Electricity Is Now Holding Back Growth Across the Global Economy (bloomberg.com)
- Reference: 0180390015
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/15/1511233/electricity-is-now-holding-back-growth-across-the-global-economy
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-12-15/electricity-is-holding-back-growth-across-the-global-economy
The Netherlands is a case in point: 12,000 businesses are waiting for grid connections, congestion issues are expected to persist for a decade despite $9.4 billion in annual investments, and the country is already consuming as much electricity as was projected for 2030. ASML, the chip equipment maker whose fortunes can sway the Dutch economy, has no guarantee it will secure power for a new campus planned to employ 20,000 people.
Data centers are particularly affected. Google canceled plans near Berlin, a Frankfurt facility cannot expand until 2033, Microsoft has shifted investments from Ireland and the UK to the Nordics, and a Digital Realty Trust data center in Santa Clara that was applied for in 2019 may sit empty for years.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-12-15/electricity-is-holding-back-growth-across-the-global-economy
Re:Well I have said it many times but right (Score:4, Funny)
"Wing trolls always mod me down."
Don't know who "wing trolls" are but they get something right.
Re: (Score:2)
They're like bridge trolls but live in the service tunnels under airports.
Re: (Score:2)
Same sad asshole making the same sad remarks. Don't like it? Move to Russia.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's mandate EVs with [1]V2G [wikipedia.org] to provide dispatchable electricity that is needed to stabilize nuclear- and renewables-heavy grids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
Re: Great...let's pile on.... (Score:2)
This, thank you. But please subsidise it, because it does degrade batteries. I'm sure some compromise can be achieved. Other than that, I don't think EV deployment has a substantial impact on peak grid capacity. Not in the UK at least, where peak demand is between 4pm and 7pm. With all the charging options and cheaper electricity at night, contributing to peak load makes little sense.
Re: (Score:2)
We know this argument is total bad faith bullshit because the same folks making it also hate and refuse to support forms of public transport or really anything that would reduce car dependency. AKA "my conservative media diet has convinced me a gasoline burning engine must be central to my personal and political self definition"
Efficiency? Externalities? Economics? No, all is irrelevant!! Culture war all the time! All things must be subsumed into the culture war!
Re: (Score:2)
> support forms of public transport
It's often cheaper to move the power to where it's needed than to move the workers to where the power is generated.
Too bad we can't just put something on the roof (Score:3)
That would generate our own power, at least during the day.
Re: (Score:3)
> That would generate our own power, at least during the day.
Solar certainly has a place, but distributed solar creates its own grid issues and I doubt could, in the near term, solve issues with demand constraints or grid constraints. I looked into solar but the ROI simply was not there for my use case.
The challenge is a lot of facilities, such as data centers want a lot of power that is basically uninterruptible, and build them in places where the infrastructure to get the power to them doesn't exist. So you have 2 NIMBY problems, building a plant and running line
Re: (Score:2)
Silicon prices never fully recovered from COVID, so companies will want to run their compute 24/7 to recoup the upfront cost. This is unfortunately true for most industrial processes. For example, there were experiments for using sunlight concentrated with mirrors as an industrial heat source, but it's just not economical to only run your expensive facility when the sun is shining.
Re: (Score:3)
Acres and acres of flat roofs and parking lots doing nothing but absorbing energy and wasting it. We have devices that passively generate power from sunlight. Sounds like science fiction when you think about it.
\o/ (Score:1)
Unchecked greed is being checked by reality.
News at ten.
Electrical Production (Score:2)
is now holding back AI datacenter growth which is starving standard buisness growth.
Re: (Score:1)
If AI is not in a bubble, I'll eat a live toad on live Youtube.
Multiple problems (Score:2)
Investor owned utilities want profit, not construction expense
Endless rules and bureaucracy makes building stuff nearly impossible
NIMBYs file endless lawsuits
There are few companies that make the equipment and they are booked for years in advance
It's inherently expensive and difficult to do
Re: (Score:3)
> Investor owned utilities want profit, not construction expense
True. I used to work for one of those. They were always trying to figure out how to offload maintenance and construction onto subcontractors. And just sit around, read meters and collect bills. It turns out that the meter-reading (which they had also sub'ed out) is easy to do. And the market took note of that and cut their ROI to the bone. They were de-listed from the stock market and went private as a subsidiary of an investment fund. Which is principally held by the construction companies doing their heav
I know ... (Score:3)
... where there is a spare [1] nuke [slashdot.org] just sitting around, unused.
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/15/1541213/how-did-the-cia-lose-a-nuclear-device
Isn't it mostly just AI data centers? (Score:2, Troll)
And that's not meaningful growth. It doesn't make more stuff or more services or make life better for anyone it just replaces jobs.
Re:Isn't it mostly just AI data centers? (Score:5, Informative)
No. Not here in the Netherlands at least. There's a few new data centers here (not AI related), but all this growth - and the shortcomings of the grid - were predicted 10-15 years ago. The grid operators warned that billions were needed to modernize and beef up the grid in order to meet the predicted demand. Governments didn't want to spend the money. Same for much of our other infrastructure, there's about €50B worth of work that should have been done already, concerning rail, roads, bridges, waterways.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you reply to your own posts as "anonymous" often?
Re: (Score:2)
It's someone else masquerading as rsilvergun. Some random anonymous jackass who seems to think they're doing something other than wasting time and making a pointless mess.
Re: (Score:2)
> It's someone else masquerading as rsilvergun. Some random anonymous jackass who seems to think they're doing something other than wasting time and making a pointless mess.
Heh, that makes more sense