Anyone know? Feel like I should get educated on this so I don’t look silly when I talk about it. I guess we can support it much more easily than I thought.
Anyone know? Feel like I should get educated on this so I don’t look silly when I talk about it. I guess we can support it much more easily than I thought.
On-premises natural gas turbines.
Yes, that is an ecological disaster and will exacerbate climate change.
No, the people implementing this do not care.
This is the answer. The USA’s capacity to build utility-scale plants has atrophied significantly since the 90s, and would require a decade of ramp-up to meet the projected demand. We literally don’t have enough engineers and other specialists to do it, so you’re talking about putting people through school and training before there would even be enough hands to physically do the labor. On top of that, it would require industrial policy to make the financing work (e.g., government-backed loans, because of course it would all be done through private companies).
In the meantime, you can do stuff like import gas turbines from South Korea.
Uh… You literally just said we can’t do the thing and then said we’ll do the thing. Gas turbines from South Korea are the components you need to build a power plant. Sure, you can build it behind the meter, but it still requires engineers and other specialists and as you said, we don’t have enough of those to go around. So, no, the idea of making independent power plants to run these data centers is just as hard as making grid-attached power plants
There’s a difference between building more grid capacity and building a private generator.
One requires more engineering expertise than the other.
But it’s the same type of engineering expertise, of which we have a shortage. For example, Amazon said they’re going to build a 7.5GW gas power plant for their data center cluster. The largest gas power plant in the world is 8.5GW and it took 40 years to build. It sort of doesn’t matter if Amazon’s plant is going to be grid-attached or not, it’s going to be a massive engineer effort.
Easier to engineer for one customer than 20,000, maybe.
Yes, the grid itself is infrastructure that is failing regardless of the state of power plants, and going behind the meter eliminates that one complexity. But that’s not as much a rarified engineering problem as it is a straight up under-developed infrastructure problem.
There’s still a 3+ year waiting list for gas turbines. There’s still a massive shortage of engineers that can build a power plant. The power plants are still incredibly difficult. And a.i. workloads are so volatile that it requires entirely new solutions to power management.
Oh so we’re cooked then. Nice to know I can stop worrying about putting money into my 401k
No joke. I have a pension that I’m sure I’ll never get to draw from. How many once in a lifetime financial crises must the millennial generation endure? I’d gladly give up my retirement/financial future to see the whole thing blow up, though. I just hope the kids are alright.