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points by 1970-01-01 16 hours ago | 0 comments

Politically force datacenters to consume only solar and battery. Instead of total collapse, we now have tremendous amounts of cheap energy when the bubble implodes. That seems like the only way to hedge the bet on AI.

[–] Ringz 14 hours ago

I like this idea, but they’re already doing this. Just not all data centres.

I think Google's first offshore purchase was 92 MW from the Norther wind farm in Belgium. TSMC will buy all the power from Ørsted's 920 MW Greater Changhua 2b & 4 offshore wind farm for the next 20 years.

There are examples in Germany but mainly for chemical and steel factories.

The best way to “force them” is a global emissions trading system + carbon levy. But his might be very unlikely in the next 10–15 years and maybe as complex as Peace in the Middle East.

[–] boringg 15 hours ago

Reliability issues. You cannot get 4 9s with solar and battery.

[–] Zigurd 14 hours ago

Compared with gas turbines? The main reason power is supply constrained is that gas turbines are a precision high-tech product that fails catastrophically if you don't build it right and maintain it.

Bloom fuel cells are a plausible alternative, but they are in the process of building out their manufacturing capacity, and operating experience at data center scale hasn't been tested. Bloom's process also involves extremely high temperatures, which could result in uptime and maintenance issues.

[–] boringg 14 hours ago

Im not a gas booster -- but turbine technology is pretty impressive. Id go with nuclear before gas for sure - especially for these larger long lived sites.

I would say you end up with battery+solar and gas turbine/gensets providing power when solar+batteries cant fill the gap. Its a bit expensive to be adding so many different sources on site to shore up power supply.

FWIW obvious maintenance work required to keep turbines going.

[–] Zigurd 10 hours ago

Leadtime for nuclear power, unless you wanna buy a sketchy Russian submarine reactor that's been rusting in an arctic bay, is decades longer than even the supply constrained gas turbines.

I don't know why you think solar needs two forms of back up. Batteries are very reliable.

[–] Y-bar 14 hours ago

Which is why just about everyone is saying that a mix of energy sources, such as combing solar with wind, is a good thing.

[–] boringg 13 hours ago

What are you talking about -- almost no one goes with a mix of energy. It should be renewables + nuclear + storage and were golden. Everyone just goes solar+battery saying thats all we need, it isn't.

And gas/fuel has high functional use as a differentiated energy product - we just don't need to use so much of it -- keep it on the smaller end of the use case spectrum.

[–] lenerdenator 15 hours ago

Is the point of the battery not to add 9s with solar?

[–] boringg 14 hours ago

Yes the point of batteries is to add backup power when solar goes down - and it does. However the two of them do not get to 4 9's of uptime which is needed for these large data facilities.

[–] lenerdenator 13 hours ago

At least in my personal use - which is admittedly far smaller - I just see the battery as the main source. Solar exists to charge it.

[–] senordevnyc 4 hours ago

AI is never going to implode the way you’re hoping. We’re never going to end up with massive amounts of “dark data centers”.

[–] solyin 4 hours ago

The question is what are they going to get used for if the current market for them dries up? Say LLM chatbots demand craters for some reason. Let's just say magic. At $0.01/hr for a GPU machine, other than cryptocurrency, what would people use GPUs for?

The answer is there's a lot at that price, so then we go upwards and do price discovery to find out what applications there are and how much they're able to pay, but one thing is certain, even without LLMs there's demand for GPUs, the only question is at what price.

[–] Geonode 13 hours ago

"Politically force X" is practically always a failure.