Amazon's nuclear datacenter dreams stall as watchdog rejects power deal Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs. The Federal …
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Amazon: We want to take away stable and reliable power from other customers
Representatives of other customers: Not over our dead bodies
The quick and relatively clean solution is to build new CCGT plants, another solution is to tell hyperscalers to stock up on batteries and deal with intermittent power.
""CCGT isn't a clean solution..."
Neither is nuclear from the point of view of energy pollution..."
Setting anything on fire is going to create some sort of air pollution. Claims of how clean some of this stuff can only be realized with perfect combustion.
Nuclear is very clean when you look at what comes out of a smoke stack of a coal or Natural Gas plant and in the case of a coal plant, the ash.
Nuclear technology is stuck in the past and hasn't moved forward since the 1950's.
5 thumbs down, eh? Sad to see so many people are ignorant of the laws of thermodynamics. Things have definitely got dumber since I took my science degree. Too many Labour governments, I expect... I'd post a link to the summary of my dissertation on the complexities of climate science, but it would clearly be pointless.
@IvyKing
"Amazon: We want to take away stable and reliable power from other customers"
Take? You mean buy. And why isnt there enough power?
"The quick and relatively clean solution is to build new CCGT plants"
That is one option but would upset the MMCC crowd.
"another solution is to tell hyperscalers to stock up on batteries and deal with intermittent power."
But why should the customers have to solve the failures of government policy?
"Take? You mean buy. And why isnt there enough power?"
Because demand can always outstrip supply - it takes years to decades to build the supply, and a purchase order + a switch to create more demand.
"But why should the customers have to solve the failures of government policy?"
It isn't [just] "government policy". Remember, utilities are privately-owned here in America (well, except the Tennessee Valley Authority; generators like the Hoover Dam are federally owned but their power is still sold and placed on a privately-run electric grid). The utilities try to keep their costs down by only building out supply as necessary to match demand and not much more, of course these plans are subject to governmental approval. Still, it's a joint operation of general oversight and private enterprise in order to keep those aforementioned private companies from abusing the public [again, it is to be added]...
@Snake
"Because demand can always outstrip supply - it takes years to decades to build the supply, and a purchase order + a switch to create more demand."
The supply/demand curve! Yes. So generating electricity instead of pushing unreliables on the grid would leave this horrible situation of the grid potentially not having enough supply.
"The utilities try to keep their costs down by only building out supply as necessary to match demand and not much more, of course these plans are subject to governmental approval"
Sounds like making it easier to build supply (gov) would then cause increased building to meet the demand.
@jospanner
"what do you mean there’s climate, pollution, and public opinion to be considered? damn all of that, we’ve got god-awful ai slop to generate, which is clearly the overriding concern."
Interesting you put it that way. What is public opinion when the lights go out. No street lights, heating, cooking, never mind the shrieking as communications go down. And that isnt an issue of power plants but of the grids trying to handle unstable and unreliable power generation.
I look at this from the perspective of the UK but I hear California overrode peoples air conditioning and asked people not to charge their cars because their supply was strained. Yet billions have been spent on trying to make an unreliable technology work on the grid, billions that could be adding more power to the grid. Reliable, safe and stable power.
Germany was getting close to a crunch point of no power on the grid due to "climate, pollution, and public opinion" considerations, instead of just building power generation. I hope they came to their senses and resolved it.
"Interesting you put it that way. What is public opinion when the lights go out."
More importantly, what about public opinion when the AI models stop processing.... </crickets>
"I look at this from the perspective of the UK but I hear California overrode peoples air conditioning and asked people not to charge their cars because their supply was strained. "
No - they were asked to time those activities to reduce the peak load. That's a very different, and entirely reasonable, ask.
@John Robson
"More importantly, what about public opinion when the AI models stop processing.... </crickets>"
Sure. And if google search engine wasnt invented </crickets>. Manufacturing which stopped 90% of the population standing in a field on subsistence living wasnt invented </crickets>.
Yet take stuff away and watch people suffer. You only know progress once its done.
"No - they were asked to time those activities to reduce the peak load. That's a very different, and entirely reasonable, ask."
Because the grid couldnt cope. And they remotely locked air conditioning units because it couldnt cope.
@Richard 12
"It would be a failure of Government policy to permit Amazon to destabilise the grid."
Thats worrying. Why would the grid be so easy to destabilise? Sounds like increased supply might help and the increased demand would give good reason to build actual supply.
The concerning line from IvyKing was- "another solution is to tell hyperscalers to stock up on batteries and deal with intermittent power.". And we know which power generation is pushing batteries.
"Amazon: We want to take away stable and reliable power from other customers"
It's more like somebody drowning climbing on the back of somebody else to save themselves. It's not that they have any animosity towards the person they are killing to save themselves, they just aren't putting any thought into anybody but themselves.
This situation is particularly scary if it becomes the norm. Who's next? Walmart? OpenAI? Tesla? Rio Tinto?
"waiting for fusion to come, just need something to contain that 100 million deg C."
... and to solve the problem that ALL of the energy so released from conversion of mass to energy, (by whatever means), eventually ends up in the environment according to the first law of thermodynamics.
Datacenters should be barred by law from receiving preferential pricing or deals that will leave other customers with the burden of higher costs. So if a datacenter needs new utility lines or substations built, it should be forced to pay for that up front. The companies building all these datacenters are all in the trillion dollar cap club and can easily afford it out of their pocket change!
"So if a datacenter needs new utility lines or substations built, it should be forced to pay for that up front."
It's much cheaper if somebody else pays for it and amortizes it over the next 4 decades. Tech companies live and breath by the quarter.
The build costs of a multi GW nuke plant spread over the time required to build it are almost 'incidental' level when compared to the other regular spend items, never mind the hundreds of billions being sprayed at AI this year alone by each of the big players.
A full SMR buildout wouldn't even hit close to the profit from any one of the last half dozen quarters results and could be written off over one hundred quarters - lost in the rounding error.
Now although not technically incorrect, I am struggling to see the ‘nuclear’ aspect here! I read it as if Amazon’s request was rejected because what they wanted to do might well cause a degree of destabilisation in the grid. And, presumably that would be the case where the power station were nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, or five million gerbils on the world’s largest wheel!
So presumably the issue is with the US power grid and it’s (in)ability to handle ‘events’; no?
Interestingly different approaches to their arguments.
Commissioner: the proposal raises many, technical questions that need to be answered before we can go ahead. This needs a formal review.
Chairman: but think about the AI, and the jobs and America's superiority, and...
Hmm, I wonder if the chairman is a political apppointee by any chance?
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