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.

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.

In Seattle I can hear industrial noises from the businesses along the Duwamish waterway. All night long there’s high pitch industrial whining noises, train horns, boat horns, plus occasional Boeing Field jet engine testing.

I’m not up on a hill, in fact I’m at the bottom of a depression behind a giant hill blocking direct line of sight and about .75 mi away in a direct line.

There’s also an industrial kitchen nearby that is its own incredible loudness. Also a state housing complex nearby with mentally unwell people screaming all night outside.

Point is, if you ban anything that makes noise you’ll be left with nothing, it’s pure selfish nimbyism. The loudest whining always seems to be from people’s mouths.

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.

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...

I assume once the bubble bursts they'll be turned into power supplies for bitcoin miners

These AI datacenters generally have invested quite a lot in Nvidia Chips and completely high end hardware by having DDR5 Chips etc.

And even more than that, the largest things for these things is how to supply enough water properly and water-cooling systems which aren't required in traditional systems.

They also are very conditional and spike the grid up and down with their use cases slowing the grid.

If the bubble bursts, which it will, It's hard to justify the billions of dollars spent on AI specific datacenters for essentially the bricks and mortars. I don't think that its very sound decision that they were worth building, it might make some compensation but not enough, in my opinion.

wow, super interesting. thx for sharing!

We would need to figure out a quantifiable metric for annoyance level. Municipal sound ordinances do tend to correctly utilize SPL(A) and SPL(C), with A-weighting being relevant for safety against ear injury (low frequencies have less influence) and C-weighting being relevant for annoyance level (low frequencies have more influence), but this isn't nearly enough. For example, ordinances carve out additional tolerance for burstiness, which makes sense for rare events like jackhammering but not for common events like routine plant operations. Sound with lots of harmonic content (think distortion) is more annoying than without. High frequencies can be worse if they reach you, but they're less likely to reach you (approaching a need for line-of-sight). It's complicated.

Here's a free idea for someone to run with: just as Zillow has a neighborhood "walkability" score prospective buyers might look at, there could be various pollution scores, including sound and light, sourced from some kind of Flock-like (ew) network of capture devices. Some folks are into mounting things like personal weather stations on their property, so maybe a new generation of devices capturing this type of data (with local signature-based identification of sources, and triangulation when the same thing is heard in multiple places, etc.) wouldn't be too far-fetched.

The constant humming that causes the overwhelming population-weighted noise pollution comes from cars and airplanes, due to the fact that in America it is currently not legal to build an apartment except within 100ft of a freeway or at the ends of airports.

It's the Simpsons "Everything's OK" alarm: (note: loud and annoying noise) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxNp3bUDtxY

They could start with building codes. State of the art, beautiful new designs where you can hear every word of the meeting next door.

All the sound engineers in the world can't fix "don't care" and "want to".

A modern US city has the combined problems of cheap construction of residential buildings, with insufficient unit-to-unit and exterior noise isolation (builders "don't care"), and near-zero enforcement of vehicle noise laws (police and muffler shops "don't care", drivers "want to" be loud).

Contrast this with, say, Germany or Switzerland, where concrete construction is the norm, noise laws are often strictly enforced, and a modified car would get pulled over quickly.

> States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.

That’s a weird thing to say given the story is about Virginia.

Vast majority of the new ones are for AI

In this case it is mostly the gas plants. They could have installed them far away, keeping the datacenter in place, or even better, use solar power. Or they could have built infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for datacenters to reside. In the end the problem is that maximum profit doesn't care about humans.