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Power Grid Constraints

Dutch power grid at capacity delaying datacenter construction until 2030, renewable energy integration challenges, and infrastructure bottlenecks beyond just chip manufacturing

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The Dutch power grid has reached a critical tipping point, with capacity shortages forcing datacenter construction delays until at least 2030 despite prior connection guarantees. Commenters are sharply divided over whether this crisis stems from "self-inflicted" green policy failures that hinder industrial growth or if it simply represents the inevitable growing pains of transitioning to a renewable-heavy system lacking sufficient transmission infrastructure. While Amsterdam remains a premier global internet hub, there is growing skepticism regarding the local trade-offs, as residents face rising electricity costs and "NIMBY" hurdles for the massive infrastructure required to power the AI era. Ultimately, the debate highlights a global tension where even established tech hubs like Northern Virginia struggle to balance explosive digital demand with the physical limits of aging and stressed electrical grids.

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To add a more local hurdle as well, the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. That is, memory capacity is reserved for datacenters yet to be built, but this will do weird things if said datacenter construction is postponed or cancelled altogether.
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That guarantee is not as much of a guarantee as stated in the media. You get a guarantee it will be planned at a certain time (as in looked at), not that it will be build. The cost of doing business is taking risks and mitigating them. There is a reason the nuclear plant in Borsele was build: an aluminium smelter. Maybe you should arrange for something similar as a datacenter (no politician will fall on a sword for that but you can try). The (original) power draw is about the same 80-100MW.
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I'm not disagreeing with your post, but I did a quick check here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth... It says that in 2025, Netherlands was a net exporter of electricity (~14,000 GWh). My guess: Where they want to build data centers, the grid cannot handle it, but the overall system has more than enough power to build data centers. Do you think that sounds like a resonable guess?
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> the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. Are the Netherlands a large proportion of global datacenters?
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Amsterdam hosts a major internet exchange. It's not a bad place to build a datacenter and there are many. Northern latitude brings free air cooling, but also additional distance to clients. Lots of peers in AMS-IX, but not a lot of oceananic cable landings (one with two paths to the US, but most of the submarine cables land nearby in Europe)
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Whether it's generally a reasonable place to build them isn't the percentage. The number seems to be ~3%.
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3% of the global total does seem surprisingly significant.
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London is about 3X bigger than Amsterdam in terms of capacity. If you look at the core western europe market (so called FLAP-D) which I am rather familiar with London holds 35% of that market and Amsterdam about 12%. I'm not at all sold that the old rule of thumb that this market is about 25% of global capacity has been true since about 2023 because of the AI buildout in NA/ME.
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Yes. Amsterdam has one of the largest IXPs (AMS-IX) in Europe and is also one of the largest European markets for Internet Infrastructure services (i.e. hosting, DNS provision, domain name registration, etc.)
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And all of these are practically irrelevant for AI data centers.
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Do AI data centers not need internet connectivity anymore? The value of an IX isn't just in the IX itself, but also in the presence of hundreds of parties for direct peering, and excellent connectivity to the rest of the world. It makes a lot of sense to build your DC near one - even if you have no intention of actually participating in the IX itself.
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> Do AI data centers not need internet connectivity anymore? They don't need entire IX worth of connectivity. You're sending mostly text back and forth and any media is in far lower volume than even normal far less dense DC would generate, all the major traffic is inside the AI DC. All it needs is fiber to nearest IX
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Is that relevant? The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.
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What the grid looks like in different countries is very different. The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables, which is an inconvenience for adding capacity because that's around where you have to start really dealing with storage in order to add more. In most other places the percentage is significantly less than that and then you can easily add more of the cheap-but-intermittent stuff because a cloudy day only requires you to make up a 10% shortfall instead of a 50% one, which existing hydro or natural gas plants can handle without new storage when there are more of them to begin with.
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> The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables I was a bit stunned when I read this. Your estimate is very close for 2025 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth... I calculate about 43.5% was solar or wind. What is way crazier is the "bend in the curve" of production sources in the last 10 years. Look here at how fast solar and wind is growing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netherlands_electricity_g...
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I don’t think the source of the electricity is particularly relevant to whether or not you have the transport capacity to add tens of megawatts of demand to the grid. The problem is generally not the supply but whether your local transformers have capacity left.
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When you're talking about something that draws megawatts existing transformers are pretty irrelevant because you're going to run high voltage lines directly to the site itself and install new dedicated transformers on site. What's more common is that they don't have the transmission capacity itself, but that one's pretty easy in this case too, because what that means is that you have an existing transmission line which is already near capacity with generation on one end and customers on the other. So then you just build the data center on the end of the transmission line where the generation is rather than the end where the existing customers are, at which point you can add new generation anywhere you want -- and if you put it near the existing customers you've just freed up transmission capacity because you now have new customers closer to the existing generation and new generation closer to the existing customers.
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High-level, I would agree with you. One thing that blows me away: I think I read that Northern Virginia, USA has the highest data center density in the world. Mostly it is due to demand from US gov't, military, and spy agencies (like NSA). How did they do it? In mainstream media, I don't see any news about a stressed power grid in this area. I guess the US gov't carefully coordinated with local power providers to continuously upgrade their power grid? This is a real question. It makes no sense to me. No shilling/trolling here.
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> I think I read that Northern Virginia, USA has the highest data center density in the world. Mostly it is due to demand from US gov't, military, and spy agencies (like NSA). That's where AWS us-east-1 is, i.e. the oldest AWS region where they got started to begin with. Google and Microsoft also have a large presence there. It's not just the US government, it's everybody, and it's not new. > How did they do it? Here's the US nuclear plant map, guess where a bunch of them are: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65104 The area around Virginia is also a major coal producer and when this was getting started it was a source of cheap electricity, but coal is quickly being replaced with natural gas via pipelines from the Gulf coast. Their current power mix is ~30% nuclear, ~12% renewables (solar) and almost all the rest natural gas.
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> I don't see any news about a stressed power grid in this area. That's because you don't live in Maryland. Our energy bills are through the roof and our transmission company is talking about rolling blackouts in 2027. https://www.thebanner.com/community/climate-environment/cont...
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Well, they have done pretty well for 20 years of planning. Google tells me that AWS us-east-1 region (Northern Virginia) was started in 2006! EDIT The opening paragraph: > State regulators’ review of the controversial power line proposed to stretch across three rural Maryland counties will extend to at least February 2027, officials announced Thursday, a timeline that prevents developers from meeting the grid operator’s deadline to ensure reliable electricity. I bet this is pure NIMBYism. Just this phrase alone is a dead giveaway: "controversial power line". LOL: What is controversial about a power line? Hint: They aren't, but NIMBYism exists.
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Sure, just pointing to some news coverage in which grid operators allege that the grid is stressed in the DMV area.
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The grid is constantly "stressed" everywhere, because they're designed to be. You don't build five times as much capacity as you need at huge expense for no reason, you design the thing to have only slightly more capacity than you expect to need. If demand increases you have to build more generation and power lines etc. This is not a problem but for NIMBYs, it's just the logical consequence. If the local population increases and you don't have enough grocery stores you don't say "grocery stores are stressed" and regard it as an insurmountable problem, people just open more of them.
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>The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters. In every country? Citation needed.
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I think Denmark is in the same situation, and recently gave a timeline of 10 years for new projects to get connected to the grid.
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This just highlights what an utter failure and self-inflicted wound the green policies of Euro countries have been. Europe has already lost the AI race to the U.S. and China.
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Renewables is the only realistic path to energy independence. Today's global situation should show the absolute necessity of that, even if you dont give a sh*t about the environment. Had we done more 10 years ago we would have been better of. The second best time to start is now.
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I mean nuclear provides that too. (We used to build it at a fraction of the cost and less than half of the time that we do with our modern fuckups and fuel can come from just about anywhere if need be. It might be a lot more expensive than the stuff kazachstan and still be a fraction of the cost.) I think ideally we would've done both to press the cost of nuclear down and given the fact that the renewables rollout turned out to be a lot lot more expensive than proponents claimed it would be whilst still tying us up into gass to cover winter.
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Europe still has coal, lots of it, not using it is a political choice and a self-inflicted wound.
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It does not. That is not economically mined. Last big hard coal producer in EU - Poland, has extraction cost x2 or x3 of the mountain top removal mining in US. This sector is shrinking rapidly. Poland coal production came back to ~1915 levels (taking into account current PL territory). This sector would be closed already if not for massive subsidies.
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Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.
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Of all the coal consumed per year, China uses half of it. They are not a green economy.
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They are greening fast, and enabling greening of others through cost competitive supplies.
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> either in a free market o Then why all the anti-coal mining diktats coming down from Brussels?
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Large Combustion Plant Directive: coal incompatible with both traditional air quality measurements and CO2 emissions. Renewables deployment is happening fast. Grid upgrades are not. Batteries .. it depends. Even nuclear darling France has set solar records: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/15/france-germany-set-da...
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The free market installs a tiny amount of coal, and a lot of renewable energy. Whether you believe this means "coal is/isn't cost competitive with renewables in a free market" is a debate about word definitions that I'm not terribly interested in. Brussels is trying to reduce "tiny" to zero, because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons China, like Brussels, is trying to reduce coal for similar reasons. They don't like the air pollution health hazard (fully believable), and they say they don't like global warming (somewhat believable).
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Yes, we should definitely optimise for the most expensive form of electricity: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bjorn-lomborg-solar-wind-p...
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When reading an article written by Bjorn Lomborg, you should also do the effort to read the cited sources. This is not an ad hominem attack, just an observation. Do it and you will see.
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China and Texas are both installing silly amounts of renewables. They install very little new fossil fuels or nuclear. They both maintain cheap electricity prices through abundance. The problem in the EU is not renewables, it's the same problem that Democratic states in the US face. Regulations and permitting hurdles that block private renewable energy developers.
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China is building a lot of coal power plants
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Their coal generation decreased last year. They're building on the order of 70GW of new coal while they decomission or underutilized more than 70GW of pre-existing coal. Meanwhile they installed 450GW of new renewables energy.
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They also consume half of all coal consumed globally per year. They are in no way a green economy.
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Not relevant to the question of which energy source makes sense to build in the year 2026. But sure China has many coal plants left over from 2003 when renewables was more expensive, nobody would dispute that this is a fact, however irrelevant.
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There appears to be zero advantage to having the datacenter actually in your country apart from minor local property tax, in exchange for which it will put up the electricity bills of every single citizen, who already hate how much they're paying.
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The only way to lose even harder would be to build a shitload of datacenters for them