By Jo Nova
New AI Data Centers need so much energy, so fast, they’re are going off-grid
Such is the blistering race to get ahead in the global AI battle, that the industry is not waiting for the bureaucrats to build new power plants anymore, they are doing it themselves. And the leading edge of data engineers are not choosing the clean green wind or solar power of the future — they’re building gas plants. The sun and wind are free, but the battery back up, high voltage lines, long approvals, and unreliable supply cost the Earth.
What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants
Dylan Baddour, Arcelia Martin, Ars Technica
The plant would be big enough to power a major city, with 1,200 megawatts of planned generation capacity fueled by West Texas shale gas. It will only supply the new data center, and possibly other large data centers recently proposed, down the road.
The project is one of many others like it proposed in Texas, where a frantic race to boot up energy-hungry data centers has led many developers to plan their own gas-fired power plants rather than wait for connection to the state’s public grid.
It was Energy Transfer’s first-ever contract to supply gas for a data center, but it is unlikely to be its last. In a press release, the company said it was “in discussions with a number of data center developers and expects this to be the first of many agreements.”
Behold the modern gold-rush — look at the number of applications to build power (of all sorts) and connect it to the grid in Texas:
There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.
Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, claims people don’t care about renewables now, they just want power:
The reliance on gas power for data centers is a departure from previous thought, said Larry Fink, founder of global investment firm BlackRock, speaking to a crowd of industry executives at an oil and gas conference in Houston in March.
About four years ago, if someone said they were building a data center, they said it must be powered by renewables, he recounted. Two years ago, it was a preference.
“Today?” Fink said. “They care about power.”
To get some idea on the seismic transition that is really underway, ponder that one of the new start ups wants 5,000MW of energy for a new data center covering 2,600 acres, and it is going in to a small town in Texas of less than a thousand people. That’s a massive 5GW for a town of 940 people.
There are still a few projects with renewable ambition. One project team that requires just 120MW said it will use just wind power and one large plant says they hope to run a 5GW data center on “private wind, solar and hydrogen” but they will start with gas at first.
We, here in Australia, are not even in the race.
America with its pro-energy policies will remain the world centre of AI, as indeed it already is.
The Australian Government is either unbelievably stupid or unbelievably naive, or both, to think that AI centres will be attracted to Australia in any significant numbers. Energy-intensive industries will only come if offered taxpayer subsidies like the aluminium industry already receives.
AI needs enormous amounts of inexpensive and reliable power which Australia no longer has and the country is committed to even more expensive power as we approach, or pretend to approach Net Zero.
Australia will be lucky to keep the lights in, let alone have large scale data centres.
450
But our genius PM Alabanese has bought $1Billion of shares in a Californian Quantum Computer business. Without explanation, justification or expectation of success. Even the inventors, IBM, have withdrawn from the area. It’s a failed idea.
But when you have infinite money, no oversight, no need to explain or make a business plan and are not held accountable, it’s like being God with other people’s money.
Not that Liberal PMs like Malcolm Tunrbull were ever held to account for his $444Million gift to his wife. Or $12Billion on Snowy II, which if it is ever finished will never be used.
When did Australia give the PM power to do as he pleased with our money, without oversight or even the simplest of conditions. Now we building solar panels for the Chinese ($1Bn) and Nuclear Submarines in a country where nuclear power is illegal.
Responsible government is such an old concept. And nothing to do with Australia. Science laws are written by politicians who cannot add or multiply or face any consequences for extreme stupidity.
180
“When did Australia give the PM power to do as he pleased with our money”?
When the parliament, for all practical intents and purposes, became complicit in the net-zero fiction. And so it remains. All Australian political parties, government, media and tertiary institutions have a fundamental policy of and dedication to enervation in their — our — country. This has popular support.
Likewise intellectual indolence. All of which will bring a dreadful price in years to come. And that forthcoming disaster (if it’s not here already, it has begun, pricing tells one that) has been a conscious decision.
100
Having been thought on Minsk22 and PDP11, I must be at least 2 generations behind of current IT thinking but please indulge the old man.
What is so huge benefit of centralised data centre that justifies the reworking of a country power grid?
(Maybe it is a sleeping kgbist in me, who sees enemies everywhere…)
60
Apologies on behalf of my auto spellcheck – taught, not thought!
But now, as read to the page’s end, maybe I am not that behind?
20
Yes, Net Zero, Climate Change have been legislated into vast spending. Not just the budgeted amounts but the off budget and Green certificates and Carbon Credits amount to hundreds of billions of dollars of outright theft, not approved by mandate or legally valid.
It’s a runaway government where all sides of politics do what they want and the public servants get their ideas rubber stamped through parliament which has nothing more than an Auto Sign function. And the media says nothing, questions nothing except what they are told, which is nothing. There are even pundits and opportunists demanding a ‘price on carbon’ when it has existed as revenue for 25 years.
Democracy in Australia has collapsed, perhaps first in Victoria under Daniel Andrews but I believe it started earlier in Canberra where the bien pensant Liberals introduced the world’s leading carbon theft, copied in the UK because it was so good and so secret. Who needs paraliament?
80
I doubt the Australian government has thought about it beyond a few buzzwords.
That said, perhaps there’s quite a few others who haven’t thought about this either … AI power requirements are somewhat unique from a computing perspective. Most of the power gets consumed during the training process, not the final usage of the model. This is an offline process and it doesn’t need round the clock reliable power because you can restart anytime. Therefore you would expect them to go in search of any cheap wholesale power … which does exist in Australia provided you don’t mind intermittency.
Now … right now there’s difficultly getting top of the line chips, and anyone paying all that money for a training rig would be reluctant to have the capital sitting there idle for 16 hours a day, waiting for a burst of cheap power when the sun is overhead. That’s going to change at some stage … and also the whole computing process will get more efficient, because it always does.
40
‘Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, claims people don’t care about renewables now, they just want power’
So there it is then.
Another younger prettier desperate potential we must focus all scare scheme comes along, and CAGW gets dumped like yesterday’s toast.
The only renewable thing is the grift.
Greta is already rebranding to Palestine.
271
Fink has had his head in the bubble for years.
Someone should suggest he read prior Jo Nova posts.
50
Down here in Oz, it’s remarkable that in the Digital Age we continue to live in our Antipodean information bubble. Decades ago we relied on telegrams and mail for news from afar. The limited amount of information in the former and the delayed arrival of the latter meant our people were often not up to speed. Phone calls OS were prohibitively expensive.
Fast forward to the 2020s and many of us are still captivated by MSM and either are unwilling, or unable to use the internet effectively, to research important topics. Whilst politicians are bleating about prospective AI centres and quantum computing, most of us are ignorant to the fact they cannot and will not be able to supply enough affordable and reliable power for such projects.
Larry Fink can see the writing on the wall. So can Google, they’re reviving or building nuclear power plants to provide AI energy. The French are offering sites close to nuclear reactors for potential AI suitors. Meanwhile, in the Bubble of Oz, we still pursue unfeasible net zero dreams and aspire to unattainable weather control.
20
Unbelievably, this is the view of the Business Council of Australia:
Surely they’re not serious?
360
I would imagine that any contract for large data centres needing vast amounts of energy would include a clause that would insist on power that is uninterrupted and cheap.
How can anyone offering renewables guarantee that?
211
A perfect example of believing your own BS.
210
The Coalition platform should be explicit, encourage consortiums to build their own gas fired power stations to run the data centres. The spin off from this is the natural development of towns in far flung places.
23
Forgot about the Coalition.
The Liberal Party is dead and Australia is now a one-party state. Tragically.
30
“placed” That’s a geographic (spatial) concept. {location, …, location}
Likewise for “regional hub”. If the hub doesn’t have reliable electricity there is just a donkey going round-and-round the center.
10
These people live in La-La Land.
Australia’s renewables can power AI and slash energy costs
30
Oh you know very well they are simply asking for taxpayers to subsidize business activity … as per standard Australian operating procedures.
Exactly which elaborate political hoops you need to jump through, and what you should pretend to believe might change from time to time … but wanting handouts never changes. It’s just how we do things around here.
Remember that sincerity is everything and once you can confidently fake that, then you are in the money!
60
The only thing renewable is the demand for cash. Australians in every respect are far worse off with politicians using fake unquestioned science to steal from Australians.
80
Where could Australia find a spare 100MW of inexpensive, reliable electricity, for a data centre, let alone 1GW to 2GW for a large AI “campus”?
Once the last power stations are shut down, Australia will have, if we’re lucky, just a little power for some household lighting, a bit of electricity to heat your daily ration of insects and power for a small handheld digital appliance like a phone or tablet to receive government propaganda and to monitor you.
270
Australia has oodles and oodles of cheap brown coal that could be used to power resource hog data centers and create jobs at home rather than shipping it all to China. All they need is big tech to start throwing around truckloads of cash to buy off politicians and get the energy regulations changed.
210
Steve:
I wasn’t aware that we shipped brown coal to China, or anywhere else.
Yes, we have lots of brown coal (mainly in Victoria) and lots of substandard black coal which the Chinese (or others) aren’t interesting in.
Possibly Victoria MIGHT be interested in a NEW industry rather than shutting down existing ones, but I wouldn’t think this is likely with their current politicians and bureaucrats, as current regulations are only interested in wrecking the economy.
90
India wanted to buy our brown coal from Victoriastan but the state government halted the export, because “coal bad”.
The simpleton Victorian Energy Minister of the time stopped it.
130
“The Age” campaigned on the idea that the new technology to extract the 66% of water from the brown coal before shipment would make it “blacker”. And black is dirty, bad, polluting. So our typically idiotic politicians banned the shipment.
The supremacy of politicians over science has only become worse as we Australians pay hundreds of billions for their ignorance and reach $2Trillion in debt despite being one of the most resource rich countries in the world. There is no source of energy Australian politicians have not outlawed except Chinese windmills and Chinese solar panels. And this despite the fact that they cannot explain why.
40
If the governors of the northern great plains states (Wyoming, Montana, both Dakotas) and Alaska were smart, they would fight tooth and nail to compete with Texas to land data centers. They’ve got oodles of cheap fossil fuel resources just like Texas, and have cold climates that make it much less energy intensive to keep data centers cool.
It also wouldn’t surprise me to see tech companies vertically integrate with gas/oil/coal companies to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels independent of market prices. That would help them to avoid price spikes (when prices are high) and supply shortages (when prices are low and companies start shutting down wells/mines).
150
Wyoming (and Bill Gates – where have I heard that name before?) are building a new nuclear plant.
It doesn’t produce a constant output unlike older types but can increase or decrease as demand needs over about 30%.
30
Steve mentions this: (my bolding here)
Look at this Table of power costs by State in the U.S. (it’s a PDF document, and here, be aware that whilst the EIA site Updates every two Months, the myriads of data tables like this at that EIA site are always a year behind, so while this data says 2023, it was current as at October 2024)
Now, note the unit cost for electricity for those four named States, as well as for Texas. (Look in West North Central for the Dakotas, and then in Mountain for Wyoming and Montana) Those four States are between 11 and 12 cents per KWH. Now even converting to AUD, that’s still only 18 cents per KWH, way less than what we pay here in Australia, and I’m currently paying 32 cents/KWH.
Even Texas (in West South Central) is only 14.5cents/KWH (22.3 cents in AUD)
Also of note, as you look at that Table, note the average power consumption per State. (and that’s KWH per Month) Even the whole of U.S. average is 855KWH a Month, and that’s (around) 30KWH per day, and here in Australia, we consume between 16KWH and 20KWH per day. (umm, you know, what Industrial wind plants refer to as homes supplied with clean electricity!!!)
Tony.
PostScript – Incidentally, to keep track of the addresses of places I have lived, I always hang on to one of the power bills I received at that address, and I started doing that back in 2010, and it’s interesting to look back at that power bill from 15 years ago, and there’s something worth pointing out here. Now, whilst the actual unit cost has risen from (2010) 17.13 cents per KWH to (2025) 31.81 cents per KWH, the big change (as Baldrick might have said ….. I have a ‘cunning plan’) is in the ‘service to property’ charge. Back in 2010 and earlier, that was a flat rate for the duration of the bill for that period, and it was $9.53 ….. for the 87 days period for that particular (and every) bill. Nowadays, they charge that supply charge (the original service to property charge) at $1.2767 per day, so that cost is now $114.90. (umm, effectively, the equivalent of an extra 4KWH of power per day) NOW can you see how the cost of electricity has risen, even though, umm, the man from the power company might say, hand on heart, the umm Unit cost is not all that much more, eh!
150
Can anyone name an energy-intensive non-subsidised industry anywhere in Australia or the world that successfully runs on what Australian propagandists tell us is “the cheapest and most reliable form of electricity generation”, wind and solar?
Fully woke Goolag AI says:
Surely there are some real-world examples of industries our resident Leftoids can tell us about?
Or are we getting to the crux of the matter? The real objective is the shut down of industry?
The only “industry” I can think of that benefits from wind and solar is subsidy harvesting.
240
I just asked GEMINI AI a similar question and then went down the rabbit hole of arguing that the CSIRO document it refers to is based on false assumptions and should be discarded as junk.
All it acknowledged was that many critics had pointed out the various failings in the document but that it was a controversial but “significant” document in the conversation about energy.
40
Grok AI gives me the following (after insisting unbiased data) –
Overview
The cheapest new-build electricity generation options in Australia, ranked by a statistically weighted metric (LCOE × 1/Capacity Factor × 24/Generation Hours per Day), are: (1) Gas ($A79–169/MWh), (2) Coal ($A100–210/MWh), (3) Nuclear ($A111–282/MWh), (4) Wind ($A360–1332/MWh), (5) Solar ($A500–1800/MWh). LCOE estimates from UNSW and IEA are: gas ($A75–120/MWh), coal ($A90–140/MWh), wind ($A50–80/MWh), solar ($A40–70/MWh), nuclear ($A100–200/MWh). Capacity factors: gas (85–95%), coal (80–90%), nuclear (85–90%), wind (30–40%), solar (20–30%).
Generation hours/day: gas/coal/nuclear (20–24), wind (6–10), solar (6–8).
Australia’s CO2 sink status (~180–250 Mt CO2, ~46–64% of ~390 Mt CO2 emissions) prioritizes economic drivers over elite climate narratives.
Ranked Options
Gas: Cheapest due to low LCOE and high reliability.
Coal: Competitive LCOE and reliability, but higher costs than gas.
Nuclear: Reliable but high LCOE increases weighted cost.
Wind: Low LCOE offset by intermittency; storage improves ranking.
Solar: Lowest LCOE but penalized by low reliability and hours.
20
The moment somebody uses LCOE costings, ignore them. LCOE cannot be used to accurately compare energy costs for different energy sources with vastly different lifetimes.
40
An AI centre or a data hub, (think cloud), requires electricity for the computer assets as well as the massive cooling plant to keep the place humming. A gas powered plant, co-located will also produce local heat. The whole site will have an excess of low grade heat energy emitted, (from the A/C mounted roof vents and if fitted, any power plant stacks).
It’s safe to say, (within sensible values), that all the electricity/fuel going in will be used to produce heat and that heat will be dumped into the atmosphere.
With each plant consuming energy like a moderate city but on a much smaller footprint, then they must be glowing like a hot coal when it comes to the local temperatures, especially in computer models.
I’d like to know WHICH climate model shows the inputs from these globally dispersed heaters. All that AI doesn’t make these places invisible, unless that is the plan.
So, has anyone seen a climate model run with hot coals on it or do they ignore their own?
100
Goolag and Microsoft try to be “environmentally friendly” and use water cooling.
However, that uses massive amounts of water.
From an article I wrote on data centres.
90
If the water is flowing away from the site, (think river or ocean), then the heat will be distributed elsewhere, if water cooling, (evaporation), then the heat will still be emitted AT the data centre.
My question still remains, are these centres showing up on heat maps in the climate models, they effectively a large city, housed on a small block. They should be hot embers in the grand scheme of things.
10
More and more often nowadays a prophetic 1973 novel Hellstrom’s Hive comes to mind.
00
But Larry it’s always been about heaps of low cost and reliable energy sources. Where have you been the last 30 years?
30
Harvesting subsidies, but he has now spotted a bigger gravy train.
70
+100
00
Why would Australia want AI? We have an overabundance of natural stupidity as a Federal Government.
190
Don’t forget the reserves in State Governments and local Councils.
120
The further away from Canberra the more ambitious a politician is.
20
Anyone who wants low cost power in Australia needs to be making their own. The grid has been stuffed fort 25 years. The total collapse is yet to come.
Texas has had the reset with Senate Bill 388. It places priority on dispatchable generation. And specifically excludes batteries as “generators”.
Meanwhile in Australia, Blackout has signed up Australian taxpayers to massive lifetime costs of white elephants that will not produce electricity but will garner government funds. And no ordinary citizen can know the cost because it is “commercial in confidence”.
So far the Australian taxpayer is locked into 23GW of new wind and solar and 9GW of new batteries and pumped storage not including Snowy 2.
https://aemoservices.com.au/tenders/capacity-investment-scheme
In Australia, batteries count as “renewable, dispatchable generation”. Only a clown would call a battery a generator. That alone highlights the incompetence of AEMO.
170
Rick, what would be the consequences of a large enterprise buying its own coal or gas and generating their own electricity on site? And what about diesel which is far more expensive than coal or gas?
Is that allowed? Would there be “carbon” taxes of some type?
100
And how are they going to get panning permission to burn coal in an urban setting? Not going to happen.
Gas generators, (if combined cycle), still need large cooling towers thanks to the lessons learned from Carnot. No one is going to allow them to be built anywhere near a city. And running them open cycle is not very smart and is relatively very expensive.
I have been involved with on site generation assets, (heat, mechanical or electrical power for it’s own consumption, etc), one was an alumina refinery and one was an LNG plant. And all plants that consume moderate amounts of fuel gases or coal are located a long way from urban areas. Planning schemes kill off anything near to people.
You could build a data centre remotely but who’d run it? Those IT geeks need their urban coffee shops with their smashed avocado snacks.
50
I saw on Aneroid, Broken Hill were running their gas turbine this morning.
10
You might be surprised at the sort of generating plant that runs or was running in residential areas. Hospitals usually have gas fired boilers. I know Latrobe University Bundoora campus has, or used to have, a 6MW GT trucked away in a sound proof building. They now have their own on-site solar farm.
Lots of plants require process heat. And more are adopting co-generation. Up till a decade ago, lignite heat beads were commonly used in Victoria for process heating. CSIRO were even experimenting with new combustion technology for them.
Every Aldi store is plastered in solar panels. They are essentially a day time business. I expect they make more electricity than they need but I do not know if they are storing any. My son’s physio practice, mostly day time business, sometimes gets payed for electricity rather than billed.
The simple fact is that weather dependent sources of energy are ubiquitous in Australia. It will always be lower cost to produce electricity at or near the load than transmit it from distant remote site to the load. The existing centralised grid is now inconsistent with a commercial/domestic economy, which Australia has become. The only remaining heavy industry is on life support or mining.
40
Part of the drive for privatisation of the grid was to allow private generators to send power across the grid from one site that generated excess power to another site that consumed more power than it produced.
Some heavy industry requires heat and the waste heat from an electric generator can be used for process heating. Visy was the big and vocal player outside the mining sector when the National grid was established. A number of coal mines had gas drainage generators for their own power and sent excess to the grid for very little return. The National grid enabled generators to “wheel” across the grid to consumer businesses thaey owned or had partnered with.
All this worked well and lowered the electricity price throughout the 1990s. Then the RET was established and the demise of the national grid was legislated. The notion of 5 minute bids were never contemplated in the early days of the market system design. Things like gas drainage would be offered at zero cost and were always scheduled if available. They still got paid the pool price.
Some businesses like Rio Tinto’s Yarwun Stage 1 bauxite refinery was set up based on co-generation. Buaxite refining requires steam and they train coal direct from the Bowen Basin to the Yarwun site. The original steam plant can produce 180MW of electricity, well above the site demand, but they will not pay to export so they are not utilising the generating capacity to full extend when prices go negative. They now have a gas fired GT in the second stage. I have not seen that plant. QAL also had its own power station and process heat using Bowen Basin coal. They did not export but they were contemplating adding additional generation to export.
Mount Isa Mines used to make their own power. They used a GT for that. Likewise all the iron ore mines make their own power (or a regional consortium) using NW Shelf gas.
All remote mines have their own power generators. Most based on diesel but increasing a mix of diesel and solar. I read Santos now use solar for their pumps. I know they and AGL had pipeline compressors that bled a bit of gas from the pipe to fire a small GT.
Large export businesses are not exposed to artificial pricing of carbon. But there is no pushback on the Net Zero nonsense because it has created huge demand for all mined materials. BHP and Rio Tinto are highly supportive of all the “green renewable” stuff.
Intermittent generators impair the economics of co-generation plant because the WDGs get paid from the consumer theft so can still make money at negative prices. The co-gen plants have to be prepared to stop exporting or suffer the losses when the market is saturated. Any generation linked to an industrial process will cause process upsets if it is constantly adjusting to an external requirement. The direct consumer theft ends in 2030. LGC spot price currently $20/MWh. The 2029 dated LGCs are only $9/MWh and will likely be below that before then. Once the RET ends, coal generation could look more attractive but I doubt anyone will get a licence for a new coal plant any time soon. The curtailment price appears to be around minus $10/MWh at the moment.
My hope is that Australia avoids offshore wind.
40
Rick mentions this
That hope can perhaps become a little more certain if you take the following into consideration, with respect to what is actually required for the where that construction will actually be taking place, you know ….. in the actual Ocean, and the ships actually needed to do that work.
The following is my own Post on that subject, and I just can’t wait to see that blank look on the face of Mr Bowen when a journalist asks him ….. Minister, where is the WTIV coming from?
Problems For Offshore Wind In Australia
I think Offshore wind here in Australia will end up just being talk!
Tony.
80
Rick mentions this
That hope can perhaps become a little more certain if you take the following into consideration, with respect to what is actually required for the where that construction will actually be taking place, you know ….. in the actual Ocean, and the ships actually needed to do that work.
The following is my own Post on that subject, and I just can’t wait to see that blank look on the face of Mr Bowen when a journalist asks him ….. Minister, where is the WTIV coming from?
Problems For Offshore Wind In Australia
I think Offshore wind here in Australia will end up just being talk!
Tony.
Huh! The first of these two comments timed out before I could get it posted, then, when the second one appeared, there was the first one. Must be part of the hiccoughs that Joanne might be having today.
30
The Pilbara industries already mostly run their own power stations, mainly from the abundant cheap gas. Although the is a NWIS “grid” up there, in reality most of the larger sites generate their own power.
20
Rick, that goes to show AEMO must be staffed with leftists, not electrical engineers.
70
A department manager who works at a local public utility district here in eastern Washington state tells me that after a ten-year slowdown in US orders for new gas-fired generation, orders for these plants have been picking up rapidly.
What he told me last month at a panel discussion concerning the oncoming SMR technologies and rising competition from gas-fired generation, was that whereas before 2015, it was possible to build a 2 GW gas-fired power plant in the US in three years, it now takes six years because of rising demand for qualified construction services and because of extended delivery dates in the gas-fired component supply chain caused by a lack of capable suppliers.
OK …. Where are all the power generation components and all the various other pieces of ancillary equipment needed to construct all these new gas-fired power plants in the US going to come from? China?
60
Siemens used to supply a lot of the gas turbines for use in power stations, they WERE made in Sweden but that ended about 15 years back.
Like almost everything now, china is the supplier. It’s too dear to go anywhere else. And that’s why the industrial nations are in decline. They just can’t afford to make anything anymore. Minimum wages see to that.
50
The Rolls-Royce UK nuclear power plants utilising Small Modular Reactor technology have steam turbine driven generators designed and manufactured by Siemens of Germany.
00
I read today that current orders for GTs have a delivery date in 2030.
I can remember when China was starting to ramp up its global shipping fleet, big marine diesels were out to a 5 year delivery. Not for the Chinese ships but for the tug fleets to berth them.
50
NOTE TO RESIDENT LEFTOIDS
I am still waiting for an example of a non-subsidised energy-intensive industry that is profitable or successful running on windmills and solar panels.
Since its “the cheapest and most reliable” form of electricity generation, surely there must be at least one?
120
I’m not a leftie, but to answer your question.
NDIS. That’s sucking the energy out of everything it touches, (including a big grab at the budget too). I think it qualifies as profitable, (for those on the take), and it is more than happy to SAY that it is running on windmills and solar panels.
NDIS is the industry to replace all profit centres in Oz. It will only end when the money runs out, by my reckoning, that will be sometime around next Christmas.
90
Hooray !
The Edit function is back!
30
It comes and goes.
00
This Substack article [“Fractal Turns Data Centers Into Dinosaurs”] needs to be pushed in front of the brilliant idiots of AI and state politicians responsible for maintaining the electricity infrastructure.
CPU processing speeds used to increase so regularly that nobody worried about the time-wasting I/O processes in computers. Idle CPU time was never a problem … until LLM systems came on the scene. Before AI, Moore’s law allowed the time-inefficient old technology to plug along without too much trouble.
As the (American) authour of the linked article, Jay Valentine, explains [with my added emphasis] …
30
A 17 min doco on the data centre Elon has built near Atlanta, and the locals aren’t happy with the 32 diesel genees he has installed, without permission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw&t=142s
20
The first wind farm wind turbine installation location in VIC is about to cease operations and wind turbines removed.
No doubt more of these will be closed down over the next decade and the next following soon.
20
I read an online comment recently posted by an engineer with much experience in nuclear power station construction including in China that in recent years a couple of coal fired power stations there have been successfully converted to nuclear reactor technology utilising the existing generators and much of the power station equipment including of course the buildings.
SMR Nuclear Technology Australia submitted a report to the Senate Inquiry into energy about conversion potential here, you can read all about it at the SMR website.
20
SMR Technologies
https://www.smrnuclear.com.au
00
Australia the dumb country. We have PLENTY of gas in the NW. I don’t know if shorter data links to Asia count for much but if it does we have that too.
00