Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
It takes 2 seconds to look at google satellite view of the area and see lots of desert with strips of green
https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA
Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color
A H100 cost 30k when new, and uses 500W of power.
500W for a year is about 4500kWh, which at $0.10/kWh is $450/year if run at full utilization (unrealistic).
TCO of an AI data center should be entirely dominated by capex depreciation.
Maine voters are, of course, notorious bozos in this field, having voted in a plebiscite in 2021 to cancel the link to Quebec Hydro, which was already substantially completed.
1: For example LBNL's latest banger: Factors influencing recent trends in retail electricity prices in the United States, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting it down. The whole ordeal even prompted Maine voters to establish a new law to stop foreign investors from influencing local referendums because Hydro Quebec spent so much money trying to sway the vote.
Cheap power is much more cost effective than the smaller efficiency bump you get from cold weather -- and you can also get both by locating in the midwest or northwest. Hyperscalers build here for these reasons.
Maine will go bankrupt? Maine will turn into a barren backwater? There will be no jobs?
Also it's naive to think they announce their intention to move somewhere. They try to cover it and never tell a soul until it's a done deal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/datacenters-...
Nice to see some success for their ideas.
that seems to be the idea!
It seems like that has pretty substantial time lag. Maybe require the ai companies to build power plants before they're allowed to build data centers in a certain region?
Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.
If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
What's the math on that?
It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.
The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla....
https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies.
I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
- A brief boost in construction jobs
- ~0 new jobs in the long term
- Increased electricity prices
- A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff
It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from this decision. There's actually a good chance a data center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer materially, because the change in electricity demand (and thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.
And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it.
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...
I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used.
2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is obviously no requirement to have them.
Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.
That’s like saying “Mainers should be allowed to ban speech they don’t like, and private sex acts they find offensive”. Your view of what constitutes freedom is nonsensical.
- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).
- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).
- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.
These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.
The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees.
The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.
If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the minus side?
a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.
(the # of jobs angle is not the right approach if you are a proponent of new datacenters. there are much stronger arguments to be made)
Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument against them.
The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches.
Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here.
Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).
The old datacenters are analogous to office buildings that emit some unusual noise and consume large amounts of electricity.
The new ones (ie gigawatt class) consume enough electricity for ~1 million households and at minimum enough water for 100k households (but likely many times that).
If we put them anywhere — and I’m not convinced we really need all of the data centers we have, let alone all the ones we’re building — they should not be in the middle of densely populated areas like Lewiston.
i completely agree that we should be looking into modelling this in terms of what is possible to mitigate its impact and what does that look like with current technology and costs, and where would we need to develop new tech, and what would be the critical values to hit to consider mitigation a success
They really shouldn't be.
There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging. There's no reason they can't be placed under some environmental regulations that cancel all their negatives, at least on some places. And they would still pay taxes.
But no, datacenter owners are using their connections to remove any regulation instead.
So basically steal legitimacy from real environmentalists by applying their label to something that's not really motivated by environmentalism but can be construed that way?
"They don't actually want what I'm selling so I'm gonna dress it up as something else, they'll never know"
AreWeTheBaddies.jpg
The other problem you're gonna have is that this isn't an original thought. You're at least 20yr late to the party. So, so, so much absolute garbage has sailed under the flag of environmentalism that the public is starting to be more critical (see for example the kerfuffle over wind turbines off Rhode Island) and it's not unforeseeable that eventually the environmentalists are gonna have some sort of purge or reformation or reversion to more traditional environmentalism and serving corporate interests in order to reclaim some lost respect/legitimacy. Trying to sail "obviously not primarily about the environment" stuff under the flag of environmentalism is only gonna hasten that.
The cynicism of residents is reasonable. They've have to be highly educated to actually understand the implications of what they're doing and how that revenue can be distributed. America's decline lends itself toward small-town corruption, where patronage is more important than communitarianism, due to large and accelerating net worth inequality, and an economy where outcomes are based on inheritance over labor.
This explains the logic behind an outright ban. You don't have to be vigilant about corruption and the principle-agent problem if the thing is just banned.
I dont think this is entirely true. Maybe not the first wave of data centers, but there are a lot of factors that go into the cost calc and its possible that it would still be worth it to build them even if taxed.
About a decade ago, a bunch of data center companies got fantastic deals with my city (low/no tax). People are pretty upset about it. A few years in there was a report on how many people they employeed. I think combined it was under 10 who lived in the area.
One solution: local taxes on the economic value generated by the data center. MNCs love to play accounting games, so a simple formula based on metered GWh multiplied by reported worldwide revenue with a scaling factor a fraction of a percentage. This fund should be ring-fenced be address whatever externalities are introduced by the data center, including electric bill subsidies, infra maintenance, and funding independent oversight.
Noise from data centers is a real issue, but Benn's measurements and analysis are not great (speeding up the sample rate to demonstrate frequency effects is just wrong, among other issues).
My national government is currently giving massive tax breaks for one of these. It's going to be, after all, "the biggest foreign investment in the country ever"...
[…]the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.
You have a guard, some remote hands, maintenance, maybe additional security or two, times 4 for the various shifts. 30 sounds about right.
Even 20 years ago the datacenters I worked with often had fewer employees onsite than "visitors" - because they rented out racks.
Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions.
To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?
The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?
OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy.
Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.
I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.
Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then.
>do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.
Which does put some distance between you and whatever disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was more important than safety.
You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.
Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them
I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?
In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.
Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?
Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.
On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?
I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sentiment in the coming years in one form or another.
Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.
Which is also “invisible”. Using this technology to make advancements in healthcare is 1% of its usage. While 99% is garbage apps noone needs, memes, deep fake videos and porn.
AI as a whole for now is a net negative for the world.
- most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the moment
- literally no one could tell you if scaling up with clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it.
so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_ economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right way so it doesn't result in even more financial uncertainty for people that are already financially uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the increased energy demand.
Instead of dealing with that like adults we are throwing a fit instead
And in any case ban doesn't make any sense. Instead they could charge different for grid electricity usage, and make the datacenter pay for grid expansion when they start building it.
Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.
It funds half of all of their expenditures.
Can you imagine having half of your total municipal government budget being paid for by data centers?
Their citizens pay much lower property tax rates, and get much better schooling and police.
Henrico County (also VA) took $60 million in unexpected new revenues from data centers and created an affordable housing trust that is subsidizing low-cost housing.
Although these counties are figuring it out, it's an incredible failure in imagination for many of these liberals in other states to look at an immense source of new funding that could support schools, housing and health and just spurn it because they heard from a friend of a friend that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.
Though even if the AI market collapses, the capital spent means they'd probably keep operating; paying for 30 employees is much different than paying for 3,000 at a factory. But the datacenter might be owned by the creditors at that time.
They’re an outlier and don’t really prove much of anything.
Oregon has lots and lots of data centers and not much to show for it on any front, other than higher electric prices for consumers
Following that logic, are you suggesting that data centers should not be built at all?
This is not even remotely true[1]. Large auto plants use on the order of 200–250 megawatts of power, which is either on par with a data center or slightly more than a data center depending on the size and how cooling is handled.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/tools/Industr...
A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity. Those two things aren't the same. 20MW of continuous electricity use (which AI data centers do) translates to 175,000 MWh of electricity per year. That's about the same as a minimum and might be 5+ times more.
This document is only about energy usage so we have to guess what "large" means in terms of employment but 3000 to 7000 seems to the range. Compared to 20-30.
But AI data centers are worse because they actually produce what I call negative jobs. Their currently only value proposition is in laying off people and otherwise suppressing labor costs. All while the residents all pay more for their electricity with the money no longer have because they got laid off.
I understand the high end builds to have exceeded 100 kW per rack at this point, with the largest sites exceeding 1 GW (ie 10x your upper bound). So the smallest datacenters use as much as the largest auto plants, and the largest datacenters use 100x that.
The document you linked says that a large auto assembly plant consumes around 188,000 MWh annually (with regional variation). By my quick math that is less than 22 megawatts baseline load (24/7/365).
There is a mention that natural gas and other fuels being used on-site, are you converting those to MWh equivalent? I'm not as familiar with that conversion, but from a quick online calculator I found it would still be under 75 megawatt for electrical and fuel-equivalent combined.
The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love.
The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.
(To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)
I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that.
> would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Has anyone actually done that?
Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?
They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong.
A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.
Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.
A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.
All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.
The rest will fallow.
Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements.
Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0]
[0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-cente...
They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.
Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much
You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.
> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters, they simply trade them.
but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it’s not ‘no housing,’ it’s ‘just not here.’
so when someone say ‘let someone else host them,’ it really comes across as: I want the internet, just let other communities pay the environmental cost.
I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom.
I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario.
But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
- 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside;
- Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people.
Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year.
So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people.
Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize.
My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs.
Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".
If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.
Car parts factory?
With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio comparable to an AI data center?
I did not know those existed.
But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes".
A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs, reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic: Bitcoin means green energy!
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813
(For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)
whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations?
data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations
Those factories employ people.
> Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills
No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.
Does the move benefit companies with existing DCs whose competition can no longer establish a region there?
NIMBY causes energy prices to go up in areas that won't allow drilling, refining, nuclear or nat gas development, or power lines. When will the same happen for things like AI services?
This is what unregulated capitalism looks like with no govt oversight.
Personally, I see little reason to ban new taxpayers with few-to-none negative externalities from moving into your state, but what do i know?
For a known amount of data enter power, dedicate 125% of power in solar and battery.
Need cooling? Use liquid geothermal loops. Or radiate energy back into space. We know frequencies that do not reflect in atmo.
Acoustic pollution is another area. Acoustic tiles, building plans, and natural noise barriers are also of utmost importance too.
We need more compute. Plain banning is not the way. Demanding highly ecological and conserving solutions is.
Given that, the bill is just for show, and not actually serious.
My comment is a statement on hypocrisy, and how if people had to bear the full cost of their decisions, they would decide differently.
Maine is codifying this hypocrisy for shallow minded political points.
Datacenters might not be as potentially destructive, but they're also a massive net negative for the community in many real world ways. If you want them to "maximize gains", then the answer is "tax them more" which, shockingly, turns into a functional ban because somewhere else is taxing them less.
Read this instead as, people hate this shit. They don't want datacenters, they don't want AI, they don't feel like those things are doing anything for them.
You will win the policy debate by saying:
"a datacenter uses just as much electricity and provides just as many jobs as a car parts factory, so it's silly to ban the one and not the other when you can just as easily examine the externalities of the datacenter and blah blah blah"
But you will be missing the point, which is that people see building car parts as a solid, upstanding thing which has tangible and direct benefits to people; whereas building an AI datacenter means allowing some rich California surveillance czar to suck the water and power from your local community so that they can steal your job, fracture your community, and impoverish your family. One is good and one is bad and the voter's choice is to do the good thing and not the bad thing.
Even if car parts factories pollute more than datacenters do.
instead of blocking data centers, we need to scale up energy production. the solution is to get rid of all the red tape that makes it so impossible to build in America.
quality of life metrics are highly correlated to the availability of energy.
It explains the intent (to protect consumers/grid from price changes and fluctuation), and bans 20MW+ loads. They forgot to define load, so a behind-the-meter datacenter (zero net load on the grid) still would likely not get permitted even though it does not violate the intent of the law, which is a bit odd.
All the concerns around data centers have technological solutions.
A key characteristic of a society in decay is banning productive assets because there is no will to build the infrastructure anymore. Hopefully this changes
> The council shall evaluate issues related to data centers located or proposed to be located in the State, with the goals of protecting ratepayers, maintaining electric grid reliability, minimizing environmental impacts and enabling responsible and appropriately sited economic development.
https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=H...
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Will the DC cover the costs of its own expanded power generation needs? Are residential and small business users protected?
Can the water system handle the increased usage in a given area?
What physical discharges are created? Waste heat air, waste heat water, etc?
What kind of noise will be generated? Are there limits on use of onsite fossil fuel power generation?
shevy-java•1h ago
Imustaskforhelp•1h ago
1. Iran war has made the prices of both helium gas and energy to asian countries higher which is making ram production more expensive.
2. Samsung workers are in a protest (15 thousand workers)
3. Jevon's paradox (even after turboquant, we might be just scaling things up in demand perhaps)
4. Some providers have already signed up/locked up more expensive deals so there is a more baseline of higher
Dylan16807•1h ago