Spark will help our national grid operator hold it together through a $100m comms network upgrade. Microsoft plans to reboot the Three Mile Island nuclear plant (last seen melting down on Jane Fonda). High-flying Infratil cops a downgrade. Consumer reveals a class of inkjet that doesn’t rip you off. And
Tech Insider: Spark puts some numbers around its big Transpower win, Infratil downgraded, Microsoft’s plan to reboot nuclear plant
Power lines glinting in the sun at Transpower's Ōtāhuhu substation. TransGO – Transpower's private telecommunications system – helps monitor substations and the national grid operator's systems as a whole, and helps it set the wholesale prices that form a big chunk of your power bill. Photo / Alex Burton
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“Without this network, Transpower would not be able to protect, monitor or control its primary grid assets or run the wholesale electricity market.”
The contract is for April 2025 to April 2030; that is Transpower’s next regulator control period, under new rules that the Commerce Commission sets in half-decade chunks (in power industry jargon it’s called RCP4 for regulatory control period four).
Spark says Transpower is planning to spend $140.6 million on telecommunications, network and security over the 2025-30 period, with more than 75% of that total going to TransGo.
In its final determination on Transpower’s “price quality path” for the period, the commission says “RCP4 average annual forecast ICT capex would be $21m without the TransGO Refresh project. It is $39.7m per year with the TransGO Refresh” – implying a $93.5m spend on TransGO for 2025 to 2030.
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The filing says TransGO started in the current five-year regulatory period, with $19m spent, but that the bulk of the project will be undertaken in RCP4.
“Nokia was the previous provider,” a Spark spokeswoman said. The two firms will work together on the 2025-2030 refresh. “Spark as the system integrator and connectivity provider while Nokia is providing IP and optical networking solutions.”
The chunky win could help ease pressure on Spark, which blamed its recent earnings miss in part on soft goverment and enterprise spending. The telco is on a drive to cut $50m or 10% from its labour bill this financial year, with some of the cuts focused on the teams who create managed IT services for big clients.
Infratil downgraded
Infratil has delivered investors 20%-plus returns over three decades, outpacing Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, Forsyth Barr’s Aaron Ibbotson and Benjamin Crozier said in a September 20 note.
A lot of the recent success has been driven by the rise and rise of CDC Data Centres, in which Infratil owns a half stake.
Ibbotson and Crozier expect CDC’s success to continue amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
But they also say it’s now factored into Infratil’s price (shares closed Friday at $12.25, close to the all-time high of $12.52; the stock is up 19.05% for the year).
The pair say the flow of good news around the $24 billion sale of Australian data centre operator Airtrunk and Contact Energy’s push to buy Manawa has pushed Infratil above their spot valuation of $11.50 and within 10% of their 12-month target (which they actually upgraded slightly from $13.00 to $13.25, based on the latest upwards vision of CDC’s valuation).
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Ibbotson and Crozier say for all its long-term success, Infratil’s stock goes through periods of consolidation. They see one ahead.
Microsoft plans to reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI
The power consumed by “hyperscale” data centres is staggering as they cater to the boom in cloud computing and, more recently, the voracious demands of artificial intelligence systems.
“Based on the data centres already connected, and confirmed plans agreed with us in coming years, we could see the total capacity required for data centres reach around 500MW [megawatts] over the next five years,” Vector recently told the Herald as Microsoft, Amazon, and others build giant server farms in Auckland’s northwest, joining half-Infratil-owned CDC, which opened Silverdale and Hobsonville facilities with combined peak power usage of 28MW – not to mention Spark’s plans to boost its data centre capacity from 22MW to 90MW, and even the GCSB getting in on the game with its own data centre under construction at Auckland’s Whenuapai air base. For context, Auckland’s peak power consumption is around 1700MW today.
Data centre demand is helping to fund new renewable energy projects.
In April 2023, Mercury Energy signed a deal to supply Amazon Web Services (AWS) with 50% of the electricity from its soon-to-be-completed 222MW Turitea South wind farm for AWS’s giant new data centre at Westgate.
(The wind farm, near Palmerston North, is now in operation, even if AWS’s server farm is struggling to get past go, thanks to drainage issues, which the council maintains are not specific to the building’s function.)
And Microsoft has signed a deal with Genesis-owned Ecotricity to supply 100% renewable power for its hyperscale data centre at Westgate, due to open by year’s end as part of a multi-facility plan. (Not everyone’s onboard with the green vision. NZRise cofounder Don Christie sees Big Tech building globally-accessible data centres in NZ “To export our green energy. They’re running out elsewhere”.)
But those projects pale next to a plan revealed on Friday that could see Pennsylvania’s dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant brought back to life to feed the insatiable energy needs of Microsoft under an unprecedented deal in which the tech giant would buy 100% of its power for 20 years.
Microsoft is the world’s second-largest data centre operator (after AWS), thanks to its giant cloud computing operation. It’s now also the major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The restart of Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history, would mark a bold advance in the tech industry’s quest to find enough electric power to support its boom in artificial intelligence, according to a Washington Post report.
The plant, which Pennsylvanians thought had closed for good in 2019 amid financial strain, would come back online by 2028 under the agreement, according to plant owner Constellation Energy, the Post says.
If approved by regulators, the US$1.6b ($2.56b) Three Mile Island reboot would provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent it takes to power 800,000 homes, or 835MW.
Never before has a US nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned – let alone one that suffered a partial meltdown (the 1979 incident saw no deaths or injuries, but was burned into the popular consciousness by The China Syndrome film of the same year, starring Jane Fonda).
That was 45 years ago, however. And the world has changed since, allowing an appeal based on nationalism – and environmentalism.
“The energy industry cannot be the reason China or Russia beats us in AI,” Constellation CEO Joseph Dominguez told the Post. “This plant never should have been allowed to shut down... It will produce as much clean energy as all of the renewables [wind and solar] built in Pennsylvania over the last 30 years.”
Finding the US$1.6b won’t necessarily be an issue. Microsoft is teaming up with BlackRock on a US$30b fund to build data centres and energy projects to meet growing demands stemming from AI.
The most cost-efficient class of inkjet
Consumer’s latest instalment underlines that while inkjet printers can sell for a song, manufacturers quickly make that back through expensive refills (and even more so if the printer on the shelf has “starter cartridges” as they’re known in the trade - with even less ink than usual).
Anyone who’s owned an inkjet knows that pain. Less well-known is Consumer’s finding that printers that use inkjet tanks, rather than cartridges, cost a lot more up front but are far more cost-efficient to run.
Consumer says the model that uses the least ink is the HP Smart Tank 7005 ($505).
But factoring in their better reliability scores, it says the top two models are the Epson EcoTank ET4850 (which can be found for $600 or less) or the Epson EcoTank ET-8500 ($1088), which is pricier but got better printing and scanning scores.
Epson says an EcoTank will print 14,000 pages black or more than 11,000 colour pages before you need to go back to the well. That’s the equivalent 30 ink cartridge sets. I had the cheaper model, which I managed to damage moving house - but before that it had definitely broken the cycle of expensive trips to buy refills - which for my previous, four-cartridge printer cost $35 or more per cartridge.
EVs: Lease don’t buy
Wall Street Journal reviewer Joanna Stern recently wrote about what she learned in a year driving an EV.
Overall she loved her EV, but she found one big drawback: Battery performance degraded by 70% in freezing weather.
Our friends at Driven note, “Lithium-ion batteries operate optimally within a specific temperature range, usually between 15 to 25 degrees Celsius. When exposed to cold temperatures, the chemical reactions slow down, resulting in a decrease in the battery’s capacity to store and deliver energy. This phenomenon is often referred to as “cold weather hysteresis.”
Cold weather also means slower charging and shorter battery life.
Driven also notes that electric car makers are getting better and better at battery management techniques to overcome these issues.
That feeds into Stern’s second point: Lease, don’t buy. She took a two-year lease on the basis that EV technology would be superior on many levels by the time it expired.
She noted that leases have got more competitive as the EV market has slowed (here, that’s also led to some killer half-price deals for those who do want to buy new).
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
