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Abilene, Texas is also a great place to build a solar power plant with some batteries and reduce the gas bills for these datacenters. EDIT: I am not suggesting
by konschubert 5mo ago
Abilene, Texas is also a great place to build a solar power plant with some batteries and reduce the gas bills for these datacenters.
EDIT: I am not suggesting that they don’t build gas turbines or go off grid. I’m saying they can save fuel by using solar when it’s there.
- noosphr 5mo agoThere isn't a battery in the world big enough to provide enough power for data enter if this size. Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.
- konschubert 5mo agoA big AI data center uses about 1 GWh of power each night. A large battery storage site is about 500MWh. So this is totally doable and it’s also going to be economical as soon as the US has built enough LNG export capacity.
- noosphr 5mo agoThat's a big data enter from last decade. Today big data enters use 4GWh power in winter. So only 8 of them.
- konschubert 5mo ago4GWh of power in what time frame? Either way, in winter you’ll need the gas turbines, I didn’t claim otherwise.
- vrighter 5mo agoso, half an hour's worth?
- gnabgib 5mo agoA medium AI data center uses 1GWh.. per hour.. 10-14GWh overnight (the shoulders aren't strong solar producers). Google 1GW (India), Meta 2GW (Louisiana), Meta 1GW (Texas), Stargate 1GW (UAE), Tsukuba 1GW (Japan), Gangwon Hyperscaler 1GW (South Korea), Teesside AI 6GW (UK). https://constructionreviewonline.com/top-5-largest-data-centers-with-over-1gw-capacity-under-construction/ https://constructionreviewonline.com/top-5-largest-data-cent...
- konschubert 5mo agoHi, I think that's a fair point, I underestimated the power needs. For a 1GW data center, the economical case is probably to build about 2 GWp of solar, plus a 5GWh battery or so. That is not unrealistic: https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/masdar-and-consortium-partners-achieve-financial-close https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/masdar-and-consortium-par... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/28/catl-secures-worlds-largest-sodium-ion-battery-order-with-hyperstrong/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/28/catl-secures-worlds-l... On a sunny day, that will let you to power the data center fully from solar for most of the day, and partially through the night. Obviously you need ~1GW of gas turbine capacity as well, for the non-so-sunny-days, so the economic case for solar here is dependent on the fuel price.
- NkVczPkybiXICG 5mo ago[flagged]
- nicoburns 5mo agoThe Pacific Ocean is a bit of an exageration here. There isn't a single battery this big today, but if batteries continue following the exponential growth curve they've been on then there probably will be in the next decade or so (if not sooner).
- noosphr 5mo agoThere's a bit of a difference between 'some batteries' and at least five times the size of the largest battery ever build.
- nicoburns 5mo agoThere is, and "some batteries" is an under count, however: - The ratio between "some water" and "the pacific ocean" is a lot higher than 5 - On an exponential growth curve, a factor of 5 isn't all that much. This probably isn't feasible for a data center being built today (although they could build solar to at least reduce their fossil fuel power generation needs during the day). But it probably will be for data centers being built in 5-10 years time. Basically it's important to differentiate between "we can't quite do this yet" and "we'll likely never be able to do this". And powering a data center with rewnewables+batteries is definitely in the former category.
- konschubert 5mo agoYou will always use gas for cloudy days or maybe in winter. I didn’t claim solar should be the sole source of power.
- nmbrskeptix 5mo ago[dead]
- red75prime 5mo agoSome batteries? Battery-backed solar has the highest cost as a baseload power source due to high intermittency of solar power.
- applied_heat 5mo agoDo you have a source for this? I constantly point out that several cloudy days in a row often happens but am rebutted with graphs of the declining costs of solar modules and batteries
- red75prime 5mo agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Figure 3 When used as the sole source of electricity solar clocks at 565 EUR/MWh. Nuclear, for comparison, is at 141 EUR/MWh.
- konschubert 5mo agoNobody is suggesting to use solar as the sole source of electricity. That would obviously be insane and then leads to silly numbers like the ones you gave. A MWh of solar is about 30 Euro/MWh if you levelize the capital costs.
- red75prime 5mo agoThe article discusses why LCOE is not a good estimate of the costs. Yes, combining different sources lowers the total cost (by damping intermittency). For Denmark it's offshore wind and solar in a 7 to 1 ratio (plus natural gas or biomethane power plants). > Nobody is suggesting to use solar as the sole source of electricity. You weren't clear on what you propose.
- konschubert 5mo agohttps://has-electricity-decoupled-yet.strommarktberatung.de https://has-electricity-decoupled-yet.strommarktberatung.de Germany has a lot of solar. It's suppressing prices below the electricity price you would get with pure gas power generation.
- natpalmer1776 5mo agoEveryone is talking about batteries but honestly you don’t need batteries. - Data centers don’t sleep - Data center load (for AI) could be shifted to follow the sun - The energy requirements mean you aren’t likely to overbuild your solar farm At night just stop running your GPUs and / or pull from the grid
- applied_heat 5mo agoSeems crazy to build an expensive factory and then cheap out on the power source so it can only run when it is sunny out
- red75prime 5mo agoUsing GPUs as paperweights at night doesn't seem to be an efficient usage and it comes with its own costs. "Pull from the grid" is what they try not to do.
- theteapot 5mo ago<50% utilization of billions of dollars of capex. Brilliant idea.