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West Texas is like Costco for natural gas. There are cases where the fields can produce more than the pipelines can carry away. If you put your gigantic gas tu
by bob1029 4mo ago
West Texas is like Costco for natural gas.
There are cases where the fields can produce more than the pipelines can carry away. If you put your gigantic gas turbines right next to the fields you can obtain access to some extremely cheap fuel. They might even pay you to burn it sometimes. Negative gas prices are a thing.
- epistasis 4mo agoAnd despite that, when there's any sort of price pressure, like there is for new electricity grid additions from investors, solar and batteries completely dominate the choice over natural gas in Texas. Look at the map for 2026 of the grid buildout in Texas at the bottom of this page: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 All solar and batteries (yellow and black), with a few tiny blue dots for gas. It was the same story in 2025. And it will be the same story in 2027 because solar and batteries are getting even cheaper. These are all decisions from private investors, trying to make money, and choosing solar and batteries over gas in the market where gas is the cheapest in the world, gas is like a waste product that's hard to get rid of. Why would Microsoft choose dirty energy when all the profit-driven investors are choosing cheaper solar and storage?
- ElevenLathe 4mo agoThis is just a guess, but is the reason the same one that the gas is cheap all the way out in BFE west Texas? In other words, even if you could generate electricity from wellhead gas more cheaply than a bunch of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries just west of Fort Worth, can you actually export it to east Texas where all the demand is? The solution here being: let's build our giant demand machine directly on the steppe and skip all that expensive infra, because data is much cheaper to move than energy.
- bob1029 4mo ago> data is much cheaper to move than energy It's something like 5-10 orders of magnitude cheaper to move information over fiber than it is to move the energy required to produce that same information through a [pipe/power]line.
- Doches 4mo agoI know this is nitpicking, but as a Texan I have to correct you on a point of grammar. The “west” in “West Texas” (and similarly for the other regions) isn’t an adjective; it’s part of the proper noun and should be capitalized. So it’s “West Texas,” not “west Texas.” Yes, this is weird and no, I have no idea why we do it, but it’s really weird to read “export it to east Texas” — to the extent that I had to re-parse the sentence to figure out what you meant.
- ElevenLathe 4mo agoThanks for this. I'm past the edit window now, but both ways felt wrong and I just picked one. I suppose "western Texas" and "eastern Texas" is what I should have written to avoid the problem.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago> let's build our giant demand machine directly on the steppe and skip all that expensive infra, because data is much cheaper to move than energy. Who cares if it's cheaper. It's that you're moving less of it. The more processing you can do near the source the smaller and cheaper your pipe out to the consumer can be. Cut the tree on the hillside. Mill it in the valley. Then spend your precious boxcar volume shipping only the finished lumber out of the valley.
- ElevenLathe 4mo agoRight, shipping finished lumber is cheaper (per dollar of value) than shipping logs. That's exactly my point, but the lumber is bits and the electricity is the logs. A datacenter is a mill for turning electricity into bits!
- qsxfthnkp2322 4mo agoBecause management at big tech could give any shits about you or where they live. It’s easy to see.
- SJC_Hacker 4mo agoDoes that graph take into account capacity factor ?
- gnerd00 4mo agoWest Texas is also a basket of methane leakage -- see CarbonMapper et al
- jambalaya8 4mo agolooks like a terrible idea from my perspective also.
- sidewndr46 4mo agoReplace "extremely cheap" with "zero cost" and you've got it correct. Texas at night is an endless sea of flare stacks. We burn off an unbelievable amount of natural gas just to get rid of it.
- otterley 4mo agoI've often wondered how this is lawful under the EPA. Obviously it must be, but it seems like a gross oversight to allow people to just burn natural gas and allow its byproducts to escape into the atmosphere yet not get any useful work out of it.
- sidewndr46 4mo agoIt's legal because the government allows it. How else would it work?
- otterley 4mo agoThanks, Captain Obvious. ;) the underlying question was why (although I used the word how and that’s on me).
- bob1029 4mo agoThe alternative is significantly worse.