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Because I expect the economics of enough batteries to carry a data center’s worth of demand through the night and morning is too expensive compared to essential
by alex43578 4mo ago
Because I expect the economics of enough batteries to carry a data center’s worth of demand through the night and morning is too expensive compared to essentially free natural gas.
Data centers would ideally run at ~100% utilization, so any drop in solar output needs to be fully met by batteries.
- jeffbee 4mo ago> Data centers would ideally run at ~100% utilization I don't think this is broadly accepted among major data center operators.
- Matticus_Rex 4mo agoIIRC ERCOT estimated from their experience it was something like 85% on average?
- pixl97 4mo agoOf conventional data centers or one's running GPUs? If you're not saturating your GPUs you're likely leaving money on the table.
- jeffbee 4mo agoI don't really agree. The energy component of opex still dominates over the depreciation.
- hollerith 4mo agoFor AI data centers? Depreciation on the GPUs and AI accelerators is a bigger cost than electricity. Now it might be that a new data center will find it more difficult to obtain a reliable supply of electricity than to obtain GPUs, but your statement was about expenses.