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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yawn[/quote]

We need 9 new nuclear power plants to provide all this electricity. It is definitely not a trivial discussion. Electricity consumption in Virginia is projected to double over the next 15 years and this is almost exclusively due to data centers. [/quote]

So let's build some nuclear plants. We should have been doing that for the last 50 years anyway.[/quote]

It is not the that simple. The north Anna nuclear plant has 1,000 acres of land and it uses 2 million gallons of water per minute (for cooling) at full capacity. So you need a location that can supply 2.9 billion gallons of water per day just to cool the nuclear plant. The waste heat in the water is quite substantial and even if the water supply is available it can completely decimate the local ecosystem. Not all locations that have a ready supply of billions of gallons of water per day are environmentally suitable for a nuclear plant. Then you still need to build the infrastructure to (high voltage power lines) to bring the electricity to data centers. [/quote]

This does not even get into the costs for infrastructure build out that will largely be incurred by non data center utility customers and VA taxpayers. Building 9 nuclear power plants and all of grid capacity will easily 100 billion even under the most optimistic assumptions. Even though data centers account for almost 100% of this increased electricity demand, everyone else will pay for most of the cost due the current methodology used to pass infrastructure costs to electricity consumers. Data centers are 20% of current electricity consumption in VA, so they are only required to pay 20% of the rate increases despite account for basically 100% of the increased demand. Non data center customers will be stuck paying the other 80% even though they have nothing to do with the demand. So everyone else is in VA is subsidizing data center electricity consumption by $80 billion dollars or more. Your response is incredibly flippant and indicates a complete lack of understanding regarding the complexity of this situation, environmental impact, and costs to other electricity customers. [/quote]

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