Comment by Zigurd
7 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.
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.
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.