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- Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
Seems like a couple summers ago Texans were sweltering for lack of electric power to run their AC. Checking grid capacity should have been the job of whichever branch of state gov’t handed out these 1800 permits. Was the approval fee a box of steaks?
25 minutesI think you’ve got that mixed up with The Big Freeze of 2021. Everyone was calling for heads to roll after that fiasco, and are still pissed off.
A lot of that AC usage comes down to poor insulation, older and poorly maintained units, single family housing, overly large housing, vacant housing that still needs to be cooled to keep it from deteriorating before someone can cover the inflated asset price, the need to insulate offices separately from housing because we’ve abolished work-from-home rules…
A well-maintained stock of publicly accessible homes in dense mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, with a professionally managed building-wide AC unit, could reduce the per-capita electricity demand enormously.
But instead, we’ve queued up billions of dollars in concrete and steel to build city-sized warehouses for scorching hot chipsets.
- Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish3 hours
Inb4 they just start building them off grid with diesel generators, and they can’t do anything about it because Exxon lobbied the Texas government to make the “right to bear diesel generators” constitutionally protected.
If datacenters were losing money at $0.07/kwh on the grid, wait until they’re spending $.33/kwh (15 kwh per $5 gal) before you even factor in the price of the diesel generator hardware and maintenance.
Half the joke of those Grok server farms in Mississippi is how ludicrously expensive they are to operate. Elon is paying a premium to ruin local livelihoods.
- blazeknave@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
Where do 1800 data centers go? What do they do? Where does the inventory to fill them come from? Who has the money for that inventory?
- anon_8675309@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
- Tell them no. Period. Done.
- If you can’t tell them no, tell them they have to use renewables and provide their own power.
- 7 hours
Texas doesn’t have the best record of keeping the power on for their residents. This is probably a good idea.
- 5 hours
These aren’t just any residents. They’re corporate citizens! They need the power to… checks notes Undress children in photos?
This is hilarious because a year or so ago these idiots were saying that building a bunch of data centers would stabilize the Texas grid and were encouraging building them.
But what do you expect from a southern state so corrupt it can’t supply enough power to heat homes in the winter and builds fertilizer factories across the street from schools.
That’s ok our fucking stupid Oklahoma government will tell them to come here were apparently we have plenty of water and electricity.
Fucking morons going kill us all.
- EvacuateSoul@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
In the West, Texas explosion, the schools came more than 20 years after the plant, to be fair.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5047761/
The order of operations does not matter in the slightest. The government allowed it to happen, and Texas had no laws to prevent it.
The rest of the world has zoning laws to prevent that kind of idiocy.
- SparkyBauer44@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
Isn’t this the state where the power grid goes down when a cool wind blows through?
In fairness, Texas didn’t normally see sub-zero winter weather, even before climate change started ratcheting things up.
But also, that statewide prolonged blackout was more the consequence of poorly constructed gas generator plants trying to squeeze the wholesale price of electricity in the state. They waited so long to turn on that their un-weathered pipes froze. And then the strain on the grid took down tens of millions in infrastructure.
But don’t worry. The state bailed out all the corporate entities and guaranteed a bunch of grant money for weatherizing, so that rigging the wholesale electricity markets will never cause this kind of tragedy to happen again.
Also, funnily enough, we’ve had a bumper crop of solar and wind power since then. And the fact that we can’t toggle these power sources on and off has neutered a lot of the profit-squeezing that gas plants used to exploit.
- zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish7 hours
At this rate Ted Cruz will just have to move to Cancun full time since he leaves every time the power grid does down there. At least there is one positive.
- bitteroldcoot@piefed.socialEnglish9 hours
Good.
Texas can barely keep the lights on under normal circumstances.
- Lili_Thana@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish9 hours
Repubs here are scared they’re gonna lose control of the state in November so they’re actually trying to pretend to do more than enrich their donors and friends.
- wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
This is pretty much it.
The 2021 freeze still looms large in people’s minds, so while the grid actually has seemed to be hanging on better in Summer and Winter, things that threaten the still-isolated power supply draw attention. Then, Oracle/OpenAI set the precedent with Stargate in Abilene that you just stand these things up in the middle of nowhere because of cheap land and easy regulatory capture of the local politicians. The evolution of municipal governance in Texas also meant that the metro areas have fairly small core cities densely surrounded by independent municipalities, which often means that the tech companies can push that model into somewhat more densely packed areas, though it’s still often the exurbs (though not always… stupid Dallas city government). That means it’s the reddest parts of the state that are seeing them spring up and fuck the residents’ personal quality of life badly enough that they actually complain. There’s a big emphasis on the “M” part of NIMBY for them (because isn’t there always?) but the fact remains that no one else in the state has a big enough “BY.”
Very few of these people are ready to bail on single-party state government because they still buy the line that everything is regulatory hell and woke BS anywhere but God’s Own Property Texas, but if they see the state completely ignore them the one time they politely ask the republicans to not fuck them quite so roughly, then it’s going to be easier to stay home during the midterms. This is particularly problematic in a year when the Dems found a candidate with a pulse but who likes the Bible and looks like a Republican, and the Republicans are stuck with their primary voters’ pick, an asshole who is as corrupt as Trump but lacks even that weird sheen of “I’m your asshole” that Trump gives off to his base. Also, and this is shallow, when you’re the party that tries to project strength and vitality, having a ticket that consists of a droopy-eyed slug and a paraplegic in a wheelchair is something you have to figure out how to downplay.
Worst part of it is that they’re probably still gonna win. A little part of me hopes this is the year, but mostly I’m just hoping it’s close enough to drag out the spending and fuck the GOP’s budget in Maine and elsewhere.
- tehn00bi@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
It’s not like those areas are so flush with water either. Between years of fracking and drought, most everyone is seeing significant water rate increases.
- wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
They also don’t realize that there’s a reason Abbott had to spend millions of Wilkes and Dunn’s money to primary a bunch of Republicans in the boonies. Those Friday Night Lights rural school districts, the ones that provide any sense of place, any average-paying jobs, and any excuse to go ahead and raise your kids in BFE, those are the first ones that will get ground into nothingness by the path envisioned for vouchers and ending recapture, which the rich suburban districts want.
Of course, that frees up more land for datacenters and fracking, so…
- ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish8 hours
No, they just corrupted SO HARD SO FAST they overloaded their system.
As much as they want to “pwn the libtards”, they just can’t afford to.
- coolie4@lemmy.worldEnglish8 hours
Think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a headline with the world SLAMS and was okay with it
- printerhell@lemmy.todayEnglish9 hours
My understanding is that this is just a political stunt and that data centers can easily meet the audit requirements. Time will tell though.
100% the grid can handle it if you shed the poorest of your population from the grid. And where do you think any new infrastructure will be going in Texas. Around the neighborhoods that need it or around data centers?
