I really hope there are lots of blackouts so trust in politics drops and revolt increases I bet even some of these Silicon Valley ceos are hoping for blackouts to create a overloaded revolt eventually to destroy this planet eating system that does everything it can to slow down renewable energy that entraps us all and steals our meaning and identity that claims we wouldn’t have meaning or identity without it.
The answer is more solar panels as they generate exactly when the demand peaks.
Australia is having one of its first summers where there has been no discussion about power shortages - because of the amount of solar we have (majority of which is rooftop)
We also just went through an inflection point where evening use of gas peaker's wasn't necessary because of grid scale batteries.
I was wondering how long it would before this happened. Expect this to become the norm across the country as the data centers will be guaranteed 100% uptime. Residential will see 4-8 hours a day without power.
Your are mistaking the uptime statistic (eg “5 nines”) as the same thing as load factor (how much power the data center draws from the grid). It is not.
Also, interconnection studies are conducted before data centers are powered up from the grid. There is not a single electric utility in the US that would approve and build an interconnection that would cause a power outage. Unless they choose regulatory non-compliance, which in unprecedented
I drove through the NJ Pennsylvania area 2 years ago and what struck me was how little private PV installations were existing on rooftops. Here in Europe where I live we have areas where literally 30 percent of all private houses have PV in the USA I saw two similar Installations in two weeks. The USA on the east coast is so much behind private PV it is no joke anymore.
This is largely a function of 1) state net metering policy (ie, how much the utility pays for backed solar energy), 2) state RPS (if any RECs are up for grabs, and 3) resulting from 1 and 2, how many solar companies are actively marketing installs for residential customers
MA and NY actually have quite a lot of rooftop solar. Both are around 3 GW each I believe. Maybe you didn’t notice the sleeker, black panels that SunRun and Tesla have been pushing (they’re the biggest installers)
Well here you just hire an electrician to do the install and basically make a contract with the lines provider. The energy you produce is 100 yours as well as the equipment and it depends on the contract how much you get for sending energy into the grid. We have also other options like provider owned Installations but that is the most common one. My house has 14.9kwp PV on the roof and a 20kwh solid state battery as backup.
Not many solar customers in the US own (lease is way more popular). And our standard electricians generally don’t have the know-how to design and build solar installations, we use specialty companies, either small locals ones or national outfits like Tesla.
Nonetheless, some Northeast jurisdictions have ambitious clean energy goals, thus have rooftop solar penetration at GW scale. Your anecdote doesn’t really stack up against objective data (see: EIA 861)
Sidenote: your battery is almost certainly Li-ion, not solid state. But I’d love to be corrected on that. What’s the brand (OEM) and model?
My battery is LiFePo4 which has become standard for house batteries over here. And as I said, it is anectotal because i live in a suburban area in central europe but bavaria and upper austria near bigger cities the picture is pretty much the same:
The utilities privatize and don’t invest in upgrades or infrastructure. Enter explosion of data center construction. Grid is overwhelmed WE suffer brownouts and blackouts. WE are inconvenienced and WE suffer. End result…WE PAY FOR UPGRADES AND NEW INFRASTRUCTURE. The utilities repair existing systems and pocket the rest…issues repeat.
Congrats, you just agreed with me but louder. CAPEX doesn’t mean prevention…it means we pay for problems they manufactured. Thanks for backing up my argument, though.
That's what deregulation gets the US. It was more tightly controlled, but it mostly deregulated to a different form in the 70s. There are still board approvals in some states, but for a long period of time the US power market capacity was actually steady in required load.
There isn't really a thing as an upgrade at a plant that really changes any capacity. Equipment wears down over time. It's actually cheaper to build new/more generation with updated tech or engineering. If they do invest, it's to automat things away, mainly in coal plants, like jobs. Alot more of the material handling is automated away.
Transformers are a 3 year lead time. Have been for a long time because there isn't capacity. The guys that expanded back in the 2000s went out of business banking on increased demand, which never came.
And private utilities will get their reward for building new over updating existing. They get to bake in the profits and "show growth" from doing that. There's always someone getting a kickback of some sort.
And last, it is politics. Large jobs are always lighting for politics.
The utilities are upgrading like crazy. The problem is no new generation on the horizon. We need more power. The grid can handle it. Source: I work for an east coast based utility, and we have never had so much capital for upgrades, but we only deliver, not generate.
I’d argue the main constraint is actually transmission network capacity.
YoY we’re installing wayyyyy more generation than we’re retiring. But the capacity of the transmission network that must integrate those resources is not seeing even close to the same level of YoY changes
Blame the three P’s: price (aka cost allocation), permitting, and planning
But generation capacity (aka resource adequacy) is indeed sneak up too, at least relative to the speculative data center interconnection requests
This is likely regional. PJM's grid is in good shape and is currently auctioning off power at a high rate due to high damand and low supply. There is no planned generation of the scale we need for these data centers in my mid-atlantic state. In fact, some generation is coming offline, such as a coal plant in Baltimore.
Why are we structurally overloading a fragile multi-state grid owned by 50 private companies who refuse to invest in capacity BEFORE approving hyperscale industrial load?
The grids on the east coast are in pretty good shape. I don't k ow about other grids. For example, PJM'S grid has the ability to deliver much more power than is available and we are upgrading in our area as fast as possible. We make our money on capital cost improvement projects and delivery, so we have an incentive to build. We do not generate. We would love to sell more power at lower rates than less power at higher rates. Right now, demand is high, supply is low, and people's bills are high. Hard to beleive, but we don't want our customers' bills to be high for many reasons. Two being that we get a lot of complaints, and we are allowed to spread our losses due to delinquency to the rest of our rate base which sucks for everyone.
its the easiest fix in the world. smart charging. small discount for charging at night when demand is low. its a very simple charger. you plug it in but the smart charger only sends power to the car when demand is low.
thats just smart charging. thats what we have known.
other countries have V2G vehicle to grid. during these extremely rare brownouts that only affect a small portion of the grid. you have a small number of EV owners who have their smart chargers set to sell power to the grid at a profit.
They do not have the air permits to run diesel gensets frequent enough for that
They literally do Gen burns every month as PM.
The ones that have peak unloading agreements also secure any permits needed to do so... The local governments also have incentive to keep the grid stable and their constituents air conditioners on by letting DCs drop off the grid as needed.
Right, short duration for reliability testing. They are not running them to provide load relief to the grid, like you suggest. Ever. Unless you can provide evidence of any doing this now…
If these units are actually providing load relief, then those assets would need to be registered with PJM (which they are not to my knowledge) or possibly with Dominion (and they are keeping it as the industry’s best kept secret).
The point is, using diesel gensets to provide power beyond a system outage is generally not in the cards. You suggest it is, but it’s not. Maybe some facilities are gaining approval to pilot the capability, but this is going to truly piss off local communities (pollution, sound) so I really doubt this would scale.
I know exactly one company that’s trying to make this happen, still early days tho
That's not how it works - the power company largely can't cut off consumer demand and not much commercial demand. Smart power appliances exist, but rolling blackouts are bad for everyone INCLUDING data centers, and catastrophic failures take days to recover (many of us are old enough to remember the East Coast failure back in 2003).
It's better for everyone for DCs to drop their loads on request because they're large and predictable, and if they don't they probably will have to run the generators anyway when the blackout comes through...
The SLA covers the indoor conditions and uptime, not the power source needed to do so.
The SLA doesn't care how you keep 72F dry bulb, 50% humidity, 1.02 atm, and the electricity feed, just that you do...
And that's only colocation. The hyper scalers own the servers and provide the service. AWS can turn off entire data centers if needed as long as they meet the availability contract.
This is all dependent on profit and maximizing shareholder value on both ends, but you're saying the utility will just "remove" the data center from the grid to the benefit of the consumer?
On top of that, every U.S. state except Nebraska has government employees who make state-level regulations that compel the same. That includes places as diverse as Texas and New York.
If the grid is at risk of blacking out they transmit signals across the grid to request load shedding. Data centers because they have 100% generator backup and are massive loads can get better rates if they agree to peak shave and switch to generator load during these events to protect the grid.
Data centers have to run the generators monthly anyway for PM purposes and typically can run 2-3 days without refueling if not longer...
I hate articles like this. We should be willing to sacrifice electricity and air conditioning during the height of summer to maximize shareholder value |s
The backup generators are only for essential stuff like security. Backup could never keep up with something like a 750 MW data center. BUT - your point is correct, because the data centers pay a small premium for priority non interruptable service. You will get brownouts, they will be fine.
I would blame it on Trump throttling all of the East Coast offshore wind farms, some of which were already producing energy. China can power data centers with solar and wind. Why can't we?
but most importantly to get a much better answer to this question you could go to AI right now and have it give you a precise pro and cons list of AI and then analyze which is greater.
but most importantly to get a much better answer to this question you could go to AI right now and have it give you a precise pro and cons list of AI and then analyze which is greater.
I really hope there are lots of blackouts so trust in politics drops and revolt increases I bet even some of these Silicon Valley ceos are hoping for blackouts to create a overloaded revolt eventually to destroy this planet eating system that does everything it can to slow down renewable energy that entraps us all and steals our meaning and identity that claims we wouldn’t have meaning or identity without it.
So AI is taking jobs and causing blackouts. This is not going to end well for Data Centers.
The answer is more solar panels as they generate exactly when the demand peaks.
Australia is having one of its first summers where there has been no discussion about power shortages - because of the amount of solar we have (majority of which is rooftop) We also just went through an inflection point where evening use of gas peaker's wasn't necessary because of grid scale batteries.
Look up the “duck curve”
Also solar capacity factors in Australia versus Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, etc
Just rolling black out the AI racks. We don’t need them.
I was wondering how long it would before this happened. Expect this to become the norm across the country as the data centers will be guaranteed 100% uptime. Residential will see 4-8 hours a day without power.
Your are mistaking the uptime statistic (eg “5 nines”) as the same thing as load factor (how much power the data center draws from the grid). It is not.
To learn more, read here:
https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rethinking-load-growth.pdf
Also, interconnection studies are conducted before data centers are powered up from the grid. There is not a single electric utility in the US that would approve and build an interconnection that would cause a power outage. Unless they choose regulatory non-compliance, which in unprecedented
Looks like the Eastern US needs to buy more electricity from Canada. Good luck with that! <laughs in Canadian >
I drove through the NJ Pennsylvania area 2 years ago and what struck me was how little private PV installations were existing on rooftops. Here in Europe where I live we have areas where literally 30 percent of all private houses have PV in the USA I saw two similar Installations in two weeks. The USA on the east coast is so much behind private PV it is no joke anymore.
This is largely a function of 1) state net metering policy (ie, how much the utility pays for backed solar energy), 2) state RPS (if any RECs are up for grabs, and 3) resulting from 1 and 2, how many solar companies are actively marketing installs for residential customers
MA and NY actually have quite a lot of rooftop solar. Both are around 3 GW each I believe. Maybe you didn’t notice the sleeker, black panels that SunRun and Tesla have been pushing (they’re the biggest installers)
Well here you just hire an electrician to do the install and basically make a contract with the lines provider. The energy you produce is 100 yours as well as the equipment and it depends on the contract how much you get for sending energy into the grid. We have also other options like provider owned Installations but that is the most common one. My house has 14.9kwp PV on the roof and a 20kwh solid state battery as backup.
Not many solar customers in the US own (lease is way more popular). And our standard electricians generally don’t have the know-how to design and build solar installations, we use specialty companies, either small locals ones or national outfits like Tesla.
Nonetheless, some Northeast jurisdictions have ambitious clean energy goals, thus have rooftop solar penetration at GW scale. Your anecdote doesn’t really stack up against objective data (see: EIA 861)
Sidenote: your battery is almost certainly Li-ion, not solid state. But I’d love to be corrected on that. What’s the brand (OEM) and model?
My battery is LiFePo4 which has become standard for house batteries over here. And as I said, it is anectotal because i live in a suburban area in central europe but bavaria and upper austria near bigger cities the picture is pretty much the same:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/4203+Altenberg+bei+Linz/@48.3724777,14.3491963,158m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x477398b9dc46fda7:0x3fda7b863bb027c1!2s4203+Altenberg+bei+Linz!3b1!8m2!3d48.3736086!4d14.3495882!16s%2Fm%2F03gvcqw!3m5!1s0x477398b9dc46fda7:0x3fda7b863bb027c1!8m2!3d48.3736086!4d14.3495882!16s%2Fm%2F03gvcqw?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDEwNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
This is a typical suburbian village near where i live it is not every third house but roughly ever fifth house literally which has pv on the roof!
And thats pretty normal over here, in bavaria near munich it is even way more!
Sure not the same all over Europe but anectotal where i live and pretty much the entire area over here!
Your battery is not solid state btw!
And the rest of Europe is generally quite a bit behind Germany, they’ve been the regional frontrunner for quite some time
Not Germany but yes other parts of Europe have less Installations than Germany and Austria
But only the humans. The data centers all have diesel or natural gas generators as backup so they can weather the brownouts and blackouts.
The utilities privatize and don’t invest in upgrades or infrastructure. Enter explosion of data center construction. Grid is overwhelmed WE suffer brownouts and blackouts. WE are inconvenienced and WE suffer. End result…WE PAY FOR UPGRADES AND NEW INFRASTRUCTURE. The utilities repair existing systems and pocket the rest…issues repeat.
You’re incorrect, utilities have been spending $$$$$. See CAPEX figures across all IOUs (note: this is the main reason your bills have been going up):
https://www.eei.org/-/media/Project/EEI/Documents/Issues-and-Policy/Finance-And-Tax/Industry-Capital-Expenditures.pdf
A major setback from building out the grid are NIMBYs and current-state of permitting. The book Abundance does a great job and outlining this
Congrats, you just agreed with me but louder. CAPEX doesn’t mean prevention…it means we pay for problems they manufactured. Thanks for backing up my argument, though.
That's what deregulation gets the US. It was more tightly controlled, but it mostly deregulated to a different form in the 70s. There are still board approvals in some states, but for a long period of time the US power market capacity was actually steady in required load.
There isn't really a thing as an upgrade at a plant that really changes any capacity. Equipment wears down over time. It's actually cheaper to build new/more generation with updated tech or engineering. If they do invest, it's to automat things away, mainly in coal plants, like jobs. Alot more of the material handling is automated away.
Transformers are a 3 year lead time. Have been for a long time because there isn't capacity. The guys that expanded back in the 2000s went out of business banking on increased demand, which never came.
And private utilities will get their reward for building new over updating existing. They get to bake in the profits and "show growth" from doing that. There's always someone getting a kickback of some sort.
And last, it is politics. Large jobs are always lighting for politics.
The utilities are upgrading like crazy. The problem is no new generation on the horizon. We need more power. The grid can handle it. Source: I work for an east coast based utility, and we have never had so much capital for upgrades, but we only deliver, not generate.
I’d argue the main constraint is actually transmission network capacity.
YoY we’re installing wayyyyy more generation than we’re retiring. But the capacity of the transmission network that must integrate those resources is not seeing even close to the same level of YoY changes
Blame the three P’s: price (aka cost allocation), permitting, and planning
But generation capacity (aka resource adequacy) is indeed sneak up too, at least relative to the speculative data center interconnection requests
This is likely regional. PJM's grid is in good shape and is currently auctioning off power at a high rate due to high damand and low supply. There is no planned generation of the scale we need for these data centers in my mid-atlantic state. In fact, some generation is coming offline, such as a coal plant in Baltimore.
My statement is about systems not about your job.
Riddle me this…
Why are we structurally overloading a fragile multi-state grid owned by 50 private companies who refuse to invest in capacity BEFORE approving hyperscale industrial load?
The grids on the east coast are in pretty good shape. I don't k ow about other grids. For example, PJM'S grid has the ability to deliver much more power than is available and we are upgrading in our area as fast as possible. We make our money on capital cost improvement projects and delivery, so we have an incentive to build. We do not generate. We would love to sell more power at lower rates than less power at higher rates. Right now, demand is high, supply is low, and people's bills are high. Hard to beleive, but we don't want our customers' bills to be high for many reasons. Two being that we get a lot of complaints, and we are allowed to spread our losses due to delinquency to the rest of our rate base which sucks for everyone.
lol IOUs are absolutely not refusing to spend CAPEX, it is literally the main driver of their profits.
And what do you mean “50 companies”
What are you going on about???
I use electricity to heat my house. Data centers use electricity to cool their house.
They're SOOO close...
About 80% of power consumption is IT load for newer/larger data centers, the rest is cooling plus miscellaneous
BUt WhAT aBoUT ELeCtRIC vEhICles!!
Dont worry, they’ll probably blame the blackouts on solar and EVs anyway!
its the easiest fix in the world. smart charging. small discount for charging at night when demand is low. its a very simple charger. you plug it in but the smart charger only sends power to the car when demand is low.
thats just smart charging. thats what we have known.
other countries have V2G vehicle to grid. during these extremely rare brownouts that only affect a small portion of the grid. you have a small number of EV owners who have their smart chargers set to sell power to the grid at a profit.
Depends. In some areas there’s extra solar during the day
I already get a token reward from the shitty power company for charging after 9 through my existing charge point.
Weave grid through Pepco.
I mean - every data center can remove itself from the grid entirely during peak events... So this is a lot of hype...
If a grid requests load shedding and it's in the data center contract the DC switches off utility to local generation
They do not have the air permits to run diesel gensets frequent enough for that
But collocation of large-scale power plants that do have permits is absolutely going on
They literally do Gen burns every month as PM.
The ones that have peak unloading agreements also secure any permits needed to do so... The local governments also have incentive to keep the grid stable and their constituents air conditioners on by letting DCs drop off the grid as needed.
Right, short duration for reliability testing. They are not running them to provide load relief to the grid, like you suggest. Ever. Unless you can provide evidence of any doing this now…
I've been to buildings that have it in their utility contracts. NOVA area in both Ashburn and Manassas.
If these units are actually providing load relief, then those assets would need to be registered with PJM (which they are not to my knowledge) or possibly with Dominion (and they are keeping it as the industry’s best kept secret).
The point is, using diesel gensets to provide power beyond a system outage is generally not in the cards. You suggest it is, but it’s not. Maybe some facilities are gaining approval to pilot the capability, but this is going to truly piss off local communities (pollution, sound) so I really doubt this would scale.
I know exactly one company that’s trying to make this happen, still early days tho
https://www.aigent.energy
Pollution and sound are bad, blackouts and grid failures are worse
And my point stands :)
Good day
Why do you think they put “could” in the headline? It frees them from the hassle of finding out. They can just print speculation.
Bingo, headline is preying on the uninformed
sure, but what law is making them do that? power companies will just prioritize data centres no petty homes.
Utilities are highly regulated, they absolutely cannot just prioritize any facility or customer type they want. Just not how the industry works
That's not how it works - the power company largely can't cut off consumer demand and not much commercial demand. Smart power appliances exist, but rolling blackouts are bad for everyone INCLUDING data centers, and catastrophic failures take days to recover (many of us are old enough to remember the East Coast failure back in 2003).
It's better for everyone for DCs to drop their loads on request because they're large and predictable, and if they don't they probably will have to run the generators anyway when the blackout comes through...
Generally agree, but the data centers are contractually held to SLAs, so they’re motivated to give the least amount of flexibility possible
The SLA covers the indoor conditions and uptime, not the power source needed to do so.
The SLA doesn't care how you keep 72F dry bulb, 50% humidity, 1.02 atm, and the electricity feed, just that you do...
And that's only colocation. The hyper scalers own the servers and provide the service. AWS can turn off entire data centers if needed as long as they meet the availability contract.
Um where did I say SLAs said anything about power source? Nice straw man…
It's a direct response - the service level agreement doesn't care how, just what. The DC provides the conditions to the end customer.
The DC is motivated to have the most flexible solution to that SLA, not the least.
Any level of flexibility that the data centers commits to is a direct risk to delivering upon the SLA
You seem like you might be in industry, but I’m sry I think you have a misunderstanding here
I hope the DCs get to have catastrophic events.
I mean AWS has knocked out it's services twice in the last 10 years or so and you notice...
Reddit gone, Netflix gone, Prime? See ya.. half the Internet runs on AWS
That’s why I run my own :-)
heh ditto!
chatgpt age gating me was the final push to actually invest in some GPU and VRAM and built out a proper local LLM
Eh. Such a waste of electric.
no mosre a waste then anything else i do
*points at texas* rolling blackouts there favoured poor areas vs right.
exactly how it works lol
This is all dependent on profit and maximizing shareholder value on both ends, but you're saying the utility will just "remove" the data center from the grid to the benefit of the consumer?
the utility will just "remove" the data center from the grid
Yes, that protective removal happens regularly. The chief U.S. electrical reliability coordinator requires that effectively every utility has that responsibility- ironically in both the U.S. and Canada. Example: https://www.nerc.com/globalassets/standards/regional-development/serc/regional_prc-006-serc-03_clean_08252021.pdf
On top of that, every U.S. state except Nebraska has government employees who make state-level regulations that compel the same. That includes places as diverse as Texas and New York.
If the grid is at risk of blacking out they transmit signals across the grid to request load shedding. Data centers because they have 100% generator backup and are massive loads can get better rates if they agree to peak shave and switch to generator load during these events to protect the grid.
Data centers have to run the generators monthly anyway for PM purposes and typically can run 2-3 days without refueling if not longer...
So kinda yes?
This is not true
Do you work in the industry? Because I've worked at multiple DC sites on power and cooling schemes where they've got load shed contingencies
To produce AI child porn. Great investment, USA!
21st century technology in a 20th century world.
I hate articles like this. We should be willing to sacrifice electricity and air conditioning during the height of summer to maximize shareholder value |s
As long as the billionaires can get .0001% richer, I'm all for it.
Atleast we live in a system that protects us all and gives us meaning and identity.
And remember folks, it's YOU who will get to experience the rolling blackouts because the data centers have backup generators!
The backup generators are only for essential stuff like security. Backup could never keep up with something like a 750 MW data center. BUT - your point is correct, because the data centers pay a small premium for priority non interruptable service. You will get brownouts, they will be fine.
I would blame it on Trump throttling all of the East Coast offshore wind farms, some of which were already producing energy. China can power data centers with solar and wind. Why can't we?
Can and will if we import Chinese battery tech/Solar.
And adding tariffs to all forms of energy imported from Canada
What are these data centers for that we dont have access already?
massive productivity gains.
so much hype and fear about AI.
also, its propping the economy up right now.
negative headlines sell.
but most importantly to get a much better answer to this question you could go to AI right now and have it give you a precise pro and cons list of AI and then analyze which is greater.
massive productivity gains.
so much hype and fear about AI.
also, its propping the economy up right now.
negative headlines sell.
but most importantly to get a much better answer to this question you could go to AI right now and have it give you a precise pro and cons list of AI and then analyze which is greater.
I need to watch those videos jumping into different AI beds made of different foods on my Facebook feeds dammit
It’s the AI buildout of course
Nothing. They're to help tech companies and tech bros get wealthier at your expense.