A fork in the road…
At this moment in history, as AI takes off, France has a couple of gigawatts of reliable baseload power to spare. It has a vision of being one of the global Big Three industrial hubs of AI development along with China and the USA. The French Energy giant EDF is offering land near the power plants to build big new AI datacenters, and is already signing those deals.
With AI on the cusp of self-directed robots to transform manufacturing, transportation, medicine, research, and farming, it could be remaking whole economies soon.
Ten or twenty years ago, Australia could have joined this party. We could have expanded our economy vastly, putting us at the front of the new technology. Instead we wrecked the grid, blew up the coal plants, and ran out of gas. All so we “wouldn’t be left behind” or called mean names by someone at the UN.
France tempts AI firms with its nuclear electricity
World Nuclear News
UK-based AI cloud provider Fluidstack has signed a memorandum of understanding with the French government to construct one of the world’s largest decarbonised AI supercomputers in France. Meanwhile, utility EDF has identified four sites on its own land that it will offer for data centres. AI firms with its nuclear electricity.
It added: “Fluidstack and the French government recognise that AI’s future hinges on three core pillars: energy, compute power, and AI models. By leveraging France’s nuclear assets, the advanced grid infrastructure enabled by [grid operator] RTE, leading AI talent, and cutting-edge compute technologies, this partnership will establish France amongst the world’s top three AI hubs alongside the United States and China.”
Nobody tempts anyone with solar panels, voltage surges, price rises and unreliable power.
Fifty years ago France built 56 nuclear plants in just 15 years, and they’re still reaping rewards and opportunities from them.
France’s nuclear fleet is ageing and little has been done to replace them.
France sells electricty to its neighbours in the UK and the continent via interconnectors at likely higher prices for domestic consumers than a wholesale price for industry.
Will be interesting to see how this pans out
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Sounds like a good incentive to give the nuclear power stations a bit of TLC and to add a few new ones. And it will help with the funding too.
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They are doing life-extension work.
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And to add to that:
France conducted significant repairs and safety activities following the Fukushima disaster in 2011, with ongoing maintenance and inspections continuing into subsequent years. EDF has been investing 3.7 billion euros annually, totaling 55 billion euros by 2025, to upgrade and maintain their power plants to meet the tightened ASN standards and extend their operating life to 50 or 60 years. This initiative, called the “Grand Carénage” . . .
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Where do you get the idea that France is doing little to replace its ageing reactor fleet? In February 2022 Macron bit the bullet and ordered 6 new reactors with plans for 8 more on the table.
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The experts say there is no chance of France meeting their nuclear targets. There are demands that it increases it’s renewable proportions
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This is the link on nuclears
https://ieefa.org/resources/frances-nuclear-buildout-plan-must-not-jeopardise-renewables-growth
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Tonyb,
Snippet from that ieefa link:
Classic abuse of the average.
I don’t think they’re proposing to build them one-by-one — finish the first, then get out the drawing board and a blank sheet of paper and start designing the second — if they can build one by 2050, why can they not build 14 by 2050?
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The UAE built 4 in 10 years by Sth.Koreans – 8 years getting regulatory approval and 4 built and running in the next 2 years. Yes, all the same design (and as built already in Sth. Korea).
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“Must not jeopardise renewables growth”… who is saying that, and have they the authority to enforce their statement?
Even if so, France can simply change its laws and policies. If it built lots of reactors in the 1970s then it can do it again, as Jo points out.
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Little is being done to replace them because they do not need to be replaced. Why not mention that? Geoff S
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Thanks Jo for trying to educate us again, unfortunately for our stupid blog donkeys there’s little hope.
And I’m sure there are still enough idiot voters who’ll still vote for Labor, Greens and Teals to make the coming election a close run thing.
The Teals, Greens and Labor should be left at the bottom of our ballot papers and let’s hope Aussie voters don’t waste our precious time for another 3 years.
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I have been saying it in other forums, if Labor and the LNP preferenced each other ahead of the Greens and Teals, both of these groups would disappear.
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William I agree and those Jew hating parties should be voted out at the first opportunity.
The Greens today are Jew hating Fascists and the Teals vote with them in parliament most of the time.
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“The Greens today are Jew hating Fascists”
Fascists are Right Wing the Greens are Left Wing
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But that means that they seem to meet behind your back?
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Mussolini came from the socialists to fascism.
The full name of the Nazi Party was (translated) the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Try again.
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China’s Coal Power Construction Is At A Decade-High Despite Renewables Boom
Despite soaring solar and wind power installations, China launched construction of as many as 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power projects in 2024, the highest level since 2015, new research showed on Thursday.
China also approved 66.7 GW of new coal-fired power capacity in 2024, as approvals picked up in the second half after a slower start to the year, found the report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
Apart from the new coal power construction starts, China last year resumed construction of 3.3 GW of suspended projects.
All these approvals and construction start to signal that “a substantial number of new plants will come online in the next 2-3 years, further solidifying coal’s role in the power system,” the report says.
Despite a pledge to phase down coal by the end of the decade, China continues to be committed to coal power,
The persistent growth in Chinese coal demand, including for power generation, goes to show that coal remains the baseload of China’s power system to back up the surge in renewables and will stay such for years to come as power demand jumps with the increasing electrification of homes and transport.
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The teal is a highly gregarious duck and can form large flocks. Teals are similar to the Canadian Loon.
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I haven’t heard that they have named a unit of currency as yet though
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Are they good with peas and gravy.
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It’s interesting.
AI as programmed by bad actors of the Left to produce biased answers and propaganda of the Left on search engines such as Goolag and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is one of the Left’s most powerful weapons.
But their powerful weapon cannot run on the expensive and intermittent power promoted by the Left and so has to use an inexpensive reliable form of energy that they hate so much.
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True AI means “Machine Learning”. Humans are nowhere engineering/developing that yet.
Garbage In/Garbage Out.
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Johnny,
Dot com bust ,now rinse and repeat for AI . AI has uses but to replace humans for anything requiring judgment or original thought it fails . Unfortunately my (human) processor and hard drive are not what they used to be and I can’t get them replaced…
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The Australian Government supports AI research but with the power stations getting shut down, where’s the electricity to run it going to come from?
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“The Australian Government has committed $1 billion for critical technologies under the National Reconstruction Fund. This includes artificial intelligence.”
That’s the problem. It’s Marxist Bureaucrat money.
Better headline:
“Very successful American Silicon Valley Company backed by Peter Thiel, Andreessen & Horowitz along with Palantir and Elon Musk is opening up an AI Company in Brisbane backed by $5 billion in US money.”
Which one would you want?
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Jo,
nitpick
It’s about France, so you can use their (and our) spelling: data centres.
/nitpick
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The Latin root word of centre is centrum which comes from the Greek kentron which comes to centre in late Middle English so I think having the r after the t has plenty of solid tradition.
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Growing up in Canada in the 70’s it was spelled ‘center’, but during the 1980s Canada began spelling it ‘centre’. Today the word ‘center’ is almost nonexistant, you don’t see that spelling anywhere. I have no idea why Canada did that.
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It looks like the German’s hydrogen trains fiasco has bitten the bullet again.
What’s wrong with proven Diesel locomotives and how many billions of $ have these clueless donkeys wasted this time?
They should ask Elon to help them make the German economy prosper and even make the trains run on time.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/13/german-rail-operator-switches-back-to-diesel-locomotives-hopes-measure-will-be-temporary/
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What happens when other European countries have insufficient electricity from renewables? In the past they would have bought power off France, but if it’s committed to AI … too bad, so sad.
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I wonder who is prepared to pay more for French nuclear power, AI operators or freezing, dying countries?
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Germany will be happy 😀
With some natural intelligence they were not in that questionable situation 😀
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Was reading some info on X the other day about Germanys nuclear power plants. Germany once had 30 viable nuclear power plants. Wow!! Now in various stages of dismantling. (Class 1-4). Apparently, there’s still a couple haven’t been touched yet, which could be turned back on within the next 2 years ( or sooner ). They’re the Stage 1 types. Stage 4 are almost fully demolished but the Stage 2/3 could possibly be rebuilt, but obviously at a cost.
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Also, there are 4 countries that have nuclear power that intended to phaseout. Germany, Belgium, Taiwan and Spain. Spain looks like their phaseout might be about to be reversed after a political vote.
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And then there was the fear for tsunamies 😀
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No country on Earth has more energy reserves than Australia and yet if Labor falls over the line this year we’ll have ZERO energy to spend on base-load and therefore nothing to spend on new AI data centres.
I reckon NZ would build a sizable AI centre before we do, but under Labor, Greens and Teals we will quickly waste TRILLIONs of $ on toxic, UNRELIABLE W & S for decades and obviously see no measurable change in our weather or climate.
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That could have been Australia, if we had kept with our coal and gas electricity generation. That is, maintained and upgraded the present fleet, even added to them with new plants. We could have been the AI centre of the Southern Hemisphere/ Pacific Ocean etc etc. Nope, we’re just a bunch of wombats with a new prediction of over 70% increase in power prices in the next decade.
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70 %, that’s probably on the low side.
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My comment, which follows after the colon, is super-sarky. It’s borne out of frustration with the destructive effects Energy Minister Chris Bowen is wreaking on our vital energy system: AI Superpower envy for Australians? Too right mate! Under lacklustrious Energy Minister Bowen, Australia could become a Claytons AI Superpower.
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Oh and by the way. Everything is AI at the moment. It reminds me of the media/ community shift towards Ukraine after the Russkies invaded. We had to fly Ukraine flags and have them as emojis in our social media profiles. Buildings were lit up in Blue and Yellow. Actors urged their support for the country. People fawned over Zelensky like he was the new messiah. Countries couldn’t wait to give them billions of $. Apparently, there is an emoji for AI- ✨
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Back in the day, inexpensive, reliable energy was a major competitive advantage Australia had. It was used for energy intensive industries like aluminium smelting or steel making.
Now, we barely have a steel industry, and the only reason aluminium smelting survives is due to 1) subsidies and 2) additional payments so they can be load-shed at will in order to keep the grid powered up otherwise entire cities or regions would go dark when the wind stopped blowing and/or sun stopped shining. (Jo reported on that recently.)
What’s been done to Australia by Uniparty politicians (starting with fake conservative Howard) to destroy our energy supply is a disgrace.
Now, as per my post above, Australia wants to promote AI, but what will it be powered with? Certainly not wind, solar or Unicorn flatulence. Not even the wokist of the woke far Left companies like Amazon and Goolag try that. Amazon just purchased a nuclear powered data centre and Goolag six nuclear reactors.
As usual, Australia has missed the boat. Second or Third World status is inevitable.
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Global power consumption for data centers by 2026 is expected to be around 800 TerawattHours.
Even way back in 1850 before oil and coil became popular, with just biomass energy, the global energy production was around 8,000TWh.
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Are you aware of Lieutenant Colonel Riccardo Bosi and the Australia One Party?
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You have to laugh when you consider the implications of this article, eh!
Here’s the current Energy Dashboard for the UK.
When it opens, see that chart down the right hand side of the page. Well, this lists the power sources delivering power in the UK for the last week.
Now, note the Imports, and that’s 5.6GW, or a whopping 14.6% of all consumed electrical power. That comes from around seven or eight separate ‘taps’ to power generation outside of the UK ….. in other words, Europe, which is delivering its excess power into the UK to, umm, you know, keep the UK actually ‘running’.
Now, France, quite obviously is the biggest supplier of that power into the UK, because of its excess.
So France now attracts the AI Industry.
Message from the UK ….. “Hey you guys, where’s our power???”
Tony.
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At least the UK can import power, if it’s available.
Australia cannot import power so the lights will simply go out when we run out of power.
No doubt some clueless subsidy harvester or politician will dream up a power cable to NZ or Indonesia to import power from coal, nuclear (Indonesia) or NZ hydro.
Closest distance Australia to NZ is about 2000km and Australia to Indonesia 2700km+.
Still shorter than the ridiculous Sun Cable, 4300km.
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But since free thought and information won’t exist, we can take all those undersea internet cables we won’t need and use them as power cables instead!
Households can get 10mW each, to power a LED, enough to see the bugs you’ll be eating.
/probably shouldn’t give dumb pollies any more brainless ideas…
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https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
This page gives an up to date picture of UK power movements, on the left are the imports by country and GW amounts, on the right are where they export to.
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AI should be treated as a vicious rabid dog loose in the henhouse and kept under extremely tight control and restricted access to the world at large untill its safety has been ABSOLUTELY proven. Any one using it should be totally liable for the costs of and rectification of any adverse results resulting from that use.
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AI is like a loaded and cocked handgun in the hands of kindy kids.
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Except that the outcomes of the “Kindy Kids”would be accidental. I believe that the outcomes resulting from the current torrent of of AI being pushed on us has been fully orchestrated.
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Wish ye not for the AI revolution for it will be your master that can watch, analyse, control and limit EVERY single aspect of your life and do it in a nanosecond. Literally.
You’ll wish for the good old days of a human slowly wading through reams of paper in an office, taking weeks or months to do anything that could affect you.
AI will be DM’s favourite 1984 on steroids x 100.
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I’m waiting for the day they introduce some AI at the traffic lights. I’m sick of waiting at a red light when there’s nothing otherwise preventing a safe negotiation of an intersection.
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Try Great Moments with Unexpected Consequences No.17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfDqEuZ3zco
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As part of a global strategy/treaty in 1975, the Whitlam government signed the United Nations Lima Declaration, through which the Australian government sold out Australian industries and workers by specifically agreeing to transfer manufacturing to Third World countries, supposedly to help them develop.
The Hawke government in 1984 followed on by freeing up money markets to facilitate money printing, excessive debt and asset inflation in preparation to transfer out wealth, degrade our standard of living, create a culture of dependency on government. Eg the endless housing bubble.
Global warming is about that final transfer of wealth to a hand full of corporations and ensuring no economic recovery. The latest stage in the globalist takeover was COVID which brought lock downs while they built the electronic control grid (5G) and depopulation
That’s why governments blew up out power stations and undertook all the other destructive policies and actions. It’s called new the world order.
There are no mistakes here. The destruction of Australian society, culture, industries and replacement of the European and English descent population, with 3rd world multiculturalism is also planned.
Multiculturalism ensures that labour cannot organise against the corporations and will remain cheap and uneducated.
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BJ,
Those are facts which people up to the age are not aware of. The left will always be adamant with their lies & propaganda that only patriots with pride in their nations, the history of their nations & conservative in their belief in the nation state , are fascists & Nazis.
As always Socialist ideology always descends into fascism & nazi ideologies, behaviour & resultant dictatorial oppression.
Their methods are devious and originate with Marxism & Stalinism!
Look around at the EU, UN, WEF & compare their policies to those of USA or the few Capitalist economies of the world that are still thriving. Unfortunately it appears that UK is the next free western democracy to succumb to the communists!
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I do not envy France. They have 18 nuclear power plants, all of which are potential terrorist or war targets. They are sitting ducks.
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I find it amazing that the nuclear industry, rejected totally by Australia and New Zealand for most of a century might finally start because of a language change. The Greens who abhor nuclear as dangerous and unnatural have made it all probable. Because according to their new language definition, nuclear energy has zero ’emissions’! Even though emissions are the essence of nuclear energy. There is no more appropriate word.
Three words have completely changed in a lifetime, captured by extremism and propaganda. Gay. Liberal. Emissions.
And the last is the craziest!
37 years of vilifying the essential gas of life, carbon dioxide, as a toxic industrial ’emission’ has meant the total acceptability of what the Green and GreenPeace in particular set out to stop. Especially by gay inner city Liberals.
And when the dust settles, can we please have our brown coal, gas and fracking as well? You can keep your hot rocks, solar panels and windmills.
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Klem,
Why are they different to any other plant that makes electricity? Geoff S
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The big power consumption in AI is the training process. Very likely this will become more efficient with time … but anyway it doesn’t require reliable electricity. If you only do training for several hours per day (while electricity is cheap) you still get the job done … and it ends up costing a lot less. I’m surprised they aren’t going for intermittent sources, since at certain times of day in Australia the wholesalers are almost giving the stuff away. The crypto miners figured this out years ago.
This of course presumes those data centres are actually being built for AI and not some other purpose like tracking everyone’s social media or something.
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Australia’s quickest way out of its energy mess would be to copy European nations and China to build modern coal and gas powered plants and forget nuclear. By the time Trump finishes and Vance gets 12 years to follow, there is unlikely to be any bother about ‘Global Warming’ left. Otherwise the pressure will be on for Australia to become the world’s dumping ground for nuclear waste.
It can’t be more than a few months after the next election that the perilous condition of the Australian economy gets so bad that the current opposition will be in the position that it will be compelled to put the facts of life about the future of Australians if we continue down this road of self destruction any longer. The costs of living can only continue to sky rocket the faster Bowen makes the death spiral of chasing net zero – about the only nation to be so stupid to do so. The rest of the West is breaking away already with a big conference into nuclear energy booked for later this year I read some time ago.
Besides, isn’t Australia always beyond net zero already due to its size as a carbon dioxide sink? Dutton just has to be big enough to take on the fight, head-on. Someone must emulate Trump and Musk with some very forthright talk and confrontation of the extreme left that has a tendency to evaporate when the going gets tough. Vance showed in his latest speech just how forthright that speech that he gave to the Europeans can be. Australia has to tag on the Trump-Vance coat=tails.
I figure we are only in this mess because we have been led by the nose by weak politicians that allowed the nation to be crushed by threats to our trade by these same European elitist bods that are so upset by Vance. Brazil and Argentina have gone their own way. They, like us, export mineral, energy and agricultural essentials the Europeans need. That’s a position of strength.
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