Big news for Portsmouth

[Ohiosam]

I think someone here has hinted about something going on. Just can’t remember who

Two federal agencies say a recently proposed $33.3 billion, 9.2-gigawatt (GW) natural gas plant in southern Ohio will eventually power a data center.

The facilities, including the behemoth proposed 10-GW data center, will be constructed on revitalized U.S. Department of Energy land in Piketon, where the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant was.

There, the former enrichment buildings are in various stages of demolition. As of March, some are nothing but rubble.

SB Energy, a subsidiary of Tokyo-based SoftBank Group, will lead the project. It will also invest $4.2 billion in new transmission lines across southern Ohio with American Electric Power (AEP) Ohio. SB Energy was attracted to Piketon because of the high density of the existing transmission infrastructure, among other reasons, an official said Friday.

To start, SB Energy said it will invest $10 billion in an 800-megawatt data center, creating 4,000 construction jobs and 300 to 400 operational jobs. That could grow to 35,000 construction workers and 2,500 operational staff, the official said.

Construction is scheduled to start this year, with the data center coming online in two years, said Tim Walsh, U.S. Department of Energy assistant secretary.

“It’s just going to be a generational change for this area, and we’ve struggled economically, there’s no doubt about that,” Sen. Shane Wilkin (R-Hillsboro) said Friday. But Piketon, he said, “frankly, won the Cold War by the work they did here at this site.”

Wilkin isn’t worried about where Ohio will get workers. “I would much rather need the workers and have the jobs than not have the jobs,” he said.

The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, near Piketon, started enriching uranium in 1954 for the U.S. nuclear arms program, and later for commercial nuclear reactors. It shut down uranium enrichment in 2001.

Current workers at the Portsmouth Site, many clad in a neon vest, filled the white tent Friday for the official announcement, which was also attended by government officials and SoftBank executives.

“I haven’t heard anything negative from the community,” Walsh said in an interview. “Over the last 20 years, they’ve lost so many jobs, and now they see this as a way to really grow the future for themselves and their families.”

The investment was born from a $550 billion trade deal between the U.S. and Japan, according to a U.S. Department of Commerce news release.

Feds announce huge natural gas plant, data center project in southern Ohio

The facilities, including the behemoth 10 gigawatt data center, will be constructed on revitalized U.S. Department of Energy land in Piketon.

www.statenews.org

 

[giles]

Might be time for me to go back to working transmission lines.

 

[Buckmaster]

I supported the Monaca PA plant. At the time the next plant was scheduled for Shadyside. It got canceled and must be replaced by this facility.

 

[bowhunter1023]

I supported the Monaca PA plant. At the time the next plant was scheduled for Shadyside. It got canceled and must be replaced by this facility.

Two totally different endgames, so it's not really a replacement, although it will have that effect for Bechtel, who was supposed to build the plant in Shadyside. What is a replacement, is using natural gas for power gen as opposed to taking it to a cracker plant. The push for nat gas power gen is already fierce, and it will grow exponentially. The need to make plastic pellets is now less than the need to power AI.

 

[Mike]

The Meta data center between Bowling Green and Perrysburg is going to have nat gas power generation. It is massive.

 

[hickslawns]

I wanna go live in the woods. You can keep the AI.

 

[GoetzTalon]

Crazy that a place is so big that it needs its own power plant to run it. Our electric will still go through the roof along with the water.

 

[Buckmaster]

Our electric will still go through the roof along with the water.

Water is a limited resource. Someday more valuable than Gold.

 

[5Cent]

Water is a limited resource. Someday more valuable than Gold.

Already is, we just don't see the value and how fast we are destroying it.

I'm curious to see how fast Sandusky Bay warms up as the first of 4 or 5 centers comes online in Sandusky here soon. It's huge, it's ugly and it's just the beginning. Will they blame the larger algea spawns on farmers again next year, or the hot water in the name of progress? I think lots of ppl are about to complain about the noise too...

@jagermeister, yours or sandusky office pulling temp trends for baseline and comparison post go-live? Were there studies that included ODNR before approved?

 

[Ohiosam]

Two totally different endgames, so it's not really a replacement, although it will have that effect for Bechtel, who was supposed to build the plant in Shadyside. What is a replacement, is using natural gas for power gen as opposed to taking it to a cracker plant. The push for nat gas power gen is already fierce, and it will grow exponentially. The need to make plastic pellets is now less than the need to power AI.

I was told long ago that the cracker plants need "wet gas". That's gas with ethane, butane, and propane in it. The ethane can be cracked in to ethylene . While wet gas can be used like dry gas in power generation it's a waste of the other valuable liquids if they aren't separated first. Do I understand it correctly?

 

[Ohiosam]

Already is, we just don't see the value and how fast we are destroying it.

I'm curious to see how fast Sandusky Bay warms up as the first of 4 or 5 centers comes online in Sandusky here soon. It's huge, it's ugly and it's just the beginning. Will they blame the larger algea spawns on farmers again next year, or the hot water in the name of progress? I think lots of ppl are about to complain about the noise too...

@jagermeister, yours or sandusky office pulling temp trends for baseline and comparison post go-live? Were there studies that included ODNR before approved?

I've never really understood the algae bloom issue in western Erie. All the great lakes have lots of ag run off, from both US and Canada. Heck almost every drop in Michigan flows to the Great Lakes. But most all of the blame falls on Ohio, especially NW Ohio. I'm in the Ohio river watershed but I've had to go through more training and record keeping because of Erie algae.

 

[Jackalope]

I think their post construction continued staffing estimates are grossly overestimated. I've spent quite a bit of time inside datacenters including the Quest facility in Columbus. A few security guards and a couple of people to swap out hot swappable system parts is all I ever saw working the entire facility. Outside of low pay physical security and parts swappers, the remainder such as Network techs, sys admins, etc can all be done remotely from wherever their AI HQ is such as Japan. 300-400 operational staff is a huge stretch, 2,500 is laughably absurd. Regardless of the jobs the datacenters create they will never create more than they destroy.

The good and bad news is that while AI is very good at operationalizing very structured things like writing a computer program in Python, or designing an electrical substation, things that have set rules and published methods, it is not good at innovating and inventing. nd for good reason. What's yet to be seen is what economic motivator will people have to innovate, if AI will pick it up in a matter of minutes and make the need for programmers, designers, and engineers, obsolete. For example programming languages. The internet has come a long way in just 20 years thank to innovation in coding. With that came scores of people who learned to code and made good-paying careers from it. They contributed to the innovation brick by brick and progress is steadily made. From an existing coding language standpoint they're largely obsolete now as AI can pound out in 4 minutes what took a code developer a month to do. So what incentive do people have to innovate and how much will innovation be stifled? Time will tell. I think the next thing we'll see is a huge battle over intellectual property rights and royalties. If I use AI to write a program, who owns the rights to it, me, or the AI company who technically created it. The same for music, movies, books, and yes even corporate IP. Don't think for a minute these AI companies aren't dumping billions into this tech without a revenue model in mind beyond selling vague AI cycle credits to use it. Oh and wait until they start including paid advertisements and modifying AI output based on whose paying them. At that point where's the credibility in AI's outputs? There's lots to be done regarding laws and regulations and sadly these AI companies will exploit everything and everyone for everything they can while funneling billions to politicians to drag their feet on creating them.