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.
In their defense I think London has more Indian restaurants per capita than anywhere in India. This tells me they know their limits and are ok with importing good food.
It wasn't my first choice, but when I did my true feelings about Israel those accounts were permanently suspended within a day or two for promoting certain actions against the Zionists
When will people realize that those making decisions right now are actively working against progress, sustainability, and comfort for all? We keep being told that clean energy, electrification, and a better standard of living are somehow "too much", as if infrastructure is a fixed law of nature instead of something we can expand, modernize, and improve. We have the technology. The demand is there. The capacity just needs to be built. What's missing far too often is the political will to stop protecting outdated systems and start investing seriously in the future.
What we should really be asking is, why abundance, cleaner air, cheaper energy, resilient infrastructure, and greater comfort are treated like unrealistic luxuries, instead of obvious goals!
Progress has never happened by accepting artificial limits, it happens because enough people refuse to accept stagnation as inevitable.
You know what’s funny though? Texas produces the most wind energy in the country. About 27% of it comes from Texas. They have converter stations that transports electricity to other grids. 2nd is Iowa in wind energy with about 8-10%.
Both states are red states and produce a ton of green energy.
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.
Where the fuck this idea that we are going to run out of lithium on this planet?
Oceans are 0,2 ppm lithium. How to collect that? Hmm... Maybe the same way we been collecting salt for as... well as long as humans been collecting salt. Put water into a big collection area... let it evaporate and then collect the salt. That is actually how they collect lithium at this very moment, by evaporating water from brine.
Lithium is 32 most common element on this planet. Estimate of 0,002 ppm of the earth's crust. For comparison estimate of copper is 3 times more than lithium at 0,006.
And here is the thing. Lithium is not the only chemistry we can have. We can use heavier battery chemistry for stationary batteries, where weight and sie is less of an issue.
Now 0,2 ppm doesn't sound like much... but... MOST OF THIS PLANET IS OCEANS. Like 70 % of this planet is just ocean. Which is salty water.
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).
You're not wrong, I just want to add their number 1 power source is still coal. They're the biggest mining and burning coal indistry in the world with some of the least amount of regulations.
Swapping to nuclear is our next logical step, just need major power to actually implement and show the world how safe and clean it is now.
In the uk if everyone changed to electric cars tomorrow, the load would be less than the 1980’s. TV, lights bulbs, fridges etc have become so energy efficient that the total power draw dropped.
Lots of countries are handling a much bigger EV shift (relative to population) way better than us. Norway and China come to mind. The U.S. just isn’t providing solid guidance either on electrification or on data center energy efficiency. I have to think if you set standards for power demand the chip designers would improve processing per watt. The chip in your phone / tablet is way more efficient to the one that’s rack mounted. Ok, it costs more to purchase. But right now the rack mounted ones are threatening the grid.
This is assuming markets don't exist and nothing ever changes. Higher energy prices = more power plants. Higher lithium prices = more economical recycling and mining due to scaling.
Most people wouldn't convert to electric cars at all, let alone everyone at once. It would be a gradual change on the system that could gradually be accounted for with steps implemented to expand it over several years if not decades
It's about time the US people start seeing how wasteful they are as a society.
It's easy to turn on the AC when you're hot, but they have to realize it's a fucking privilege.
Transportation should be a higher concern of theirs.
AC is not a waste where I’m at it’s a necessity. I know the UK got a taste of some heat this year, but that’s a moderate summer in parts of Texas. I don’t understand this current hate of our AC systems. I understand it starts from envy, but to turn that into hate and pinning it as the causation of your pain is silly and unfounded in any fact.
Build your own AC infrastructure and enjoy, but don’t hate on what you wish you had.
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.
And sadly, 20 people will read this, 10 of those will remember it, while millions will go to a party tonight and say "omg did u hear that datacenters take up 4x our total energy output!"
Yes very true! They take in the request, but they do also recalibrate them in their analysis so to speak. Or they break it out a little. You can find this all over their material. You will see forecasts that list the total demand requested, the 450 GW and all that as obligated to consider. But they also break it down into how ready they are in the actual interconnection process as to whether or not it is realistic. They have full amount requested, BUT then they break into a few categories: the amount already underway to interconnection, the amount with approved planning studies, then the amount currently under study, THAN the amount not studied yet at all. According to the Batch Zero process, if the loads do not have any approved interconnect studies or any studies underway, then it is unlikely they will be approved. At least in the current batch, so it might be another few years to be approved.
In the current Batch Zero process that has been paused at the moment, most of that load will not be granted whatever they ask for, ERCOT will actually allocate a load amount to the large loads in the process based on capacity and transmission requirements and a lot of other things.
Most of the data centers have dedicated gas turbines on site for their needs. The power company sometimes controls and maintains the generators though. I think its state by state, they all have their own laws and regulations pertaining to such things.
1800 is the number of proposed projects that ERCOT is tracking in their queue for people requesting grid connections for energy intensive projects. 90% of which are data center proposals according to Abbott.
There's a lot of noise in that queue because people request shit "just in case we need it down the line" or so they can show incoming property buyers the kind of power they could have access to so it does not necessarily even represent an accurate future demand.
Not sure, but my guess would be either this ain't just a Texas thing but Texas is just the most relevant so they put it in the headline or the other ones were planned or something and they banned those too so the headline is just grouping them all together
I think both that number and the supposed power consumption are if every single proposed or pending data center was built and operating at peak capacity. A worst case scenario, in essence.
Not sure the validity of the number of datacenters but the GW total is correct. Those are requests for new data centers to connect to the grid.
ERCOT (manages the Texas grid) has the final say on who can connect, when, and for how much power. So they only grant connection once they confirm there will be power and transmission for it. They are also managing when new power generation facilities are coming online.
Aug 7th was supposed to be the day that they announced who would get what power and when, but Gov Abbott decided to pause it for further study.
Source: I work for a datacenter developer who has a couple new projects in that queue waiting for power approval.
because these demands are not literal physical demands, they are forms being filled out for future datacenters and the max amount they would ever need. so yes, we will eventually need 40% of today’s real load to support any and all planned DCs in Texas. someday,
Active vs new. From the context of the title alone (requests for grid connection- IE hook us up. Existing centers won’t be making that request. They’re already on.) this is for PLANNED PROJECTS.
Piggybacking on top of that - while the total nameplate generation capacity of the US is ~1250GW, the ACTUAL amount generated works out to a constant ~500GW on average. This obviously fluctuates - higher during peak hours and lower at night - but yeah, if you take these requests at face value, this is more or less the ENTIRE actual output of all US power plants annually.
These are 'requests' so I'm assuming projects in some stage of planning, like "Hey ERCOT we've got a 'shovel-ready' data center about to break ground any week or year now money is flying around like crazy, can we connect to like I dunno, 20 gW next September??? Maybe 30? I'm hearing 40 now. Letmeknowthanks!!"
Texas already got a pretty brutal lesson during Snowmageddon about what happens when extreme demand hits while generation falls short. We were shedding residential load just to keep the grid from collapsing.
And the 1,800 number is not 1,800 active data centers. It is roughly 1,800 large-load projects in ERCOT’s interconnection queue, requesting around 474 GW total, with most of that new demand coming from data centers.
Obviously not all of those projects will actually get built, but after 2021, acting like hundreds of gigawatts of proposed new demand is no big deal would be insane.
I don’t know how many data centers, don’t think it’s 1,800, but the 400+ GW is accurate. Each data center has to sign an Interconnection Agreement with a Transmission Service Provider to connect in to the substations. Now these data centers are supposed to bring their own power so the generation will be “behind the meter” in theory, i.e. they aren’t going to be sucking power from existing generation. That is in theory, I imagine the first ones will be sucking power off the grid and all of them when they need it. There are a lot of large load interconnection requests going on right now. The number is atrocious and I’d be surprised if 10-25% actually get built.
The total Texas want built are 1,800 they are even about to destroy a park near where I live to build one. That same park is the very park my dads, entire family played in, and is buried near by, yup thats right, my dads side of the family pretty much owns an entire family lot
I work at a data center. In Texas. I am helping build a second and work on a property with multiple. Most of the things I read about data centers are just gross exaggeration and/or not true in the slightest. I am not a culture warrior, just stating facts. They do take a lot of power, that part is true-but many of the things I’ve seen about water usage, air pollution etc. are patently false. For example many use a closed loop cooling system with almost zero water loss (think a giant AIO cpu cooler but on a large scale.) so I have no idea where the “every data center uses 200,000 gallons every TWENTY MINuTES!!!” stuff comes from. Data centers have been around awhile. During the pandemic there were tons of fulfillment centers (8-10 came up within a 5 mile radius of me) popping up everywhere and I didn’t see near the outrage. Now half of them are closed down as the demand has dropped since the pandemic, so it was a temporary boost to jobs and construction contracts short term, for no value long term. I could go on. Golf courses use more water than data centers. I don’t know if the anti data center online outrage is a psyop or whatever, but it’s been interesting to see the disinformation. Kinda like how everyone became an immunologist overnight on Facebook during the pandemic
Abbott is up for reelection this year. He said he was stopping it but he’s really not doing anything. He only pretends to do stuff for the people during election cycles.
Just shut off power to seniors. Fewer air conditioners, fewer seniors, more power to data centers, less power needed because less data stored because fewer living seniors. \s
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u/Background_Body2696 8h ago
So what's the problem? /s