That guarantee is not as much of a guarantee as stated in the media. You get a guarantee it will be planned at a certain time (as in looked at), not that it will be build. The cost of doing business is taking risks and mitigating them. There is a reason the nuclear plant in Borsele was build: an aluminium smelter. Maybe you should arrange for something similar as a datacenter (no politician will fall on a sword for that but you can try). The (original) power draw is about the same 80-100MW.
reply> the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection.
replyAre the Netherlands a large proportion of global datacenters?
Amsterdam hosts a major internet exchange. It's not a bad place to build a datacenter and there are many. Northern latitude brings free air cooling, but also additional distance to clients. Lots of peers in AMS-IX, but not a lot of oceananic cable landings (one with two paths to the US, but most of the submarine cables land nearby in Europe)
replyWhether it's generally a reasonable place to build them isn't the percentage. The number seems to be ~3%.
replyYes. Amsterdam has one of the largest IXPs (AMS-IX) in Europe and is also one of the largest European markets for Internet Infrastructure services (i.e. hosting, DNS provision, domain name registration, etc.)
replyAnd all of these are practically irrelevant for AI data centers.
replyIs that relevant? The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.
replyWhat the grid looks like in different countries is very different. The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables, which is an inconvenience for adding capacity because that's around where you have to start really dealing with storage in order to add more.
replyIn most other places the percentage is significantly less than that and then you can easily add more of the cheap-but-intermittent stuff because a cloudy day only requires you to make up a 10% shortfall instead of a 50% one, which existing hydro or natural gas plants can handle without new storage when there are more of them to begin with.
>The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.
replyIn every country? Citation needed.
This just highlights what an utter failure and self-inflicted wound the green policies of Euro countries have been. Europe has already lost the AI race to the U.S. and China.
reply