Comment by cyberax
6 hours ago
> Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else
Except that they don't.
Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?
6 hours ago
> Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else
Except that they don't.
Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?
Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways.
You’ll see them all connecting to the grid in the following years simply because it’s cheaper
Indeed. And the problem with grid connections is that the grid can't carry arbitrary streams of energy. So you can't just connect a bunch of remote panels to the grid and YOLO it on the scale of the large datacenters.
This problem does not go away, though. It's still an issue for renewable generation, especially for northern areas.
Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.
Honestly a lot of different reasons. One they can put natgas on a private disconnected grid direct on the same property.
The other big ones is states ignoring the environmental rules of all the negative side effects of said generation.
DC's better be careful or any government change and their choices now will bite them in the ass.
Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.