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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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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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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The teal is a highly gregarious duck and can form large flocks. Teals are similar to the Canadian Loon.
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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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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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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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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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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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