141–150 of 169 posts
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.
We must stop using fossil fuels as fast as possible, globally.
capex certainty for 20 years. smart if AI demand holds, very expensive if it doesn't
They aren’t building data centres just for Ai but building that can be repurposed.
They can use it for research or as new location as part of Azure and so on?
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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 1…
That can help on overcast days, or the middle of winter when days are shorter, but you still need battery capacity to run for stretches when there is no sun producing energy.
For residential its often recommended to have 3 days of storage capacity + the option for a backup generator. I'm not sure what the recommendation is for industrial projects, but I expect they would still need a backup generator. If they already have to put in a generator to handle the full load of the server farm, and they have cheap local gas, why bother with the solar? At a minimum you have both, but the generator (or power from a contracted gap generator) is a given.
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Of conventional data centers or one's running GPUs? If you're not saturating your GPUs you're likely leaving money on the table.
I don't really agree. The energy component of opex still dominates over the depreciation.
Now it might be that a new data center will find it more difficult to obtain a reliable supply of electricity than to obtain GPUs, but your statement was about expenses.
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Replace "extremely cheap" with "zero cost" and you've got it correct. Texas at night is an endless sea of flare stacks. We burn off an unbelievable amount of natural gas just to get rid of it.
I've often wondered how this is lawful under the EPA. Obviously it must be, but it seems like a gross oversight to allow people to just burn natural gas and allow its byproducts to escape into the atmosphere yet not get any useful work out of it.
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I've often wondered how this is lawful under the EPA. Obviously it must be, but it seems like a gross oversight to allow people to just burn natural gas and allow its byproducts to escape into the atmosphere yet not get any useful work out of it.
It's legal because the government allows it. How else would it work?
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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 1…
You can't replace batteries with more solar, additional solar only increases the energy produced while the sun is out. That can help on overcast days, or the middle of winter when days are shorter, but you still need battery capacity to run for stretches when there is no sun producing energy. For residential its often recommended to have 3 days of storage capacity + the option for a backup generator. I'm not sure wha…
I think one of the highest-leverage U.S. economic strategies right now is to maximize the upside from the AI data-center boom. That means reducing any bottlenecks around not just data-center construction, but also adjacent industries like power generation and transmission. If the U.S. can scale the infrastructure around AI faster than other countries, it can gain a decisive economies of scale advantage in numerous in…
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You can't replace batteries with more solar, additional solar only increases the energy produced while the sun is out. That can help on overcast days, or the middle of winter when days are shorter, but you still need battery capacity to run for stretches when there is no sun producing energy. For residential its often recommended to have 3 days of storage capacity + the option for a backup generator. I'm not sure wha…
Nightly storage is cost effective because you use it 365 times a year. Seasonal storage is solving a different problem.