How to stop a data center in your backyard(lataco.com)
lataco.com
How to stop a data center in your backyard
https://lataco.com/stop-sgv-data-center-building
63 comments
I lived in Reston Virginia for 5 years, the claims about NoVa noise pollution in this article are bizarrely conflating the noise levels of active construction sites with the regular operations of a data center (which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America).
>which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America
Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.
Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.
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Considering what’s happening to the residents in places like West Virginia they had better figure out how to make these things more palatable to locals than “it will create 10 $50k a year jobs and some one time windfalls for a construction company”.
At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.
At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.
Or… allow it, but tax it appropriately, don’t give any subsidies, and actually require that the operators deal with the negative externalities (noise, including subsonic noise, effects on utility pricing, etc).
It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.
It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.
I agree it "ought to be", but from a practical perspective, this often just isn't worth it at a local level. Actually determining the right cost for the externalities would take a decent amount of work and odds are whatever the "fair" value is will be enough to kill the project anyway. The developer will likely jump to some other jurisdiction that isn't able to muster up enough political will to demand a fair deal. An outright ban might sound harsh, but there are benefits to their simplicity because many of these race to the bottom deals aren't worth engaging with at any level. Let some other community gamble with the winner's curse.
> It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them.
That would imply that increased demand strictly decreases prices, no?
Given fixed supply, no dice.
To expand supply, one would use incrementally more expensive mechanisms to generate the incremental supply. (Because, why wouldn't you already be generating via the cheapest supply?) Either all existing customers would pay the same and the new customer would pay the higher rate OR smear the incremental costs across everyone. Prices might hold steady under the former choice but they would not decrease.
Is the idea that the new customer would unlock some better generation capabilities through capital investment? Something not already incentivized by the distributed grid?
Or is the idea that one should soak the new customer to subsidize the existing ones? Maybe rejigger some pricing tiers to push more of the existing customers into lower tiers while charging the new customer more. My guess is you're proposing this last option. I otherwise can't see how to square your suggestion with supply vs demand.
That would imply that increased demand strictly decreases prices, no?
Given fixed supply, no dice.
To expand supply, one would use incrementally more expensive mechanisms to generate the incremental supply. (Because, why wouldn't you already be generating via the cheapest supply?) Either all existing customers would pay the same and the new customer would pay the higher rate OR smear the incremental costs across everyone. Prices might hold steady under the former choice but they would not decrease.
Is the idea that the new customer would unlock some better generation capabilities through capital investment? Something not already incentivized by the distributed grid?
Or is the idea that one should soak the new customer to subsidize the existing ones? Maybe rejigger some pricing tiers to push more of the existing customers into lower tiers while charging the new customer more. My guess is you're proposing this last option. I otherwise can't see how to square your suggestion with supply vs demand.
I can think of a couple of utility models that could work and one that definitely doesn’t.
First, the bad. Build a facility that consumes 1GW at existing rates in a market with slow growth like the US. The supply sources are roughly fixed, so the grid will need to run more expensive sources. Prices go up.
Now the good. Choice A, in a growing market like China and like the US arguably should have. Lots of demand is coming online all the time (not just datacenters), and everyone plans for this. Power plants of various sorts get build, and there is so much construction that costs can be quite low. Oh well, we can wish.
Choice B: suppose there’s a market with roughly constant demand and enough cheap supply to go around (maybe a good hydro resource or some solar and wind and/or cheap natural gas). Residents have cheap power, which is a good thing. But the hydro doesn’t magically get bigger just because someone builds a 1GW data center. Some careful market design is needed, but that datacenter’s grid connection could be contingent on the operator actually sourcing 1GW of new generation and paying the marginal cost of its demand, with appropriate corrections if the time that the generation produces doesn’t line up with the demand. As possible pretend numbers, suppose that existing prices, all-in for the customer, are 12 cents/kWh. 5c of that is distribution and we’ll ignore it. So the data center operator sources 1GW of average supply at 10c/kWh and tries to connect itself fairly directly, so their transmission is cheap. They are allowed to buy from everyone else and sell to everyone else, but they are paid 2c/kWh selling to the grid (which the grid and residents like!) and they pay 15c/kWh when they plus whatever capacity they supplied have a shortfall and they need to buy. And, if the numbers were picked right, the grid makes a small profit selling peak power to the datacenter while still selling at peak times to residents at 12c/kWh.
Would this work? I don’t know, but I think it could be done in a way that makes residential and ordinary commercial rates go down as a result of someone building a giant new load and also paying for the new capacity to supply it.
First, the bad. Build a facility that consumes 1GW at existing rates in a market with slow growth like the US. The supply sources are roughly fixed, so the grid will need to run more expensive sources. Prices go up.
Now the good. Choice A, in a growing market like China and like the US arguably should have. Lots of demand is coming online all the time (not just datacenters), and everyone plans for this. Power plants of various sorts get build, and there is so much construction that costs can be quite low. Oh well, we can wish.
Choice B: suppose there’s a market with roughly constant demand and enough cheap supply to go around (maybe a good hydro resource or some solar and wind and/or cheap natural gas). Residents have cheap power, which is a good thing. But the hydro doesn’t magically get bigger just because someone builds a 1GW data center. Some careful market design is needed, but that datacenter’s grid connection could be contingent on the operator actually sourcing 1GW of new generation and paying the marginal cost of its demand, with appropriate corrections if the time that the generation produces doesn’t line up with the demand. As possible pretend numbers, suppose that existing prices, all-in for the customer, are 12 cents/kWh. 5c of that is distribution and we’ll ignore it. So the data center operator sources 1GW of average supply at 10c/kWh and tries to connect itself fairly directly, so their transmission is cheap. They are allowed to buy from everyone else and sell to everyone else, but they are paid 2c/kWh selling to the grid (which the grid and residents like!) and they pay 15c/kWh when they plus whatever capacity they supplied have a shortfall and they need to buy. And, if the numbers were picked right, the grid makes a small profit selling peak power to the datacenter while still selling at peak times to residents at 12c/kWh.
Would this work? I don’t know, but I think it could be done in a way that makes residential and ordinary commercial rates go down as a result of someone building a giant new load and also paying for the new capacity to supply it.
You would think and I’m definitely with you on your method.
There's a datacenter around the corner from where I live in San Francisco. More than a decade ago[0], I worked at a company that had hundreds of machines there. Recently I was looking to colocate a server and found that Hosting.com on 3rd street sold off datacenter operations and the buyer shut them down at that location. Sad. Hurricane Electric is still running in Fremont and it's only an hour away, but I would have preferred to have just walked next door. Ah well, such is life. I imagine the building is much more valuable as an empty tenant since it's a block away from the VCs at South Park.
I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.
0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines
I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.
0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines
Getting a data center halted in Monterey Park doesn't seem like that much of a flex; is there some subtle reason why this wasn't a super weird place to try to site a dense data center in the first place? Most of these things seem to go in exurbs.
Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.
>AI is on track to become the next Concorde
A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?
A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?
If you had a data center in your backyard you'd change your mind on this one suuuuuper fast.
We as a society should weight the cost/benefits of new technologies like this. What is the actual benefit of gigantic AI data centers? Is that worth the costs of the data centers to the power grid
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Do you want to live next to one? Or do you think that honor should go to poor people?
Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...
Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...
Rich people don't send their kids to wars or live next to their factories. Those are the rules.
If you're wealthy, it's not a problem because you probably won't have a data center next to you. If you're poor, you're screwed.
Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.
We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.
Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.
But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.
Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.
We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.
Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.
But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.
NoVA is one of the richest areas of the entire country and is loaded with data centers.
You can make this argument for any industrial building.
Yeah, and it would be equally valid.
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nslsm(6)
most people have no idea where their apps come from. they think it all happens on their phone. this is why we can't have nice things.
The real travesty here is the double standard. Can you imagine if these residents wanted to develop their properties for business use. The government would not exercise their discretion to waive various reviews for lowly peasants. But a data center comes along and suddenly all the doors are opening.
You would be surprised! Here's a fun pastime: pull up your Google Maps and scan through any McMansion district or SFH subdivision. Count how many independent businesses pop up in residential zones and at residential addresses! Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)
I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.
Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.
Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
>Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)
Most of those are just addresses for businesses elsewhere. The landscaper is not going to register his business to the fenced dirt lot he parks everything, he's gonna register it to where he gets mail.
I'm well aware of what you can and can't do I own commercial real estate.
The government would love nothing more than to get a pound of flesh out of home notaries and the like but the political will isn't really there.
>zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
You say that like the regulations and it's peddlers aren't the ones in the wrong. If you're not harming your neighbors
The burden of proof should be on the government, none of this "well someone could do something that undermines public health despite the fact that doing so runs counter to their interest on any timeline longer than a week" bullshit that underpins nearly all existing municipal regulation.
Most of those are just addresses for businesses elsewhere. The landscaper is not going to register his business to the fenced dirt lot he parks everything, he's gonna register it to where he gets mail.
I'm well aware of what you can and can't do I own commercial real estate.
The government would love nothing more than to get a pound of flesh out of home notaries and the like but the political will isn't really there.
>zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
You say that like the regulations and it's peddlers aren't the ones in the wrong. If you're not harming your neighbors
The burden of proof should be on the government, none of this "well someone could do something that undermines public health despite the fact that doing so runs counter to their interest on any timeline longer than a week" bullshit that underpins nearly all existing municipal regulation.
> Most of those are just addresses for businesses elsewhere.
No, they're really not. And that's why I omitted a whole class of mobile service that does use Maps incorrectly (because Maps is happy to work with businesses that have a region or service area and no public entrance or office.) If you see landscapers, or locksmiths, or HVAC service or window tinting, yeah they're obviously mobile and people aren't expecting to park at the neighbor's and show up at their front door.
But with a nail salon, yeah they're running from home. They're setting appointments and taking payments on the D.L. That firearms dealer flabbergasted me. His storefront is in his garage. The neighbors/HOA must see that when he opens the door? I don't know! Obviously the farmers need real estate but they could work mail order or delivery. But the vast majority of office-based businesses can easily work out of a residence, or do light production work in a garage and be self-contained.
But you claim to know this and you "own commercial real estate" and you know what "you can't do" but people do what you can't do allll the time. They get away with all kinds of stuff.
That is why the HOA gives a hard time to that businessesman, not because he's being kind and giving away water, because he's running an illicit business from his garage (you can see it and you can see the tee shirts he promotes it with) and that business is drumming up foot traffic and visitors that should never have been in the neighborhood.
"If you're not harming your neighbors" is right. Many of these businesses are legitimate and innocuous. I bet you that most neighbors don't even know about them. If foot traffic and visitors increase, they don't really know why and it's not their business. Most neighbors try and keep to themselves when there's not disruption or trouble.
I see this as a failure of the modern city planning and I do see a lot of trouble in zoning. As I said, America was founded on plantation owners and estates and mansions that had copious land, like the entire system of England before us. Where was the boundary between "commercial property" when you owned farms and had livestock? My ancestors lived by homesteading, and sold mineral rights to their own land. That's commercial property, basically! That is exactly why landowners were the voters and the politicians, because they had a stake in the success of the government.
So it seems unfair to tell a family that they can go purchase a 3BR/3BA house in a sleepy suburb and then to enforce its money-pit nature. That they can't make any profit or run any business that would leverage that property for their benefit. That they can only camp out in there and sleep and have a beer until it's time to go back to work. That's all patently unfair and definitely not The American Dream. So I don't know, but it definitely involves an element of subterfuge and financial evasion/fraud to set these businesses up, so I also think they should come into the light and pay their fare share.
No, they're really not. And that's why I omitted a whole class of mobile service that does use Maps incorrectly (because Maps is happy to work with businesses that have a region or service area and no public entrance or office.) If you see landscapers, or locksmiths, or HVAC service or window tinting, yeah they're obviously mobile and people aren't expecting to park at the neighbor's and show up at their front door.
But with a nail salon, yeah they're running from home. They're setting appointments and taking payments on the D.L. That firearms dealer flabbergasted me. His storefront is in his garage. The neighbors/HOA must see that when he opens the door? I don't know! Obviously the farmers need real estate but they could work mail order or delivery. But the vast majority of office-based businesses can easily work out of a residence, or do light production work in a garage and be self-contained.
But you claim to know this and you "own commercial real estate" and you know what "you can't do" but people do what you can't do allll the time. They get away with all kinds of stuff.
That is why the HOA gives a hard time to that businessesman, not because he's being kind and giving away water, because he's running an illicit business from his garage (you can see it and you can see the tee shirts he promotes it with) and that business is drumming up foot traffic and visitors that should never have been in the neighborhood.
"If you're not harming your neighbors" is right. Many of these businesses are legitimate and innocuous. I bet you that most neighbors don't even know about them. If foot traffic and visitors increase, they don't really know why and it's not their business. Most neighbors try and keep to themselves when there's not disruption or trouble.
I see this as a failure of the modern city planning and I do see a lot of trouble in zoning. As I said, America was founded on plantation owners and estates and mansions that had copious land, like the entire system of England before us. Where was the boundary between "commercial property" when you owned farms and had livestock? My ancestors lived by homesteading, and sold mineral rights to their own land. That's commercial property, basically! That is exactly why landowners were the voters and the politicians, because they had a stake in the success of the government.
So it seems unfair to tell a family that they can go purchase a 3BR/3BA house in a sleepy suburb and then to enforce its money-pit nature. That they can't make any profit or run any business that would leverage that property for their benefit. That they can only camp out in there and sleep and have a beer until it's time to go back to work. That's all patently unfair and definitely not The American Dream. So I don't know, but it definitely involves an element of subterfuge and financial evasion/fraud to set these businesses up, so I also think they should come into the light and pay their fare share.
In most cases the government should get out of the way for any development of private property. If they need to pay for increased usage of utilities but 90% of restrictions on private development are insane on the US Coasts.
I live in a muni where virtually all development is done under variance, so I'm not sure what you mean here; "peasants" get stuff all the time, in fact, my guess is most of what gets decided on is "peasants" getting stuff.
(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)
(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)