Honest Question: Is this a profitable endeavour? or it's just for the positive PR?
Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
101–110 of 115 posts
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon Citizenship: 1) They setup an offshore corporation for you in a low tax jurisdiction and give you payment processors to take checks and credit cards over the internet. Every few years, they move all of these corps en masse to lower tax jurisdictions, if any. More efficient competition among tax regimes. Amazon will file all pertinent taxes and paperwork and connects to your quickbooks to make that even easier.…
Bring on the Snow Crash-esque future.
It's already here.
Just look @ Snapchat HQ. There are homeless people sleeping literally right outside the main entrance. The epitome of high-tech, low life.
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sometime in the next 12 hours [...] a crappy experience How perspective changes. I remember when ordering anything meant "4-6 weeks for delivery".
The 12 hours here refers to the delivery window on the delivery day, not the time to ship the package. Though the total delivery time is certainly much less than 4-6 weeks.
The 4-6 weeks is a 2 week delivery window! (No tracking numbers then, either.)
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know absolutely nothing of cooling and refrigeration, but it is an area I've been thinking of transitioning my career towards (burned out SysAdmin) and learning as a trade. What you just described is something I actually overheard a couple of guys talking about at a neighborhood pub. A/C and Energy efficiency are bit topics in Central Texas as other posts mentioned. Do you have any articles you'd recommend for some…
One of my previous jobs was infrastructure maintenance in a data centre, I've worked closely with refrigeration mechanics quite a bit. I'm at work at the moment, let me get back to you when I'm home.
Cheers!
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sometime in the next 12 hours [...] a crappy experience How perspective changes. I remember when ordering anything meant "4-6 weeks for delivery".
I don't understand your comment. Do you mean that we should back to the 4-6 weeks delivery or if you're just annotating the notion that things have improved in the the last few decades?
It's that a 12 hour window being "crappy" is like saying your transatlantic flight being delayed 30 minutes is "crappy" (my first Atlantic crossing took 10 days I think). It's all about perspective :-)
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#106Is there any energy market in the US where you can offer/buy "positive/negative operating reserve"? Probably more related to AWS: I could imagine Amazon getting in the energy market and trading negative operating reserve. The scenario would be: - offer cheaper AWS compute instances on the AWS spot market - sell the excess energy consumption as negative operating reserve on the energy market
What is negative operating reserve?
It is not easy to store energy.
So in a power grid, producers (powerplants, windfarm...) offer how much energy they can put into the grid for a certain time of day, whereas consumers, e.g. your energy provider, which manages many households, or the industry go to the energy market and say: "I need this much energy at this time of day".
So now you have to make sure this supply demand evens out.
Say for example there is more demand than actual supply, then positive operating reserve has to be put into the power grid (e.g. turn up your gas power plant). For these smaller fluctuations of supply demand you have to have something which scales quickly. A nuclear power plant is probably not so easy to scale and the output is rather constant.
Now the other case: There is not enough demand and too much energy is produced in the power grid. The energy needs to go somewhere. So now you have to find a consumer, who can quickly scale up it's demand. This might be a flour mill or here it would be AWS. And for offering that you can consume an energy X in the next hour, you get paid by the Department of Energy, whose incentive is to keep the grid stable.
So AWS would monitor the energy market and would have to know, how fast their customers would turn up more Spot instances, once AWS offers them a lower price. Then they would know how fast they can scale their energy demand in the data center and make an offer on the energy market that they can consume an extra X MWh in the next 30 minutes.
So fast scaling up demand for consuming energy from the power grid would be "negative operating reserve".
If you are just a consumer and have a consistent demand, this would not be "negative operating reserve"
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is out in west Texas where wind is plentiful along with cheap land. Nearly all wind and solar farms inject energy into the grid just like any other generator. In an open energy market like ERCOT (where this wind farm is located) there's a market where energy is traded. If they inject "X" units of energy into the grid and pull out the same "X" units all is good. If not (the usual case since generation and dem…
But grids are local in nature correct? If they inject X unit of energy into the local West Texas grid and they pull X units from the grid in West Virginia where they have a datacenter, are all things equal? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.
A lot factors into it, but yes -- essentially grids are sort of local.
The US has three grids: East, West, and Texas.
Folks ask why Texas has its own grid and we generally say "because Texas", but the real reason is just the way the grid grew in the early 20th century. Texas was isolated from the big industrial centers of the coasts and had abundant internal energy sources (coal and oil) so it just grew into its own grid and stayed that way.
Inside each grid the frequency is internally regulated. Each grid is out of sync with each other so power transfer between grids is limited. A tie between grids requires converting energy to DC and back into AC synchronized to the receiving grid. ERCOT has 5 of these ties and their capacity is a small percentage of the demand. Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids (one grid at a time). They choose where to operate depending on pricing.
Another problem to deal with is transmission capacity. If you have too much generation away from demand transmission gets congested. To deal with this we have nodal markets (http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/training_courses/14/nodal10...).
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is negative operating reserve?
It is not easy to store energy. So in a power grid, producers (powerplants, windfarm...) offer how much energy they can put into the grid for a certain time of day, whereas consumers, e.g. your energy provider, which manages many households, or the industry go to the energy market and say: "I need this much energy at this time of day". So now you have to make sure this supply demand evens out. Say for example there i…
Awesome, thanks
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
But grids are local in nature correct? If they inject X unit of energy into the local West Texas grid and they pull X units from the grid in West Virginia where they have a datacenter, are all things equal? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.
A lot factors into it, but yes -- essentially grids are sort of local. The US has three grids: East, West, and Texas. Folks ask why Texas has its own grid and we generally say "because Texas", but the real reason is just the way the grid grew in the early 20th century. Texas was isolated from the big industrial centers of the coasts and had abundant internal energy sources (coal and oil) so it just grew into its own…
> Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids
Note that this wind farm is located right on the border between ERCOT and SPP (Eastern grid member). Depending on transmission capacity buildout I could imagine them being switchable.
Re: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your comment. Do you mean that we should back to the 4-6 weeks delivery or if you're just annotating the notion that things have improved in the the last few decades?
It's that a 12 hour window being "crappy" is like saying your transatlantic flight being delayed 30 minutes is "crappy" (my first Atlantic crossing took 10 days I think). It's all about perspective :-)
Once we have a taste of what's possible it's really hard to accept that the status quo is good enough. With Prime Now I can get a lot of things ordered, shipped, and delivered within 2 hours, with live updates when the delivery person is on their way and arrives outside my house. I remember the days of multi-week ground shipping, I'm really glad we kept pushing the limits.