New Homes In London Were Delayed By 'Energy-Hungry' Data Centers (bbc.com) 58
A London Assembly report warns that surging demand from "energy-hungry" data centers is straining the electricity grid and delaying new housing developments. With data-center electricity use expected to rise up to 600% by 2050, officials fear London's housing crisis could worsen without coordinated action. The BBC reports: According to the report (PDF) from the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee, some new housing developments in west London were temporarily delayed after the electricity grid reached full capacity. The committee's chair James Small-Edwards said energy capacity had become a "real constraint" on housing and economic growth in the city.
In 2022, the General London Assembly (GLA) began to investigate delays to housing developments in the boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow - after it received reports that completed projects were being told they would have to "wait until 2037" to get a connection to the electricity grid. There were fears the boroughs may have to "pause new housing altogether" until the issue was resolved. But the GLA found short-term fixes with the National Grid and energy regulator Ofgem to ensure the "worst-case scenario" did not happen -- though several projects were still set back. The strains on parts of London's housing highlighted the need for "longer term planning" around grid capacity in the future, said the report.
In 2022, the General London Assembly (GLA) began to investigate delays to housing developments in the boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow - after it received reports that completed projects were being told they would have to "wait until 2037" to get a connection to the electricity grid. There were fears the boroughs may have to "pause new housing altogether" until the issue was resolved. But the GLA found short-term fixes with the National Grid and energy regulator Ofgem to ensure the "worst-case scenario" did not happen -- though several projects were still set back. The strains on parts of London's housing highlighted the need for "longer term planning" around grid capacity in the future, said the report.
Fair weather friends (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, fundamentally, you can't build industry of any kind - be it steel production or data centers - on renewables. Manufacturing and now Big Data require stable baseload which can only be achieved by power plants. Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.
Re:Fair weather friends (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.
If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.
Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.
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I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.
Because it makes industry shut down and move to a different country. Just look at Germany and on-going de-industrialization after they shut down nuclear reactors.
No industry, no jobs, no real GDP growth and everyone, but rent-seeking 1%, gets poorer. So even if your electricity costs don't spike due to pricing controls, you still too poor to afford it.
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Data centers are a worthless and parasitic industry. It will require a real citizen effort to stop reelecting their handmaidens and to kick them out.
Re:Fair weather friends (Score:4, Informative)
The demand is all coming from AI data centres. We had data centres being built for years without this massive spike in demand.
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It would make sense in conjunction with an employment based mitigation. Data centers employ very few people once operational (they're not called lights-out facilities for nothing), so no mitigation. Major manufacturer provides many steady jobs, more mitigation for them.
Of course, things get complicated. There are mini data centers being set up in people's back yards where the waste heat warms the home owners house. That doesn't employ a lot of people but gets effectively double use of the energy for at leas
Because we like industry (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.
If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.
Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.
Your suggestion is logical, but I don't think you considered industrial use. That smelter or fertilizer factory will get impacted as well...distribution centers, even ice hockey rinks. Lots of industries use a lot of electricity...it's just they provide actual value, unlike this AI Rush. Most of these are the backbone of your local economy. Not everyone can be an engineer at a big tech company...someone has to make raw materials, houses, grow your food, etc
In my view, the AI bubble is a cancer we just have to accept and accommodate. TMK, investing in electrical infrastructure is not a bad idea. There's no way to separate pointless computation, like bitcoin or most LLMs, vs legit cloud computing, which we want to encourage. And as many have pointed out, once investors realize LLMs are not going to provide the value promised, all that cloud computing capacity can just be repurposed for technology growth that I would consider much more practical. Once the bubble pops...once all the servers bought are obsolete....you still have an upgraded grid and distribution system to support EVs or whatever technology increases our electricity consumption in the future.
The story here is that local suppliers need to step up to make demand. The answer is to shame them, not the customers who want to buy electricity.
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That's why I suggest a mitigation to the increases for industry based on local employment. Data centers employ very few people per-Killowatt and so contribute a lot less to the local economy compared to those other industries.
Re: Fair weather friends (Score:2)
Your government will not allow that. The cost of grid upgrades is being pushed onto existing customers. In my state, the utility commission approved rate hikes of 20-30% to fund data center related grid upgrades. Meanwhile generation remains flat
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There are places in America where your rate goes up with consumption. Yes.
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Not entirely true about stability. Lots of corporations develop a network of big data that can be turned on or off depending on electrical situation.
Most AI can do this. The trick is to have the tech distributed around the world. If your English AI center is short of power, you can redirect the processing to your Japanese AI center, or the Chicago one, etc.
The extra 1 second before they deliver the photo realistic picture of a certain political leader in a pink princess dress you requested does not affe
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Re: Fair weather friends (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s worse than that. Big tech is socializing the cost of powering its AI dream onto the people it also intends to throw out of work. So, AI will take your job and you will pay for it. Your elected representatives are all in.
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Wrong. Renewables are now covering a lot. Wind doesn't stop at night, for example, and there are these things called "batteries".
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The key reason why we are seeing across the board rollback of green initiatives and green policies is that they get in the way of building more data centers.
Sorry buddy but that is horseshit. The war on green predated AI. It was stupid then, and it's stupid now.
Also, fundamentally, you can't build industry of any kind - be it steel production or data centers - on renewables.
Fundamentally that's also bullshit especially for steel production and datacentres especially which can be configured to load follow and gracefully shed performance to suit energy, but in general the cost of sustained renewable generation using wind+solar+storage is now cost competitive with building a coal plant. In fact many actual heavy industry sites are migrating precisely to this very thing, includ
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Stable power to manufacturing and Big Data cannot be achieved through baseload alone as long as that power is shared with customers whose power demand changes faster than the baseload can ramp up to meet it. This is why we have peaker plants and grid storage.
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They also get in the way of building homes.
For a while (no idea about current situation) but where I used to live in the UK you could not build a property because the Environment Agency had enacted new rules which capped water run off into watercourses, and no council anywhere in the UK had manageable plans to actually meet it with new developments, so nothing got built.
The rules were well intentioned, but came down like a hammer and stopped everything.
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This must have been quite some time ago. Statistica [statista.com] says that housing completions in the UK haven't dropped below ~150k/year since at least 1949.
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The key reason why we are seeing across the board rollback of green initiatives and green policies is that they get in the way of building more data centers. This is a beyond any doubt proof that Big Tech was only a fair weather friend for environmentalism.
I have no doubt any company is a fan of environmentalism only in so far as it helps business. If it polishes your reputation and attracts customers, great. As soon as customers don't care, companies won't either. Same with DEI, community involvement, political affiliation, and any other side project unrelated to actually running the business. Why would one expect anything else?
To put it another way, inexpensive, reliable power is a must have. Green or renewable energy is a nice to have.
Two main issues not highlighted (Score:4, Informative)
First, the UK has a major problem in that their only large metropolis is London. London is a huge city about the size of New York,just under 10 million people. The UK's next largest is Manchester, which is under 3 million. The UK got two more with more than 1 million, but that's it. Much of England is rural. With so much concentrated around London, power becomes a major issue.
Secondly, the grid is more of a problem than the power plants. In a large metropolis It is often easier to create a power plant on a set area than it is to send the electricity to the individual houses. The grid of transmission wires is usually near capacity on a city that is growing, so you need more power lines as well as more power plants.
Re:Two main issues not highlighted (Score:4, Interesting)
First, the UK has a major problem in that their only large metropolis is London. London is a huge city about the size of New York,just under 10 million people. The UK's next largest is Manchester, which is under 3 million. The UK got two more with more than 1 million, but that's it. Much of England is rural. With so much concentrated around London, power becomes a major issue.
Secondly, the grid is more of a problem than the power plants. In a large metropolis It is often easier to create a power plant on a set area than it is to send the electricity to the individual houses. The grid of transmission wires is usually near capacity on a city that is growing, so you need more power lines as well as more power plants.
A data center does not require people to visit it in order to use it.
If the data center is almost justifying its own power plant, then build both of the damn things in rural dirt.
Data lines are what is needed after that to “plug in” the user community. Fiber is a hell of a lot easier to deploy than power infrastructure.
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NIMBY
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If the data center is almost justifying its own power plant, then build both of the damn things in rural dirt.
Who said build? Datacentre companies are bitching about not having power made available to them. They don't want to build it. They can in theory put themselves off grid if they were willing to pony up the cash, but it's easier to be the government for a handout and saddle the public with the high cost of power.
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Third issue (Score:2)
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Rwanda
You don't know how mad it makes me (Score:1)
You don't know how mad it makes me that the tech bros were all pushing "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!"
And now all those considerable savings are evaporated, consumed by AI and their attendant datacenters.
Techbros are far worse then politicians now.
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> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!
( "you may be in a psyop when..." )
FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes [youtu.be].
It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.
The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas
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How much is crypto mining? (Score:2)
Oh no! (Score:2)
Anyway...
Water (Score:2)
If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.
Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.
Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.
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Progress? (Score:2)
How is what we're doing now progressing humanity? We're concentrating so much of build-out to make sure we keep funneling wealth, and resources, to a select few, that we're literally neglecting entire populations of people in favor of making sure we keep funneling wealth and resources to these select few. How is this progress? How is this helping anything long term? Unless the end-goal is a lowered population due to dwindling resources, I can't see how anything we're doing as a collective society is helping
This ought to be an opportunity (Score:2)
It boggles my mind that no policy maker seems able to turn the AI demand for energy into an opportunity. Historically, where there's a surge in demand from wealthy industrial customers for a service, governments have been able to extract additional value. The obvious thing to do is to turn to the data centres owners and say "we are happy to give you grid connections, but we're going to charge you at twice the current market rate to fund infrastructure and lower bills for householders". It's such an obvious
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Nope, they are going the other way. There's a proposal to dramatically increase residential power rates, in part to fund the 'increased demand due to datacenters". They want residents to pay for stuff instead of making those poor, cash-strapped AI companies have to pay for what they are inflicting...
I think it's funny (Score:2)
Your Masters want this and they are going to get it.
One of the old bugaboos with the right wing is the idea that you work the first 3 months of the year for the government.
But we know about half of the money in any given country goes straight to the top . 01%.
Nobody ever talks about the 6 months you spend working to pay for Bill gates's yacht.
Meanwhile my tax dollars paid for healthcare for people who couldn't afford it. I had a nei
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