4 ms·

I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible. Burning half a million dollars per day in single cycle turbines will eventually cause t

by bob1029 4mo ago

I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible. Burning half a million dollars per day in single cycle turbines will eventually cause trouble for accounting. Running on exactly one kind of fuel is also a bit risky for a few reasons. The grid offers a significantly more diverse fuel mix. It might occasionally be more expensive, but it is also much more reliable. The grid also offers significantly better fault handling & inertia. An order of magnitude better or more. All those aeroderivative turbines together don't make for much of a brick wall. They are quite fragile compared to what you would find in the turbine hall of a combined cycle plant. GPU load tends to be non-linear and coordinated. To the other side of a circuit it could look like a fault condition when a large cluster fires up a training batch.

finnthehuman 4mo ago
>I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible. In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it. Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.
agnosticmantis 4mo ago
> ... will eventually cause trouble for accounting. Accounting has never been a concern in a Musk company or to his shareholders, as is evident from SpaceX IPO. People invest in him because he can make "number go up" regardless of profit and loss. He's not running conventional profitable businesses, but ponzi-esque growth stories that keep ballooning to no ends without ever reaching a climax. Nobody cares today what he promised 5 years ago (e.g. Tesla owners making $35k/yr passive income from their cars robotaxi'ing) because they're looking at what he's promising for the next 5 years (probably humanoid robots on Mars with an infinite TAM).

by bob1029 4mo ago

finnthehuman 4mo ago

>I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible. In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it. Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.

agnosticmantis 4mo ago

> ... will eventually cause trouble for accounting. Accounting has never been a concern in a Musk company or to his shareholders, as is evident from SpaceX IPO. People invest in him because he can make "number go up" regardless of profit and loss. He's not running conventional profitable businesses, but ponzi-esque growth stories that keep ballooning to no ends without ever reaching a climax. Nobody cares today what he promised 5 years ago (e.g. Tesla owners making $35k/yr passive income from their cars robotaxi'ing) because they're looking at what he's promising for the next 5 years (probably humanoid robots on Mars with an infinite TAM).