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Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never ap

Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.

jameslk 1y ago
China controls 80% of the supply chain for solar and has most of the rare earth magnets needed for wind. Since China is America’s bugbear and containing China’s influence is a bipartisan issue, this was a likely outcome whoever is in office https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex... Of course, renewables aren’t the only source of energy
- burkaman 1y ago
  We don't have to guess what the most likely outcome might have been, someone else was in office 7 months ago so we can just look at what they were doing.
  - jameslk 1y ago
    Yes, moving away from China
    - hkt 1y ago
      Not, one assumes, from renewables.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      But not at the expense of building renewable energy, as is the current administration's policy.
      - jameslk 1y ago
        https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/14/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-action-to-protect-american-workers-and-businesses-from-chinas-unfair-trade-practices/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-brace-higher-costs-biden-hikes-tariffs-2024-05-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-br...
    - burkaman 1y ago
      Were they "cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant"? That's the "likely outcome" we're discussing.
      - jameslk 1y ago
        Yes, the US has been scaling back on China-sourced renewable energy supply chains since 2023 at least, with tariffs and by removing incentives Not exactly your wording at that time, but my point still stands that the outcome was going to be the same because the imports were heavily skewed towards China. This has all been in motion before this current admin
declan_roberts 1y ago
Solar and wind are not adequate power supply for a data center. You think data centers only run for 8 hours a day?
- GrifMD 1y ago
  That's a bad faith argument and you know it. More power is more power. These projects weren't taking away from development of other power plants.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  That's what these are for: https://www.tesla.com/megapack https://www.tesla.com/megapack
- namibj 1y ago
  They're VERY suitable for such trivially deferrable workloads as (much of) AI (specifically, LLM pretraining and other similar training).
  - Jabrov 1y ago
    What makes you think it’s a deferrable workload? Companies don’t buy all that expensive hardware to just have it sit there inactive.
    - namibj 1y ago
      You're conflating two things that shouldn't be: (1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster. For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough. For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.

Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.

jameslk 1y ago

China controls 80% of the supply chain for solar and has most of the rare earth magnets needed for wind. Since China is America’s bugbear and containing China’s influence is a bipartisan issue, this was a likely outcome whoever is in office https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex... Of course, renewables aren’t the only source of energy

burkaman 1y ago
We don't have to guess what the most likely outcome might have been, someone else was in office 7 months ago so we can just look at what they were doing.
- jameslk 1y ago
  Yes, moving away from China
  - hkt 1y ago
    Not, one assumes, from renewables.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    But not at the expense of building renewable energy, as is the current administration's policy.
    - jameslk 1y ago
      https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/14/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-action-to-protect-american-workers-and-businesses-from-chinas-unfair-trade-practices/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-brace-higher-costs-biden-hikes-tariffs-2024-05-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-br...
  - burkaman 1y ago
    Were they "cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant"? That's the "likely outcome" we're discussing.
    - jameslk 1y ago
      Yes, the US has been scaling back on China-sourced renewable energy supply chains since 2023 at least, with tariffs and by removing incentives Not exactly your wording at that time, but my point still stands that the outcome was going to be the same because the imports were heavily skewed towards China. This has all been in motion before this current admin

declan_roberts 1y ago

Solar and wind are not adequate power supply for a data center. You think data centers only run for 8 hours a day?

GrifMD 1y ago
That's a bad faith argument and you know it. More power is more power. These projects weren't taking away from development of other power plants.
gwbas1c 1y ago
That's what these are for: https://www.tesla.com/megapack https://www.tesla.com/megapack
namibj 1y ago
They're VERY suitable for such trivially deferrable workloads as (much of) AI (specifically, LLM pretraining and other similar training).
- Jabrov 1y ago
  What makes you think it’s a deferrable workload? Companies don’t buy all that expensive hardware to just have it sit there inactive.
  - namibj 1y ago
    You're conflating two things that shouldn't be: (1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster. For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough. For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.