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Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
Finland has low emissions from electricity :
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
71 gC02eq/kwH
France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
Is that not the miracle of the free market?
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
* easy permitting
* lots of space
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world