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It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.
by chaos_emergent 2mo ago
It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.
Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.
The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.
For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
- smallerize 2mo agoNatural gas generators are also a supply bottleneck. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threatens-natural-gas-fired-power-expansion/ https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threat...
- dathinab 2mo ago_decent, clean_ gas generators have a bottleneck cheap, dirty, loud "tbh. shouldn't exist" kind fo gas generators are far more available and what is widely used but also huge part of the solar supply bottleneck is artificial due to import regulations from china and both the US and EU having failed to secure meaningful domestic solar supply chains.
- cbmuser 2mo ago»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.« No, it's just physics.
- dathinab 2mo agono, it's not physics but politics which are the problem here
- TitaRusell 2mo agoAmerica produces a ton of LNG. Its cheap and corporations will ALWAYS choose cheap unless the government steps in.