Comment by YetAnotherNick
8 hours ago
Except neither ChatGPT and nor sources say this. First source says:
> Gas-fired generation could meet data centers’ immediate power needs and transition to backup generation over time, panelists told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
What you are saying has nothing to do with local, but has to do with large abrupt changes in electricity usage, and datacenter electricity usage is generally more predictible and smooth than most other industry.
I'm not talking about fluctuations (i.e. a datacenter with fluctuating usage). I'm taking about adding a datacenter to an existing grid. That significantly changes the baseline load on the grid, and that is a local problem because transmission is not universally even across an entire grid.
If your transmission line is saturated, it doesn't matter how much more generation you add on the source end, it's not gonna deliver 'more' over the transmission lines.
And that is just a simplistic local example, because it's not a single producer, single consumer, single transmission line scenario. ChatGPT and the article aren't diving in to that. The closest they might get is congestion but even then you already have to know the issue to be able to ask about it.
As far as the article itself is involved here, this tread mostly goes into the reason why global usage percentages doesn't mean there are no problems. It's like saying gerrymandering has no impact because of some percentages elsewhere.