Infrastructure nerd, gamer, and Lemmy.ca maintainer

  • 5 Posts
  • 422 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. “Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around 2 years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders,” the report states. That’s because essentially all you have to do is put up a bunch of solar panels and some batteries and run a wire to your data center—not build a huge centralized power plant and connect it to the grid. The report continues, “Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”

    I like this.



  • Oh that’s super interesting, thanks for the heads up.

    If it was unreliable I’d do this, but despite going through the LG cloud it’s pretty bulletproof and instant. I just have to open their app every 6-12 months or so to accept a new EULA. Really shows how shitty their app is though, since their cloud back-end seems solid.

    Edit: Oh actually, this feature might sell me on doing it: “the unit doesn’t make annoying sounds when settings are changed by this controller”