Comment by ilaksh

9 hours ago

This almost seems like a straw man to me. Isn't the much larger problem the actual increased energy usage and making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers?

I am a huge proponent of AI actually, but very suspicious that "financiers" are suddenly creating what amounts to an energy tax by finding legal ways to sneak extra fees or rates into our electricity bills to cover build out and commercial usage costs.

But as far as smoothing out demand, my (admittedly a layperson) theory is that we need to force them to adapt more solar and wind and at the same time more facilities for handling the variable production from that. Such as more large batteries and a shift to large scale long term storage of renewable fuel like hydrogen or other fuels produced directly from renewable sources.

If you have a large production and storage of renewable fuel, then maybe you can build that in such a way that it can handle significant input variations that could include excess grid power.

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ilaksh

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phil21  9 hours ago

Solar and wind would make it worse.

What matters is peak capacity. Using the grid as a free battery for when your intermittent sources of energy go away against your fairly constant loads only makes the grid weaker overall. The best part of these huge predictable load centers is utilization factor.

Storage of some sort would probably help some, but overall the best type of load for a grid is predictable constant usage. Bonus points if it can reasonably be part of a load shedding/demand response program.

  • DoctorOetker  4 hours ago

    Some kind of large aerostat / inflatabe chimney reaching up till the tropopause largely insulating for most of its length, but with heat engines on top and on bottom. I'm not proposing to use water / ice transition, but just consider a hypothetical strong suspension system, heaving a bucket of water weighing 1 mass unit can be powered by lowering a bucket of ice weighing 1 mass unit (ignore tiny density difference). So one can simultaneously bring 2 thermal baths close together, both at the bottom of the heat loop (where ambient temperature and tropopause temperature in the loop are close by each other) as well as at the top (where ambient cold tropopause temperature and surface temperature in the loop are close by each other). So both at the top and the bottom mechanical power can be generated with a heat engine.

    The ground level vs tropopause temperature difference is not perfectly stable but largely maintained throughout day and night cycles, it is effectively base load, no nuclear required! We could generate energy while helping the planet cool.

    Best to place these in seas, at least 1 structure length away from coastline, not in the middle of densely populated area. Salty sea water can be frozen (purifying it because ions get pushed into the brine) for desalination, brought to conventional thermal power plants, melted on their cold sides producing potable water while improving the thermodynamic efficiency of the thermal power plant (more electric energy per unit of fuel / rod spent).

AnthonyMouse  8 hours ago

Data centers are pretty useful for adding more renewables to the grid. They generally have both a UPS (for short-term outages) and backup generators (for long-term outages). UPS means they're already paying for inverters and some amount of batteries, and then in combination with a more renewable grid, it makes sense to put the grid storage batteries there, and they have the incentive to do it to take advantage of time of day metering by actually running on them during peak demand hours. Likewise, if you have a huge capacity backup generator and the grid is stressed because renewable generation is low (and therefore prices get high), you can turn it on. Which allows the grid to get more power from renewables the other 95% of the time.

jeffbee  9 hours ago

Texas is the standing proof that "making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers" is not a problem. Texas has the most load, the most marginal load added every year, and the cheapest retail power. Load grew 15% in the 5 years to 2024, and retail prices fell by 1¢.