50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers

pstuart

Power should be a public utility, just like water and sewage.

ageitgey

It's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.

jeffbee

Same content: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nearly-50-000-lake-tahoe-1709... TL;DR Libertarian separatists, who went so far as to name their utility "Liberty Utilities", organized their utility in 2009 under a temporary agreement with Nevada, which was extended twice, and now after almost two decades of failing to invest in their own generating assets they will be deprioritized by their ex-partner.

infecto

This is an interesting problem. I have been wanting to dig deeper on some of the complaints around water and power. This one is unique though. Doesn’t read much like a problem so much with data center growth as it does with Liberty mismanaging their business/assets. For almost 20 years liberty acted as nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation. They should have been figuring out this problem long ago.

freediddy

This is like the movie Chinatown, where people were fighting over water, but now it's all about electricity. It sounds like Lake Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road and didn't care about electricity for so long that now they have to pay the piper. I think it's entire just that they have to bear the costs of their own electricity.

redwood

Northern Nevada would be such an obvious place to build out large amounts of solar energy as well

nvitas

just as a thought experiment, say you're an entrepreneur, how would you solve this problem? whether it AI, Data Centers, EVs...I'm seeing this problem more and more, we need more energy/power. I'm curious to see what others think are possible viable solutions.

xnx

Related coverage without invoking the AI bogeyman: "Liberty Utilities needs to replace 75% of Tahoe power supply as NV Energy deal ends soon" https://mynews4.com/news/local/liberty-utilities-needs-to-re...

outside2344

It will be hilarious if Google built a data center in Nevada only to run Incline Village out of power (where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge).

swader999

Biosacks will be pushed to the margins as more GDP share is created by tokens and corporations are able to lobby for votes.

palmotea

Good. I don't think any electricity should be used for homes. It's wastes resources on people who will soon be economically unviable, and really constrains the data center build-out.

hannahstrawbrry

A lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents, companies engaging in mass layoffs only for the stock prices to climb. AI adoption aggravated the symptoms, the root causes remain the same.

arjie

It’s not clear that these high wildfire risk places should be populated. They’re like the flood plains of Texas. I don’t think any utility under CPUC pricing can reasonably supply them for a long time. The price comes out of something: defensible space clearing, lack of power generation contracts, or all this pushed to another vendor. The vagaries of American politics allow for failure and then bailout as a mechanism for these sorts of situations but I think we can see the writing on the wall. 50k residents at an average million dollars a resident is $50 b so it is not quite possible to have a buyout so I see why we just allow for the decline. But any more we allow for the place to be inhabited, the greater the risk. Otherwise it’s just an incredibly regressive use of our resources: taxing a lot of working age people in the more urbanized areas to fund wealthy retirees in the forest. The current tide of California politics favors that and we can do it so long as our economic productivity is powered by tech but a time will come after and it’s better now to do this than after when we will find ourselves unable to sustain productive capacity.

instagib

I didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada. Residential customers will mostly pay 70% for the transmission line costs. 12 data centers by 2033 with 5,900 MW of power. “NV Energy is building Greenlink West, a 525-kV, $4.2 billion transmission line from Las Vegas to Yerington, expected online in May 2027. Schwarzrock said Liberty would be “first in the waiting line” when Greenlink opens, giving it access to a wider pool of energy providers. But that timeline matches the contract deadline exactly, leaving almost no margin for error. About 70% of the project’s costs will be borne by Southern Nevada customers. But this is nothing new, at least according to NV Energy.”

oooyay

There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity: 1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers. 2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand. How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.

Nifty3929

Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?