161–169 of 169 posts
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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.
No need for that when solar power and nuclear exist. The problem in Poland, Germany etc is prematurely getting rid of perfectly good nuclear power plants, not lack of gas drilling.
There are also a lot of smaller nuclear power plants planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Poland
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…
When you say "it", I suspect it will pan out to American Elites, as opposed to America the nation, or Americans the people.
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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.
The alternative is significantly worse.
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Nightly storage depends on being able to recharge to full capacity every day. That isn't a risk they could possibly accept, they would have to have an alternative source that could sustain when the sun doesn't come out or equipment fails.
> to full capacity every day. A common misconception you don’t need to hit 100%, you need enough energy to make it either from that day or from prior days. At grid scale daily production is never 0 and it’s never 100%. You can guarantee a surplus all 365 days a year, it’s just a cost vs benefit function, that’s however different from always fully charging your energy storage. If hypothetically the minimum was 99.9% o…
Regardless, that buffer doesn't make a big difference in the topic here. My panel regularly show 0Wh on rainy days, PR effectively 0 as they may be getting only a few percent of real capacity.
How do you propose industrial scale would allow a series of arrays could both not be oversized on sunny days and cover usage on cludy days?
If I'm misunderstanding your argument I apologize. I just don't see how a data center could possibly be okay with having only a single day worth of storage and generation without having backup power scaled to cover their full usage demands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to full capacity every day. A common misconception you don’t need to hit 100%, you need enough energy to make it either from that day or from prior days. At grid scale daily production is never 0 and it’s never 100%. You can guarantee a surplus all 365 days a year, it’s just a cost vs benefit function, that’s however different from always fully charging your energy storage. If hypothetically the minimum was 99.9% o…
Not a misconception, just a discrepancy in what we were describing. I well understand that you shouldn't hit 0% for battery health and that the last 10-20% charge takes much longer than the middle of the charge cycle. I was responding to the idea of only having capacity for a night and using it 365 days per year, I took that to mean a full charge/discharge cycle every day since otherwise you have more capacity than a…
> could both not be oversized on sunny days and cover usage on cludy days?
That isn’t a problem that’s worth trying to solve. Grid solar power is so cheap you can waste 70% over a year (even more on sunny days) and in many areas still be paying less than coal per kWh.
Ultimately the grid doesn’t care about being oversized for specific days. There’s a wild difference in demand on sunny day in the summer vs a day that’s 70f. When it was 70f in the 1970’s they didn’t go out and destroy nuclear reactors or coal plants because they are unnecessary in May. That’s valuable infrastructure even when not in current use.
The only metric grid operators care about is does this grid design need the demand and what does it cost. Peaking power plants exist to fit edge case demands even if not used for months at a time, “peaking solar” isn’t a term anyone uses but solar + batteries can fit that niche.
capex certainty for 20 years. smart if AI demand holds, very expensive if it doesn't
Why? 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?