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Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

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Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#91

Post by Symbiote »

iAMkenough wrote: post #84
ck2 wrote: post #37

With all the fracking in the USA, literally exponential growth, one of the things they do is gas burn off for months, sometimes years at all the sites Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters? (and why not build the datacenters at the Bakken formation) You can see the burnoff from SPACE and it's for months at a time at each location, tell me that does nothing to global temperatures? (loo…

> Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters? Probably not profitable enough to set up the infrastructure to capture, store, transport, and sell that as a product. Profit potential is the only factor that matters to decision makers.

Search "datacentre district heat Denmark" and you'll find several examples, such as Facebook's datacentre in Odense.

Or one in Copenhagen, I didn't realize some small amount of my hot water (and heating in the winter) came from a datacentre. Neat.

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#92

Post by ElevenLathe »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #86
ElevenLathe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a guess, but is the reason the same one that the gas is cheap all the way out in BFE west Texas? In other words, even if you could generate electricity from wellhead gas more cheaply than a bunch of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries just west of Fort Worth, can you actually export it to east Texas where all the demand is? The solution here being: let's build our giant demand machine directly on…

> let's build our giant demand machine directly on the steppe and skip all that expensive infra, because data is much cheaper to move than energy. Who cares if it's cheaper. It's that you're moving less of it. The more processing you can do near the source the smaller and cheaper your pipe out to the consumer can be. Cut the tree on the hillside. Mill it in the valley. Then spend your precious boxcar volume shipping…

Right, shipping finished lumber is cheaper (per dollar of value) than shipping logs. That's exactly my point, but the lumber is bits and the electricity is the logs. A datacenter is a mill for turning electricity into bits!

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#93

Post by ElevenLathe »

Doches wrote: post #74
ElevenLathe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a guess, but is the reason the same one that the gas is cheap all the way out in BFE west Texas? In other words, even if you could generate electricity from wellhead gas more cheaply than a bunch of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries just west of Fort Worth, can you actually export it to east Texas where all the demand is? The solution here being: let's build our giant demand machine directly on…

I know this is nitpicking, but as a Texan I have to correct you on a point of grammar. The “west” in “West Texas” (and similarly for the other regions) isn’t an adjective; it’s part of the proper noun and should be capitalized. So it’s “West Texas,” not “west Texas.” Yes, this is weird and no, I have no idea why we do it, but it’s really weird to read “export it to east Texas” — to the extent that I had to re-parse t…

Thanks for this. I'm past the edit window now, but both ways felt wrong and I just picked one. I suppose "western Texas" and "eastern Texas" is what I should have written to avoid the problem.

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#94

Post by iAMkenough »

Symbiote wrote: post #91
iAMkenough wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters? Probably not profitable enough to set up the infrastructure to capture, store, transport, and sell that as a product. Profit potential is the only factor that matters to decision makers.

Search "datacentre district heat Denmark" and you'll find several examples, such as Facebook's datacentre in Odense. Or one in Copenhagen, I didn't realize some small amount of my hot water (and heating in the winter) came from a datacentre. Neat.

That makes sense for existing infrastructure, taking waste heat from data centers and piping it through existing public systems. Especially for government environments like Denmark.

I wonder what profits would need to be for a private energy company to install additional equipment at a remote fracking site to capture the burn off energy to then sell to a data center to then use.

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#95

Post by hvb2 »

auspiv wrote: post #21

The current natural gas price in West Texas (the WaHa hub, north of Coyanosa, TX) is negative. And has been for a while. The price peaked (dipped?) to -$9/MCF a couple months ago. That means gas producers had to pay $9 per MCF for it to be taken away. Oil in the Permian comes with gas, a lot of it, so to produce oil, you need to get rid of gas. Wells I'm familiar with have 4000-5000 cubic feet of gas per barrel of oi…

I don't understand why datacenters especially shouldn't be able to run mostly on renewables.

This won't apply to every datacenter, but the AI inference ones especially, should be seeing most demand during the day. So what's built in north America is used when it's daylight there?

If so, isn't that a perfect case for solar?

To be clear, I'm not saying it can power down, but at night it should be able to scale down significantly?

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#96

Post by hvb2 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #13
epistasis wrote: post #6

Fascinating they're going this direction when solar and batteries are so cheap in Texas... Nearly all new additions to the grid are solar, wind, and storage right now on Texas' grid. Not because of Texas regulations, but because Texas' grid is one of the few grids where generation decisions are all made by independent investors trying to make money. Especially with the shortage in gas turbine manufacturing, very surp…

While the US stays oil rich, we should expect the US to be a laggard in ending use of fossil fuels. China and EU are not oil rich, they’ll make a faster transition. Of course it’s idiotic to actively hobble clean energy. Or to put your finger on the scale for one source of energy, like the current administration does. But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy o…

> But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy on the market

Except that there's externalities not priced in. The consequences of those are becoming increasingly visible and very expensive to address

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#97

Post by matthewmcg »

mlsu wrote: post #54
jmward01 wrote: post #51

I love how they are using a company named 'Solar Turbines'. Such an obviously misleading name. (From their website)[1]: Powering the future through innovative, sustainable energy solutions. Solar Turbines Incorporated, headquartered in San Diego, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. Solar manufactures the world’s most widely used family of mid-sized industrial gas turbines, ranging from 1 to 3…

To be fair, solar turbines has had the name since 1929 (they were then called solar aircraft company). It’s not like they’re being intentionally misleading.

They’ve said the company name comes from San Diego being so sunny.

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#99

Post by bayarearefugee »

nba456_ wrote: post #81
julosflb wrote: post #35

And in the mean time, western europe is having its second heat wave even before summer starts.

If Europe was as willing to drill for gas as the US is, they'd probably be able to run more ACs and save thousands of lives every year.

> If Europe was as willing to drill for gas as the US is, they'd probably be able to run more ACs and save thousands of lives every year.

They'd also be accelerating the collapse of AMOC... after which they won't need ACs anymore.

So I guess, yeah, this solves the problem of too much heat, in a fashion!

Re: Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

#100

Post by Retric »

skybrian wrote: post #69
epistasis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might make sense for oil producers to get rid of their natural gas, which is nearly a waste material, but I'm struggling to understand how it makes sense for Microsoft. Despite the cheap natural gas, and an abundance of investors and builders with natural gas expertise, in the competitive electricity generation market everybody is deploying solar and batteries in west Texas because it's still more profitable tha…

They will also want reliable power, which seems like justification enough to keep their options open. A “phased, modular approach” sounds like it would give them options. Maybe Microsoft could install solar and/or batteries later and use their natural gas turbines for backup? With enough batteries they might get through the night, but seasonal shortages are much harder to handle that way. I bet a carbon tax on data c…

You can generally solve seasonal shortfalls cheaply by simply adding more solar / wind until you no longer have a seasonal shortfall just a massive surplus in a different part of the year.

Put another way if you want to store power say 1GWh for the worst month, well a solar panel provides a lot of power over even the worst month. 20MW of solar panel averaging even 40MWh/day * 30 days = 1.2GWh and cost way less than 1GWh of batteries.

Near the arctic circle Wind fill the same niche.

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