet and b) if they did exist they would require the standard nuclear safety and waste storage on-site, which is extremely expensive and would need additional specialist staff to manage.
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It is different in the US. Commercial customers can often get cheaper electrical rates because they're buying "in bulk" with a more consistent load. Though electric power is controlled locally so there's differences everywhere.
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European commercial customers can reduce the cost by being consistent too. High power factor, constant load. They can also reduce costs by load shifting.
They have then benefit of 230V as well.
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>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal
Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.
Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.
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>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal
Or natural gas. No carbon.
Nope, not yet. Displacing coal and oil with natural gas is an environment win. You remove sources in order of their pollution, coal first, oil second, nat gas third. Doing a mix is counterproductive.
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It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.
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It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps ...
Other than reducing CO2 emissions by prioritizing the dirtiest (coal, oil) first.
Spend that money on displacing coal first, spend the money on displacing oil second, don't bother with spending money on displacing natural gas until the previous are eliminated (well, largely so, there will always be weird regional exceptions). Every dollar spent on displacing natural gas allows coal and oil to persist and emit a greater amount of CO2.
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So letting them build their own power stations is probably a good thing
Given they have demonstrated a relentless interest in skirting laws and regulations and when finally caught out on it, tying up the process in the legal system I don't think they should be building anything, much less power stations. Just ask the people who live near Colossus 2 how much fun it is to live next to a whole lot of unregulated illegal turbines which really emphasise how bad health and environmental effects can be when some rich fuckers want their power *now* instead of waiting to do something pr
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Re: Power infrastructure (Score:2)
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" I have yet to see anyone explain to me how you prevent businessmen from coming in and skipping all the maintenance so they can pocket a shitload of short-term profits. "
It's called State and Federal regulation.
If you don't pass ( and continue to pass ) all of the State and Federal inspections that go on during the lifetime of the facility, they simply revoke your license
and shut you down.
You're trying to misdirect because you don't have (Score:4, Informative)
And Jesus mother fucking Christ telling me that people lose everything so I should be okay with losing everything is just fucking insane. What the hell happened to make you this obsessed with nuclear power?
Again you need to answer the question, how do you propose stopping billionaires and other skeezy businessmen from moving in and profiting by cutting back on necessary maintenance like they did in fukushima. As soon as I can tell your solution is to pretend that didn't happen.
It's the same nonsense I get from you guys every time. When reality doesn't fit with the world you want you just pretend reality isn't real.
So answer my question. How do you stop businessmen?
I am pretty damn sure you don't have an answer especially one that fits in with your preferred worldview. Feel free to throw some more misdirection and some more straw man on the fire
Re: Power infrastructure (Score:4, Informative)
Earthquakes and tsunami were a known hazard at the site of Fukushima Daiichi. Just like extreme heat and drought are a known hazard for lots of other nuclear plants in more geologically stable areas now. They failed to properly plan for and mitigate those dangers, and the results was multiple meltdowns and explosions.
A large amount of the loss can be directly attributed to those failures, not the earthquake of tsunami. Water did not destroy those towns, the necessary evacuation order and subsequent contamination did. The repeated failed attempts to clean them up meant that by the time adults were allowed to start coming back (it was too dangerous for children), the communities were already gone and no longer viable. It also had a devastating effect on businesses in the area, particularly farms and fishing.
The process to clean up the site is also failing. It's well behind schedule and the planned method is looking like it might not be viable.
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It's hard to not blame TEPCO to some level, as the tsunami was a one in 500 year type and was around 500 years after the last one of that magnitude. Although they're not exactly clockwork, it does become kinda obvious that you need to take such things into consideration. Yeah, yeah, there was no "legal obligation". Honestly, that isn't worth a damn. Either you update the design as new risks are determined (regardless of the law) or you knowingly take that risk.
However, you're absolutely right that the tsuna
China burns 11x the coal, CO2 up 38%. (Score:5, Informative)
But Trump says Americans need to put coal first
This isn't China. The US President cannot command industry to use coal, as Xi Jinping and the CCP do in China. US industry has been moving away from coal for about 70 years.
... Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years. "
You can misrepresent the stats by only looking at coal for electrical power generation, rather than total coal use.
You can misrepresent the stats by citing 2 anomalies of new coal plants, while China is building many new coal plants.
The fact remains the US long trend is moving away from coal, the Chinese long term and ongoing trend is to burn as much coal as they can dig up and import.
The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, down 13%.
"[2026 March 26] Despite being a renewables superpower, China continues to permit and build new coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace. Analysts say the nation’s new five-year plan will ensure further coal plant expansion and jeopardize China’s ability to deliver on its climate promises.
In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “strictly control” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy — the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP — to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.
The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed
https://e360.yale.edu/features... [yale.edu]
"[2026 Feb 10] Despite media and other reports that China is into “green energy,” the country is still using coal to power its economy, with about 80 to 100 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity added in 2025. The Statistical Review of World Energy reports that coal accounted for 58% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024, with fossil fuels accounting for a whopping 88%. Coal also provided 58% of China’s electricity generation in 2024. While a report by Ember indicates that populous developing countries like China and India “led the charge in adding more renewable energies” in the first half of 2025, their generation shares show that coal is still king in these countries, and their coal-fired capacity additions indicate that coal will continue to power their economies for the foreseeable future.
The Statistical Review of World Energy reports that coal accounted for 58% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024. Oil was at 20% and natural gas at 10%. That means that 88% of China’s energy came from fossil fuels. Carbon-free energy (nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, and most other renewables) only provided 12%. Since 2000, China has more than tripled its coal consumption and now uses more coal than the rest of the world’s combined usage, burning 56% of the world’s coal. As Doomberg points out, China consumes almost 20 times the combined consumption of coal by the 27 member states of the European Union, based on 2024 data.
In 2024, China released 11,173 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — 31.5% of the world’s total. That was about 4.5 times as much as the European Union and almost 2.5 times the amount that the United States released.
China produced 57.8% of its electricity from coal and
Re:China burns 11x the coal, CO2 up 38%. (Score:5, Informative)
The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, down 13%.
This is highly selective and misleading.
China hit peak coal and is now in decline. New plants are replacing older ones, and are cleaner, and are designed to better load follow so they fit in with renewables. Meanwhile, last year (2025) China installed so much new renewable capacity that the total output for the year (from just the new stuff) equalled the entire output of all sources of generation in Germany.
In one year.
The "but China" argument is well and truly dead. If the US and Europe were doing even half as much as China is to reduce emissions, the world would be in a much, much better place.
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If the US and Europe were doing even half as much as China is to reduce emissions, the world would be in a much, much better place.
France already did, remember?
It's Germany that's the laggard here.
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France built a lot of nuclear, but it isn't really sustainable, or all that clean. Their choice now is throw more money at it, or take the cheaper route with renewables. They will build at least some new nuclear, to keep their supply of weapons grade material and expertise up.
At the time it was a reasonable decision. Nuclear was promised to deliver much, and to be fair looked like it might. But now we have the benefit of hindsight, and more important we have better alternatives.
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The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, down 13%.
This is highly selective and misleading.
China hit peak coal and is now in decline
It is not misleading. It demonstrates the result of have a lowest cost energy policy that did not consider CO2 emissions, of China preferring coal due to cost. While in the west the less polluting fossil fuels were chosen due to lower CO emissions.
One year is not a trend, it may simply be an anomaly where they could not acquire as much coal as the previous year. I hope it is a trend, but evidence suggests otherwise. Read the citations above.
New plants are replacing older ones, and are cleaner, and are designed to better load follow so they fit in with renewables.
That is flawed for several reasons. (1) You are focusing on powe
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The US President cannot command industry to use coal, as Xi Jinping and the CCP do in China. US industry has been moving away from coal for about 70 years.
While this is true in 2025 the USA registered the largest increase in coal usage globally, consuming 10% more coal in 2025 than in 2024 undoing a couple of years of improvements. Clearly showing that government policy has huge sway on private industry. All of that culminated in the USA being the only region globally to increase its carbon intensity (intensity isn't total emissions, it's emissions per unit of energy generated). China's coal usage stayed steady while adding a shitton of renewables, and India'
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The US President cannot command industry to use coal, as Xi Jinping and the CCP do in China. US industry has been moving away from coal for about 70 years.
While this is true in 2025 the USA registered the largest increase in coal usage globally, consuming 10% more coal in 2025 than in 2024 undoing a couple of years of improvements.
Actually 70+ years of improvement. Culminating in a 12 year drop in emissions of 13% while China's emissions rose 38% despite all the renewables they deployed, Renewables supplemented, not displaced, coal usage.
Also your stats only reflect electrical power generation. I believe the US built 2 new plants and reactive 2 others. China is building far more new coal plants every year. If they have to use petroleum to supply demand, they should be building new natural gas plants. But China chases a lowest cost
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And you also misrepresent the US' 2 new coal plants, anomalies, compared to China: "A former senior official at one of China’s largest power firms stated in an interview in June 2025 that companies are building coal power capacity due to central government pressure."
Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear power requires a large complex regulatory body that isn't at risk of being interfered with for profit and we burned that bridge to the ground in the last election. The bridge itself was already on fire because it was made of wood from the 1940s...
Meanwhile as long as the country has plenty of land there is absolutely no reason why you can't build out wind and solar and here's a thing that's going to blow your fucking noodle there's no reason why the government can't do that and just give everybody free electricity.
Well there is the Epstein class. They're not going to let you have electricity anymore. There is no amount of money that they are content with and no amount of power that is enough for them. They will not be happy until we are all living in dirt occasionally being blown to pieces by drones if we get too uppity or start building a civilization that could challenge their godhood.
The only place nuclear power makes sense is a handful of countries like Japan that have severe land shortages. Even then I'm not so sure it makes sense especially with their rapidly declining population. Oh and military installations. Basically heavily space constrained places. Even then again we saw what happened in Fukushima when the regulatory framework breaks down and businessmen roll in with dollar signs in their eyes.
You need to explain to me how you stop businessmen from taking over and then skipping all the maintenance. If you can't do that and absolutely nobody here can then there is no way in hell anyone is going to sign off on nuclear unless it's for a giant AI Data Center and then it's going to be poorly built and poorly regulated. Because those companies are already losing money hand over fist and they sure as shit aren't going to spend the money it takes to build a nuclear power plant safely. There is mathematically no reason to because they could just build out solar farms if it wasn't for the fact that the oil companies don't want to let them.
The fact that there are so many old nerds obsessed with nuclear when we could move our grid to wind and solar in no time if we would just stop voting Republican here in the states is why we can't have nice things...
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:5)
there's no reason why the government can't do that and just give everybody free electricity.
It's not free. Someone has to pay for it. If you're saying the government will build it and then give the electricity away for free, where do you think the government got the money to build it?
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:5, Insightful)
The government could stop sending billions to Israel every year. That would buy a lot of solar.
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The government could stop sending billions to Israel every year. That would buy a lot of solar.
Yes, that would definitely help
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You could also massive subsidizing upgrading everyone's windows. My 1975 Condo with original windows leaked so much it wasn't even funny. I spent $1800 on 4 windows and an entry way of double panes and my energy bill dropped about 30%. It was amazing.
Now of course, prices will have gone up and some people have more windows then others, but just think of all the older apartment buildings out there. You could save so much energy by just upgrading all the windows.
I can't see something like this happening as it
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The problem with the idea of "stop sending billions to Israel" is that it's not actually that we send, you know, truckloads of cash to Israel for it to spend wherever it wants. Most of our aid to Israel is in the form of arms and equipment that is specifically to be purchased from US companies -- so most of that money actually ends up staying in the US, and if you were to take that money off the table,
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:4, Informative)
Congress even says Israel is the biggest recipient of funds and weapons https://www.congress.gov/crs-p... [congress.gov]
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If I handed you a blank map of the middle east you wouldn't even be able to locate Iran.
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Attacking Iran just created a generation of people who hate you. You've succeeded in eliminating a lot of moderates. If anything, that will increase terrorism.
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:5, Insightful)
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?
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This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?
On a percentage basis, mostly what we get for our tax dollars is entitlements, like social security (22%), medicare (14%) and medicaid (10%), plus interest (14%).
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The numbers aren't that high. Those are the numbers that AI spits out as a percentage of USA budget spending. When you consider the budget deficit you actually get significantly less back for your tax dollars, or you include an approximately 20% load of debt in your numbers (if you proposed that to a bank they'd show you the door).
But really percentages can mean anything. If I blow half my check on gambling, and half my check on rent and triumphantly say 50% of my money goes to my cost of living expenses, i
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Those are the numbers that AI spits out as a percentage of USA budget spending
Actually those numbers are from OMB. I didn't ask AI. And, yes, they're percentages of spending.
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This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
I agree but as a side note this is only a rhetorical argument. Europeans don't go by the streets talking about "free healtchare". This only occurs as an internet argument (like "Communism vs. Capitalism"). In practice it isn't free, just affordable. For example in Education, Spain has tuition fees of 1000 € per year; Germany technically does not charge tuition, but 300 € per semester for administrative support.
You're wrong (Score:2)
The exact same thing goes for healthcare. It's cheaper to give everybody healthcare. According to the Congressional budget office we could save half a trillion a year by giving everyone healthcare. If you ever want to pay off that national debt Medicare for all is how you do it.
You have a scarcity mindset that was put into you
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:4, Interesting)
You're right, it's NOT free, it's SOMETHING YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.
The really insane thing is that the USA spends more money per capita than ANYONE and still gets worth healthcare coverage and worse overall results, with lower life expectancy. There's even this effect where rich people don't get as good care as average people in other countries for a number of common conditions or procedures, because the whole system is so bad you can't even PAY for great service.
But that aside:
Solar is so gobsmackingly cheap, it'll pay for itself in almost zero time. The real cost is the grid, but generating enough power is so stupidly trivial it hurts. You put a solar panel out in a field and it collects electricity and that's the end of the story. You pay for that panel once every 20-30 years and it generates electricity for you. You don't dig things up out of the ground or fight wars, you just let it collect the electricity.
Technology Connections did an excellent video on renewable energy, and using just the figures for putting solar panels on corn farms that produce corn for ethanol and not food, his back of the envelope calculation was that you could produce 7700 TWh of electricity a year, which is considerably more than the 4100 TWh that the US grid currently produces.
The reality is there doesn't need to be any energy crisis at all. AI data centres don't even need to be an environmental problem, you can just hook solar panels and batteries up and run them and they'd even use less water than the corn fields that were displaced for the solar farm.
The whole discussion is ridiculous. More solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. It's effectively free. The only reason governments don't do it is so they can keep lining their pockets with oil and gas industry kickbacks.
Here's the video link to the right time stamp, if you want to check what I'm saying and review his math.
https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?s... [youtu.be]
Hot child in the city (Score:2)
EU not as different as press suggests (Score:2)
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
The US and EU are actually not as different as many think with respect to higher education. The US basically has free nor near-free college for all via the community college systems.
With respect to healthcare, US taxpayers subsidized them in two ways. (1) US drug companies selling them medication at or near cost, not including R&D. (2) Defense spending below NATO requirements. With both of these issues changing it will be interesting to see how they manage healthcare.
Re:EU not as different as press suggests (Score:4, Insightful)
USA population:- 349,035,494
So China is just over 4 times the size of USA
China emissions:- 13,124,727,993
USA emissions:- 4,632,164,876
That makes China's emissions just below 3 times as bad - so who is really the more polluting especially when China is making all the stuff Westerners buy?
China's pollution reaches EU (Score:2)
China burned over 11x times the amount of coal in 2025 as the USA. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, USA down 13%.
Dumb Republican No Brains can't even find Europe on a map. He thinks it's in China...
That massive pollution produced in China does not stay in China, it pollutes the air in the USA and EU too.
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Electricity should be free at the point of use, like roads and healthcare. Obviously tax pays for it, but it's infrastructure and something everyone needs to live in the modern world (especially with climate change making air conditioning a matter of survival).
Energy is part of the national industrial strategy, and national security. To ensure those things it should be government run or heavily regulated, and so abundant that it is free for consumers and only businesses pay for their use. The really sad par
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It's not free. Someone has to pay for it. If you're saying the government will build it and then give the electricity away for free, where do you think the government got the money to build it?
So basically like roads then. Providing a free-at-point-of-use thing to make the country work.
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free.
It's free at point of use. Everyone except complete and utter morons know what that means especially as the NHS budget is the #1 m
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Answer 1; Highmore South Dakota. Admire the pictures of the windfarm after the windstorm. So much for free power.
Answer 2, Night. So much for solar power, now you have to add batteries. Take a modest 50 MW data center and a 15 hour winter night and see how many Tesla Max power batteries (3.9 MWH each) it takes to get through the night, and then calculate their combined weight.
Now it's morning, the batteries are flat and you have 9 hours to recharge them and still keep the data center running.
Bonus problem,
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score:4, Informative)
Answer 1; Highmore South Dakota. Admire the pictures of the windfarm after the windstorm. So much for free power.
20-40 turbines were destroyed from an unprecedented microburst event, out of more than 70,000 utility-scale wind turbines operating nationally. Fewer than 0.01% are lost to extreme weather each year.
Answer 2, Night. So much for solar power, now you have to add batteries. Take a modest 50 MW data center and a 15 hour winter night and see how many Tesla Max power batteries (3.9 MWH each) it takes to get through the night, and then calculate their combined weight.
You mean a Tesla Megapack? The new one is 5 MWH. If you do the math, it's $150 million for the batteries. No idea what the weight is or why that even matters. You're not supposed to move it around after installation.
So $150 million a lot right? Well, the cheapest nuclear plants built in China is that price for 50 MW. Unless you want Chinese construction firms and more importantly the Chinese state regulators in charge of your project, you're going to pay a lot more than what they pay. The most recently built US nuclear reactors are units 3 and 4 at Vogtle, with a construction cost of $16.5 million per MW, or $824 million for 50 MW.
That's almost doubling the cost of your $1 billion data center by the way.
>Bonus problem, there is a heavy overcast today. The PV is at 8% of nameplate. (That's a real number by the way,) Now how many solar panels do you need to run the data center and recharge the batteries?
Same number as before. You just use the ones in Arizona where the sun is shining. And just FYI, we invented this concept called a power grid, so power production and consumption don't have to be in the same location. It's pretty new so you might not have heard of it.
US and EU coal release more radiation than nukes (Score:2)
It is something old nerds are weirdly obsessed with, like Ayn Rand books...
Maybe on the anti-nuclear side. They keep discussing 1960s technology. On the pro nuclear side they are a bit more up to date on the newer western designs which are far safer.
Even Greenpeace founders recognize being anti nuke was an environmental mistake. The US Coal industry has released more radiation than the US Nuclear industry. Similar for the EU.
China releases 11x more radiation into atmosphere (Score:2)
You can misrepresent the stats by citing 2 anomalies of new coal plants, while China is building far more coal plants each year.
The fact remains the US long trend is moving away from coal, the Chinese long term and ongoing trend is to burn as much coal as they can dig up and import.
The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned by China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions
Re: (Score:2)
Fusion is going to be necessary at some point, and you can't start those with solar panels. Reducing wilderness is acceptable up to a point, but beyond that you start to screw up vital corridors and endanger whole sections of the food web - including those not directly impacted by the panels. So yes, you can increase solar and wind, but there are upper limits you absolutely should not cross. We're nowhere near those in the US, yet, but they shouldn't be ignored.
Nuclear as a general purpose fuel is dangerous
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Re:Power infrastructure (Score:5, Informative)
Power went out during a sunny day during peak demand. This isn't a base load problem, so throw some solar panels and wind turbines down. Takes about 1/10th the time to install and 1/20th the capital. Let's be efficient in how we build our infrastructure, but also do it in a timely manner.
I would rather build more high-voltage direct current (HVDC) that criss-cross the nation and provide a more durable backbone that also enables the trading of energy between large regions undergoing weather related demand. This is going to be a bigger bang for the buck than a handful of nuclear reactors, as those reactor sites will mostly be at existing sites and won't include the infrastructure improvements necessary to deliver the additional power out of their region.
And please don't build modular mini reactors. They cost more to operator overall and produce an exponentially higher amount of radioactive waste. As components wear tends to be high and those worn components become low-grade waste. It's also a Square-Cube law problem, in that a smaller vessel has more surface area for its volume. Every surface is an opportunity for contamination. For the most part, these modular reactors are an investment scam. They have some limited industrial utility, but you shouldn't bother installing one within 50 miles of a major metropolitan area, as there are far better solutions. (better = safer, cheaper, faster, cleaner)
Re:Power infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
The peak demand comes -- right at the time we'd be getting near-peak from solar.
Why isn't the USA focusing more on having people fit solar to their houses with a battery and inverter. This would take the load off the grid during these peak-sun/peak-demand periods and sure-up the grid.
This is one of the few times that the output of renewables tracks demand so why not?
Re: (Score:2)
Why isn't the USA focusing more on having people fit solar to their houses with a battery and inverter.
Because the current president opposes all renewable energy on principle. Under Biden, there was a 30% tax credit for adding solar to your home. Within months of taking office, Trump pushed through a bill that ended it.
Maybe you were hoping for a better answer, but that's why. I can't tell you why Trump opposes all renewable energy. Maybe it's just that liberals support it, and he automatically opposes anything they support. I really don't know. Whatever the reason is, he does.
Re: (Score:2)
So does every other energy supply, what's your point?
living like 1776 (Score:5, Funny)
So they get to live like it's day one in America
Re: (Score:2)
This is both insightful and funny. +2
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That country has been have been going backwards for quite a while, so it was only a matter of time.
1:45pm western Washington weather report (Score:4, Interesting)
1:45pm - Mostly sunny, light breeze 72F / 22 C. Rather noisy though.
Re: (Score:2)
4:45pm eastern Maryland weather report: Mostly sunny, light breeze 100F / 38 C. Damp af.
Re: 1:45pm western Washington weather report (Score:2)
And whatâ(TM)s the percentage of homes that have A/C? Hah: thatâ(TM)s probably half the problem behind this power outage. Try Western Europe, where temperatures in the UK, France and Germany reached this or far more where homes donâ(TM)t have A/C. I was happy if I could keep my home office room here in London to 30 degrees; our bedroom didnâ(TM)t get below 31 several nights. Our homes are designed for keeping heat in. It was above 40 not so far away across the Channel.
Re: (Score:2)
When I was a kid, we used to "go east" to visit my dad's family every summer (southern Indiana / northern Kentucky) - summers seem miserable back there. I believe on at least one of those trips the highs for the entire week were at 95F with 90-95% relative humidity.
Re: (Score:2)
3 PM Eastern Washington weather, 86 F, 12 mph wind, 19% relative humidity, No AC needed.
Don't worry, we'll get our roasting eventually. It is summer after all. Then I will set the heat pump to Cool. Last year I needed cooling mode 21 days. It's in heating mode from mid October to Mid April.
https://www.zerohedge.com/weat... [zerohedge.com]
If you scroll down near the bottom of that article there is an interesting graphic, the 1930s really were hot.
How to make energy great again (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Limit the number of data centers in the region.
2. Suspend any new data centers to be created in this region.
3. Proft.
We are in the age anyone can run their own models in house, and in doing so, memory chip prices will be forced to fall (not only because RAM makers are being sued) and hardware will be available for those outside the Datacenter sphere. With in house models, you have your own dataset, which is private, and so is your data. And those who don't use AI, aren't forced to cope with everything AI pushed down their throats, regardless of if they asked for or not.
Re: How to make energy great again (Score:2)
I hope you are trolling. I've been benchmarking local models this week and they suck. They're like that guy from Memento who forgets everything, if he was also a bonobo.
Re: How to make energy great again (Score:2)
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I recently tried using AI locally. I was curious to see what I could get out of the generative AI as far as creating my own graphics. I don't have the beefiest system but it's just good enough to get by. 4060 8gb is about the bare minimum card and it's what I have. I figure if I like what I can create, I would consider a beefier video card with 16gb would be better.
After toying with several different recommended models I wasn't to excited with the overall results. It made really neat nature scenes, so for c
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Image models take a lot more memory, as one would expect. If you want to run a text-only generative model for coding or knowledge, or as a database for all your books or manuals or whatever, that works great. Fits in 8GB of memory, has more than enough context for simple projects. The more memory and CPU you have, the better it gets.
You've just got the most expensive use case that takes a lot more hardware. It's still not actually out of reach per se (or it wasn't, before the price increases) but the outlay
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With only 8 GB, I would expect results like an Alzheimer's patient would make, unless the model you're using supports offloading to system RAM, but that slows it down about 10x. Can you afford $600 for a 16 GB card?
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Too Bad (Score:4, Funny)
Too bad they don't have more wind turbines.
But, I am curious what the typical daily number of outages is. I suspect that it is higher than most would imagine.
Sounds like the USA has an (Score:2, Troll)
AC problem.
*Take AC to mean whatever you want, it works all the same. Suck it Fox News. - Sincerely: Europe.
Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Interesting)
The feds told people that and so did the mayor of NYC. But since the “woke commie” mayor said it the feds deleted all their webpages. https://www.theverge.com/polic... [theverge.com]
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently a lot of drama about this on Twitter / X.
A typical sequence:
- Mamdami posts that NYCers should reduce power usage.
- Nikki Haley quote-tweets Mamdani with something like "this is what happens under socialism."
- A community note points out that Haley did the same thing when she was SC governor.
- 'Free-speech absolutist' Musk has the community note removed.
Re: (Score:2)
The feds are telling people to cut power now? The feds that are Republicans? But I thought that was communist! Isn't that what they all bleated when Mamdani said that?
What political leaders are doing is begging people to share better, and that's democracy
What the feds are doing is written in the large users' contracts, so it isn't communism, it's the market..
Large customers such as manufacturers often have contracts in which they agree to cut usage or power down when told to by their power provider under certain conditions. Among the conditions is FERC declaring an emergency. The manufacturer gets a large discount under normal operating conditions.
Often those plants have
Won't somebody think of the data centers! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure they're doing just fine. It's probably in their contract with the power company that their needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
Are the data center is okay? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The orchards will be hiring fruit pickers before Labor Day. Feel free to apply and displace an H2-A worker, or better yet an illegal immigrant.
Your solution to everything (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't all these MAGA voting farmers hire red blooded MAGA workers?
Who does government serve? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the US, in the majority of regions, it appears to serve the desires of the wealthiest members of society regardless of the expense to the remainder.
In no sane society would datacenters be prioritized over supplying water and power to citizens, nor would standards and enforcement be so lax as to leave water and power supplies unsafe and unreliable so private operators can have better profit margins.
The reason you pay taxes is to support a community that provides common benefit. When there is no benefit - and even if you're incredibly wealthy infrastructure benefits you by providing a nicer country to live in - you have to start to wonder why you're paying taxes.
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I pay taxes because the government has more fire power then I do and the IRS is even scarier. If those two things didn't exist, it would be much more difficult to convince me of paying all those taxes.
Yes, yes. I do realize we need taxes to run a modern society but we can certainly debate on all the nitty gritty details such as how much and who's paying, etc. You know, the fun stuff.
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I mean we could cut you off from roads, sewers, power systems, deny you access to any help what so ever, ban you from airports, trains, not pick up your garbage, and force you to swim through rivers instead of using bridges. Would that convince you to pay taxes?
America is a âoe3rd world countryâ now (Score:2)
I used to visit countries in Asia that lacked stabled electricity. I used to think âoe why canâ(TM)t they just build more capacity and eliminate their corruption?â Now America is squarely in this position
When bad infrastructure turns deadly ... (Score:2)
Of course, only for the unwashed masses. The Epstein class and the other 1%ers will be just fine.
More powerful AC (Score:2)
Doesn't using more AC actually warm the planet?
Northern states with data centers ??? (Score:2)
renewable (Score:2)
Northeast are the states who are all in on killing off fossil fuels and going to all renewable and net zero and emulating Europe.
The union for PECO decided to strike on July 4. (Score:2)
Now that is just selfish. Hard to root for those that abandon responsibility during a crisis.
Planning for all possibilities (Score:2)
It's somewhat easier to build out power generation systems based on variables that you know.
Where it tends to go sideways is when those surprise variables turn up and flip the entire table over.
I suppose one of the ways to counter the unknown variables is to simply build enough generation to cover
twice what you really need. Use a portion of it to act as a buffer for the aforementioned surprises and sell
any remaining to your neighboring States to help pay for the upkeep or the cost of ever expanding demand
a
Re: (Score:2)
Been pretty normal for San Diego so far. This is the first day east county(20 miles from beach) got to 91F. August and September are the real hot months for us though. The southwest is one of the few areas that could very well get an abundance of rain this coming winter.
I know the very first year I got to San Diego was 1998 and it happened to be a 'Super El Nino'. I just thought, this is great I love all this rain. Originally from Florida so it just seemed normal to me. My mother assured me this was not nor