Comment by rgmerk
6 hours ago
To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
6 hours ago
To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
You can't run a turbine 24/7 either, they require maintenance windows.
Wind is better than solar in many places and somewhat reduces the need for batteries
From ERCOT's stats- wind is complimentary. But, I can't find any hard data on intraday/hourly power usage for AI it seems reasonable to assume that night time use will be lower though.
And so it doesn't have to be looked up: Wind seems to peak at dawn/dusk when solar is not delivery much power, solar peaks in line with air-conditioning load, and there's a miniscule amount of grid scale battery to hold up the grid during a short gap between solar and wind. The batteries are recharged with solar. At least that was the pattern this summer- I need to check now that it's winter.