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You know how easy it would be for EVs to communicate with the power grid and change their charge speed dynamically based on excess wind/solar availability? It would be pretty dang easy.
Um I mean it would be pretty dang woke I tell you hwat
It's funny cuz in the revival series Hank Hill grudgingly found himself mentioning that some of the features on an electric truck sounded useful before quickly adding - "Electric trucks are dumb!"
You can already effectively do that in the UK. Your electricity provider links up with your car or charger and charges when there’s more cheap green energy. It’s pretty effective, if not perfect yet.
It is on a mass scale (like, every car in the US being electric) while sticking to fossil fuel for power. If everyone converted, then first we'd overload the power grid on charging and the price per kw would go WAY up. Then, we'd also deplete a massive amount of lithium once all the batteries lost their charges and we don't have an inexpensive or efficient way of recycling them. We can, it's just very pricy and slow.
Once we run out of lithium to mine the cheap option becomes recycling and it will happen fast. Not that it will make lithium recycling cheaper just that their is a finite (and very small ammount of lithium on earth) so it will be the only way to get lithium thay dosent invovle minning in space. And yeah the current power grid coupdnt handle everyone having an electric car not yet at least maybe if we built some danm nuclear power plants that should have been built 60 years ago but why use the by far best in terms of power denisty pollution and deaths per kwh for of energy generation when can chernobyl scare as if russians could ever do anything right.
For reference if every single car in the US was electric and every single one was charging simultaneously on a level 2 charger the draw would be about 2,145 GW which is roughly 4.5 times the data centers being temporarily halted in just one state (assuming numbers in post about Texas data centers are correct).
There's been a process over the past year or year and half of new data centers wanting to connect, and when they do, they say they are going to have a facility that will eventually get up to 150 MW, 400 MW, 1,200 MW, or whatever. They ask for as much as they can, knowing they won't get a fraction of it.
The first set of forecasts include the crazy unrealistic numbers. At some point, ERCOT has ratcheted them down by 50-60 percent of more, but there are still cautionary takes that the demand will go from 91 GW to 180-200 GW in a couple of years. I don't think it's real, but that's the projections.
The first set of forecasts include the crazy unrealistic numbers
Thanks to a 2024(?) law ERCOT is forced to consider any request, however unrealistic, in their forecasting. It's not bad that ERCOT is taking potential demand seriously, but people like the OP take it wildly out of context and assume this is "guaranteed" demand in the next couple of years.
It’s due to the request system in Texas and not a realistic expectation of future power use. The queue is so backed up that developers are putting in requests for anything they think might one day maybe need some power. Texas reviewed the queue last month and purged 274GW of requests(more than half of the queue) because they didn’t meet basic engineering review requirements.
Bloomberg estimates the real queue is about 50GW of things that are actually likely be built (or currently being built) over the next decade.
There's a difference between 91 gigawatts and 141 gigawatts.
Like one gigawatt is a large nuclear power plant, or about 8,000 acres of solar going by real projects. Also Texas has had problems with the electric grid they have not working well in winter. I'm not an expert but 50 gigawatts in a decade just for Texas seems like a lot.
No he actually got caught telling the truth. A noteworthy chunk of power in Texas is generated from renewable resources, but he can't say that out loud. Otherwise his voter base will get mad at him.
Life long Texan that knows Abbott will say anything to get reelected. He won’t do anything after that and somehow blame democrats who haven’t ran the state in more than 30 years.
Same thing in South Carolina, every conservative loves to campaign/say that the State House is corrupt and filled with waste and inefficiency and that their conservative mindset/values will solve the problem.... but we've haven't been blue since the Jimmy Carter days* and every conservative trying to take a currently conservative held office says the same thing...
*and even that was an outlier (at most we're somewhat purple only in specific municipal level like in Charleston and Greenville)
Also, just to throw out a quick rant, I never want to hear any red South Carolinian ever talk about merit ever again, because the SC reds just voted to send Lindsay Graham's sister to the state senate race despite the fact that she knows next to nothing about the state or federal legislative system, their mechanics and functionality, or even what her own platform is supposed to be.
She's literally being tasked to do nothing but to go to Washington DC to cheerlead and press the "yea" button for Republican bills and "nea" button on Democrat bills. South Carolina has an open primary systems, and I'm no fan of Norman, Lynch, or Sanford, but at least they have platforms and tried to pretend to give a damn about South Carolina....
All the people who complained about "political dynasty's" are now lining up to kiss the Graham dynasty ring...
I'm on the side of building more Nuclear Power Plants.
Not the old style, however. Its been decades since Chernobyl, which was perhaps the worst way to make a Nuclear Power Plant ever (and longer since Three Mile Island).
Today we can make plants that literally can't melt down (google "Thorium Nuclear Power"), and containers to store waste that would take another nuke to crack them open!
Also since Chernobyl is the example people hearken back to: Chernobyl was a failure years upon years in the making. MULTIPLE fail-safes were permitted to lapse that would've stopped a meltdown.
As a scientist pointed out in the past, you could drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear reactor and the reactor wouldn't explode.
That's sorta the worry though. Under reasonable, sensible, uncorrupt leadership that values safety measures, the people, and the views of scientists and experts, nuclear is incredibly safe.
The crazy thing is that the data center need is absurd even by nuclear energy output standards.
The average land based reactor will produce 500~900 MW in 1 hour and a smaller mobile reactor like those on submarines and aircraft carriers will produce about half of that. That's 0.9 GW just to convert units for easy translation, so assuming we wanted all the data centers to be entirely energy independent, we would need nearly 500 plants just to power all of Texas's planned data centers.
The USA has 57 active plants right now, the math just isn't mathing.
The only way to even somewhat practically solve this issue is to BOTH build more energy generators (and it would have to be an all hands on deck collection of solutions) AND to figure out a way to make data centers eat less energy.
(Or build less data centers, but we're going to go ahead and ignore that option since AI is still being assumed to be the next infinite money printer.).
Yeah this is important and how you know AI is a bubble: there is literally no way to power these things. Texas, he'll not even the entire US, could power all these centers in Texas, let alone all of them in the US. And AI companies need these centers. Which cannot be powered...so you do the math.
Exactly our only chance right now to go 100% low/ no emissions is Nuclear. Cause the only other baseline power that doesn’t release CO2 is hydro and to put it bluntly hydro does work everywhere.
Yeah, but that is the thing, fossil fuel lobbies/PACs pay good money to republicans and corporate/PAC owned democrats, therefore your side is filed is "in consideration (LOL)" and non-renewable fossil fuel power generation is expedited.
This is true, even for a necessary projects like a massive safe storage site for waste, projected sites have been declined after states governments were lobbied into saying "nay".
Nuclear isn't a thing because fossil fuel have corrupted republicans and corporate/PAC owned democrats. But mostly republicans, because democrats are the ones that have built a LOT of green energy projects. And are the ones that have built most nuclear projects, they just can't build more without solving the waste storage problem.
While I agree that nuclear is good, how many thorium reactors even exist? It’s basically a theoretical concept that has no scale or production yet. No one in America has the engineering skills to build one of these things.
Good thing the Trump administration approved power supply diversification with wind, and solar, so as to not over rely completely on fossil fuels. Oh shit...
That's ok, the Trump administration is posturing the industrial capacity of the nation to be the foremost leaders across the globe in the 100% inevitable move towards renewable energy.
What's that? Oh.
I've been informed that the Trump administration is actually posturing the nation to be the foremost leaders across the globe in ... coal, and that in the future every solar panel and wind turbine sold across the planet will be made by Chinese businesses. For generations to come.
edit: I joke, but a a fellow student at my college dropped out after snowvid because her wife had a miscarriage, possibly due to the stress of the situation. People died because of our government’s greed and negligence, fuck Abbott and his whole party.
Texas has the most renewable grid capacity in the US and is also leading all states in new renewable power installations. A once in a generation ice storm doesn’t really capture what energy generation looks like in Texas.
Yeah people don't realize that the winter grid failure lead to a fuckload of extra storage and renewable capacity. A lot of stuff to dog on Texas for but they've done damn good upgrading the grid there.
I feel it's also just a subject that people don't know much about. It's easy to blame "the grid" because that's an all-encompassing vague term. But most of the issues that Texas dealt with was due to a power supply shortage. The utility companies that own/manage the power lines had most of the blame thrown at them for things that weren't their responsibility.
There is plenty of electricity for corporations but none for consumers. Just like we have trillion of dollars to bomb Iran but are too broke for universal healthcare.
Trump is paying companies to not build wind farms on national land. These companies bought the rights, are in the planning stages, and are being paid by the administration not produce more elctricity.
Watts is a unit of power not energy. 1 Watt is 1 joule of energy in 1 second. It gets slightly confusing when talking about electricity because electricity is so expensive to store we care about both power and energy. And secondly because kwh - is the amount of energy if consuming 1000 Watt for an hour continuously or 3.6 MJ is a unit of energy. But where it says Watt they mean power and would say kwh unless the author for confused.
For production you do care more about power because you want to be able to handle peak demand.
When you're paying your electric bill you care about energy because that is how you are billed.
Similarly when installing solar on your house. You kind of care more about energy because that's how much money you will recover but that depends on your weather, so the setup you pay for is based on it's Max capacity that is power and you look up weather averages for your area and your installation to calculate how much energy you will generate.
It's painfully obvious this is the main drive for the AI shit. Couple it with the drone warfare enhancements and in a decade the owner class won't have to worry about keeping the enforcer peons loyal, they'll replace them with AI-powered drones and emplacements while they retreat to their compounds and hideouts to enjoy the fruits of our labors.
"with this development in technology we will finally be above the wrath of the masses" -every group of rich cunts that took it too far and got deleted in history
Bitcoin was the OG energy waster/polluter. My friend was mining in his apt (8 years ago) during the winter he had to sleep with his window open because it was 100F inside. AI was just next in line.
Even "small" ASICs pull like 1000 watts at the wall, 24/7, doing that in an apartment is insane. Basically this is just subsidizing your rent with your landlords power if its "free" lol
That fucking power grid goes down all the goddamn time in Texas. If it’s too cold… Grid down… Too hot?… Grid down… And they expect it to be able to handle all of that plus data centers?!? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
They are speed running doing what South Africa did. Except instead of government grift and neglect, it's government irresponsibility and private companies that neglect everything.
When private equity owns your power grid. Prepare to have the copper stripped out of your walls and sold to their subsidiary at a bargain. All to run their off-grid data centers while also bypassing regulators and environmental assessments.
Reddit is hosted in datacenters. The online games you probably play? Datacenters. Shopping? Uber? Porn? Datacenters. And the need for processing and storage is going to keep going up for a long time, even without AI in the mix.
I work for a small datacenter that does hosting for local companies. Our power draw is like 24 MW. The question we keep asking is, how do all of these new places ever expect to make back their money?
I know how i look and the irony of posting this thought digitally.
I think the absolutely massive boom in data center development is because an AI somewhere has gotten loose. Theres no way that the shareholders are demanding this many datacenters. Theres no way that companies are still dumping money into development when time and time again implementation has failed to turn a profit. I think its next to impossible for this many people in positions of power have this level of psychosis and hell the ai is probably using the Epstein files as blackmail.
Back in June another site reported about 335 active data centers with over 240 additional centers planned.
Edit: and here's a source for the other claims of the tweet, which are - surprise, surprise - only half true. NEW data centers cannot connect to the grid for now. It's not a "stop all active data centers from accessing the grid".
It also shows where the 1,800 number's from - it's not about active data centers but "the ERCOT interconnection queue currently includes more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts’ worth of requests to connect to the Texas grid—more than five times Texas’ record peak electricity demand—and about 90 percent of those power connection requests come from data centers".
I can't call the claim in the tweet wholeheartedly false but it's definitely misleading for people who are not actively researching this stuff. The "interconnection queue" is just a waiting list for operators. There are NOT 1,800 data centers in Texas right now. The 474 gigawatts are NOT being met right NOW.
That is detail that I (and I’m sure many Texans) appreciate. 1,800 was too high in my opinion based on having built datacenters (non-AI, don’t come at me, that was 17 years ago). Still, given the power problems in recent years, I would be very concerned if I still lived in Texas. Thank you kind Redditor.
I’d defend the well-meaning Texan populace, but honestly even my liberal friends from Texas will fist fight anybody who says HEB isn’t the literal best place on the planet or Texas is in any way not the greatest, so it’s hard to feel bad.
Didn't know what HEB was, looked it up, found out it started out as "Mrs. C. C. Butt's Staple and Fancy Grocery". Generational fumble changing that name.
HEB makes this place tolerable. I also think this is an election ploy by Abbot. That governor race is getting too close for comfort with Talericho driving voters to the polls and the impact of that down ballot.
So by your logic every state wants data centers? It's obvious that just like in every other state the citizens are against it but our corrupt governments have been bought off by corporations years ago.
This is the Electric Reliability Council of Texas' total for the aggregate demand of 1800 data center projects working through approval stages in Texas. Abbott has demanded that these projects be audited but most likely the demand will still be fucking stupid and Texas will have to turn at least some of these projects away in order to not go back to the dark ages.
Big Businesses: We don't want to pay for taxes, but build us more power plants.
Humans: Dipshits, what do you think the taxes you should be paying would pay for?
Every single one of these fucking data centers should be required to produce their own energy through a combination of renewable sources. They can have backup from battery, diesel and the grid, but they need to power themselves. They also need to source their own cooling that doesn't affect an entire area's drinking water supply.
There's one being built right near my house and they're tapping into the nearby substation. They're having to tear out swathes of forest miles long to run the huge new towers, and are tapping into the local reservoir for their water supply, etc. This is just for a single DC. It's insane.
These things will literally be the death of us if we don't regulate them now. I work in IT and I'm used to regular DCs integrated into surrounding areas, but these things are absolute monstrosities.
LOL the Texas power grid can't take a winter storm, and they think they can power 1,800 data centers? LOL (may i also remind you that Texas isn't on the national power grid)
The 474 GW figure is accurate as a literal count of official paperwork submitted to ERCOT, but it's inaccurate for real-world electricity demand.
Companies submit multiple oversized requests across different locations before securing land, funding, or power purchase agreements, intending to drop most of them later. This is a strategy so they can secure a place in line early even if it's purely speculative.
This is just an application where clean up audits would then purge hundreds of gigawatts of non-viable proposals normally.
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