Its wonderful how they just drop the "20% is gas" part from that headline. Yes, burning gas is cheap, but it is also aweful for the environment and shouldn't be getting considered at all.. 20% of a fuck ton of power is still a shitload of power. I think that's how those units work anyway.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Fracking methane should be excluded. It's 80 times worse for the environment than even CO2.
They undersell the benefits of renewables significantly overall. This is for UK which they come out with slightly lower costs for omitting solar. They also say 5 years to build a 120mw microgrid. 1 post driller, 1 crane for support posts, with 2 workers guiding post insertion and cleaning up, 1 "wall of panels" crane lifter, with 3 workers aligning connecting panels on the ground, and then connecting wall to posts can get 40kw/hour=320kw/day. Complete in little over a year. But, in solar, 9 crews can really make a baby in 1 month.
Microgrids don't need permits, and utilities will give them an import connection.
where does it say 20%
That was an extrapolation from where they said renewables would cover 80% in the article. I can only assume the mentioned gas would be the other 20%
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a commenter:
They claim to compare the cost of powering a 120MW data centre from a dedicated 470MW RR SMR compared to powering it from an 80MW gas turbine plus some unspecified number of wind, solar, and battery installations. For a study supposedly promoting wind, solar and battery technology, you would think they would tell us how many, what size, and what model of wind turbines they are modelling. But no, that's left to vague hand waving.
on review this doesn't appear to be entirely true; see my other comment: https://lemmy.world/post/36518843/19617823. still no specification behind the 43.4% stat, tho
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have datacenters get their power only from renewables and limit the amount of area they have to build them and watch renewable efficiency skyrocket as they either have to develop them or have limited power.
Are you trying to trick tech companies into being useful? That'll upset them.
Someone tell Silicon Valley: They should put datacenters on trains so no one knows where they are. gonna need HSR for it to work properly tho.
We’d have renewable-powered trains that have trackside turbines to recoup some of the wind generated by the train’s drag, and we’d also have the fastest WiFi the world has ever seen
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Renewable efficiency is close to the theoretical limit. Solar cell have a limit just over 33% and current models have efficiency of around 25%.
Renewable efficiency is close to the theoretical limit.
There's still plenty of juice to squeeze in terms of cost to manufacturer, deploy, and maintain. This isn't purely a question of cell efficiency.
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if the component is at its limit, then you can come up with ways to use that component more efficiently. Also reducing the size of the whole thing also increases efficiency singe you can stuff more of them in same area
Tha area is given by the suns light. The sun gives us around 1000w per m2. The theoretical limit is 330w converted to electrical power. Current panels achieve 250w.
This is not a GPU, making things smaller doesn't give you any gains.
it doesnt have to be just solar power gained from solarcells, there could be all kinds of novel solutions to get more out of what can be harnessed. Things could be combined to get better results or they could be used for unconventional things to get something new.
But such innovation doesnt happen unless there is need for it, and companies dont see renewable energy as big priority as rest of us, otherwise there would be crazy competition for who invents better stuff and still using fossil fuels would get you laughed at. Only way to create such need is to force companies into it by threatening profits more directly, as looming eco collapse doesnt seem to concern them since its oh so many quarters away.
AI is another dot com style bubble. How about we all just be quiet about that so billionaires blow a lot of hype driven investment dollars on green energy?
Once the bubble bursts there will be a surplus of cheap green energy we can use for powering homes and EVs and such. Obviously there's better ways to do this than scamming billionaires into a hype train, but global warming is a problem now and we can't wait for our society to change to be able to address the problem in a rational way.
So... sure.... AI is the future! We need to build a lot of wind and solar power so we can have AI! We don't need this for woke global warming reasons, no no no. We need this for $$$$$$AAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ reasons! Increase shareholder value by making wind turbine and solar panels, you must do this because it's illegal not to maximize shareholder value!!!!!! Build wind and solar so you can someday fire all of your employees! For the shareholders!
Wind and solar ᵃⁿᵈ ᵍᵃˢ
problem is solar and wind are variable and not feasible everywhere. for places like australia solar is amazing. Winter in canada? not so much. So for a baseline you’d have to store a massive amount of energy in some way.
if you plan on batteries that requires lots of precious metals we will need elsewhere to aid in the transition to electric power.
the studied location is the UK
The UK has one of the largest wind farms in the world, I think it actually is the largest in the world. One of the wind farms was built just off the coast of Scotland right next to trump's golf course and I'm sure it was built mostly just to annoy him.
Solar however is a lot less reliable, just because it's not particularly sunny here and also with it being so far north during the winter the nights are quite long.
The government says that the intention is to go 100% renewable but what they actually mean is as much renewable as possible, plus nuclear cover the load. No one thinks you can 100% be on solar and wind.
problem is solar and wind are variable and not feasible everywhere.
Offshore wind is constant.
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Which is why I always laugh when people say to replace a 15 year old fridge to "save" on electricity. Why? It's as cheap as the wind, making and shipping a new fridge isn't.
Which is why I always laugh when people say to replace a 15 year old fridge to “save” on electricity.
Really depends on how much your electricity costs relative to your efficiency gain on the new fridge.
But refrigerators are also largely a "solved" technology. We aren't radicallu changing how we run a compressor or insulate a unit. I ended up getting a new one recently because my old refrigerator's repair bill was going to be as much as a new unit.
Now, if units were more modular and easier/cheaper to repair? The math changes.
"I'm going to spend $1500 so I can save $8/month."
... For quite a few years and it pays itself back in 15/16 years, after which it probably still works for another 5 to 10 years.
Unless of course the manufacturer hamstrings it well before that time.
See: Samsung
Actual paper (not calling this a study since this appears to be non–peer-reviewed and only self-published): https://microgridai.centrefornetzero.org/ Be advised that this website relies on some Chromium-only trickery.
renewable microgrids [...] compared to nuclear small modular reactors
A 95% renewable microgrid with 5% gas backup - in line with the UK’s Clean Power 2030 target - was modelled at almost a third (31.7%) lower cost than scenario 1 in today’s prices. In this model, the gas is restricted to just under 80MW (2/3rds the size of the data centre) and the model correspondingly chooses a larger battery for storage, and increases the size of wind and solar technologies.
I'm confused; how does 5% equal 2/3 the size of the data center modeled?
(Edit: Someone else suggested this: "I think the gas can supply 2/3 of the power that the data centre requires for situations when there is no sun or wind but only makes up 5% of the total energy used over a year.")
They include a link to the model: https://github.com/ryanjenkinson/data-centre-modelling
Without having read it myself, perhaps they mean 5% of total usage. So the gas generation is built to be able to handle 2/3rds of the power demand, in case of outage as a backup, but in normal operation will only contribute 5% of the energy demand. That way, in the event of a failure of the renewable energy source for whatever reason, or a failure in the batteries, the gas can kick in and keep the servers online while cutting disposal operations that represent 1/3 of the total.
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A lot of the companies and people responsible for having all these datacenters built are heavily invested in SMR. So they'll probably be used anyways.
For a modern scaled up data center, there's no real benefit to nuclear miniturization. That's the sort of technology best employed on shipping frigates and space stations - places where portability is a priority.
You don't need to pick up a date center the size of 70 football fields and send it anywhere.
Shipping frigates? Sure, lets give the Houthis and Somali pirates the capability of building dirty bombs.
And if solar power is cheaper on Earth, think of how much more cheaper it is in space where there isn't an atmosphere getting in the way.
Sometimes a tech is really cool, but there just isn't any viable use case for it.
Sure, lets give the Houthis and Somali pirates the capability of building dirty bombs.
What are you talking about?
And if solar power is cheaper on Earth, think of how much more cheaper it is in space
There's an R^2 drop off as you travel away from the sun.
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Thankfully wind and solar are cheap and require a low up front investment, otherwise it couldn't be. We need to continue to invest in battery technology, sodium batteries are the way forward.
Except you can't power 24/7/365 with renewable alone, so you still need gas turbine backup.
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interesting, never heard this before
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