Hot take: it’s ok to use land to make stuff. Food, energy, intelligence, widgets. The US is blessed with a lot of land. Let’s just take care of it and not create new superfund sites.
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Craig Lawrence
25.8K posts
Craig Lawrence
@clawrence
Investing in companies leading the energy transition @energyventures. Studied @texas_univ @Stanford. Worked @IDEO @Accel @SunEdison @SolarBridgeTech @SunPower
Austin, TX Katılım Ocak 2008
5.1K Takip Edilen13.6K Takipçiler
Craig Lawrence retweetledi
How data centers are eating up rural Texas. austinchronicle.com/news/how-data-…
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@nukeadvocate Same is true for gas plants, which have an average capacity factor around 50-60%. Data centers also don’t run 100% all the time. And none of that negates my point that we have room on the grid for data centers.
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@clawrence 50GW nameplate, not 50GW firm. Data centers don't run on weather.
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This is why I don’t get why everyone is freaking out. We added 50GW of new generation capacity LAST YEAR. And will be adding about 80GW this year. The grid can absorb a lot of data centers.
Jigar Shah@JigarShahDC
We only have the ability to build 50 GW of data centers through 2030 because of all sorts of supply chains issues with GPUs, memory, CPUs, and etc. With 100 hours of flexibility we can fit 50GWs on the existing grid and lower everyone’s bills by 5%. open.substack.com/pub/energyempi…
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@Molson_Hart Don’t forget the occasional sub-freezing temps with rain or snow that shut every city down and likely the electrical grid also.
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This is the thing that people do not understand about Texas weather.
It is not 100 for 4 months and then pleasant the rest of the year.
It is 100 for 6 months. 90 for 1 month. And 40 to 80 for the other 5.
It can be 40 Tuesday, 80 Wednesday. 40 on Thursday.
Not fun.
Kit Puls@kit_puls
@Molson_Hart Forget about the 8 months of 60°-70° weather when you are not in the middle of summer?
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That ‘bullshit’ is exactly that. Bullshit. Feel free to make the point about power density without making stuff up and posting misleading images. Utility scale solar takes a lot of land area. That’s a well know fact. Luckily, we have a lot of land in places like the Middle East that is otherwise not particularly usable. The UAE is building 1GW of baseload power with solar plus batteries. It will be cheaper and faster than building 1GW of nuclear power. And yes - it will take a lot more land. All energy involves tradeoffs. prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
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@Object_Zero_ @clawrence They missed the entire point of power to sq area discussion and they are focusing on that bullshit. It is unfortunate.
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@krewson281976 @Getthebagcoach There are direct bus routes between the major Texas cities on @vonlane
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@clawrence @Getthebagcoach its a 4 hour drive in car bus is longer with stops
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A flight from Houston to San Antonio shouldn’t cost over $100 but it actually does and cost $400. Plus…. Worst administration ever
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@GonetoBlueSky8 You have no understanding of the natural carbon cycle. Or atmospheric science. Or probably any other technical matter you are discussing. Mammals did not exist when the earth was at 7000ppm, so not sure why that is relevant to us now.
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@clawrence Big deal, you clearly have no understanding of scale, 430ppm = 0.043%, oxygen is 23%. CO2 has been 7000ppm in the past, plants need CO2, if it falls below 150ppm they die.
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I see many posts talking about how 'resource intensive' wind and solar are.
Check my math, but the world extracts, processes, transports, and burns 100 million barrels of oil a day, about 14 million metric tons worth.
My best estimate of the weight of all the wind turbine blades installed ON EARTH today (caveat, used Claude to help estimate, check my math) is 20 million metric tons. So, 1.5 days worth of global oil consumption. AND THEY LAST FOR 20+ YEARS.
Don't let people scare you with big numbers. There is nothing on earth more resource intensive than the oil and gas indsutry. It's just that when we burn oil and gas, the waste ends up mostly in the atmosphere (and your lungs), not in a landfill.
As if that is somehow better?
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@Object_Zero_ And no amount of solar alone will enable a 100% solar powered data center without energy storage. The amount of solar (and land) needed to achieve 100MW of continuous power will depend on the amount and type of storage used.
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The item you circled in the picture is not the data center referenced by Guiness. It's a substation for the solar park. The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is intended to be rated at 5GW when complete and powers much more than a 100MW data center. It is a grid connected site to DEWA's grid. The datacenter is also 33,311.11 m² (.03 square km) per Guinness. guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/…
I'm not disagreeing with you that a 100% solar powered data center is going to require a lot of land and is likely impractical most places. You just have multiple incorrect claims in this, including the image itself, which is misleading with regards to it's size. The data center in question is larger than any of the buildings in that substation.
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@Object_Zero_ @Robotbeat It’s not a data center. What is circled is a substation. But you probably know that by now.
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This 100MW data center in UAE is the largest solar powered datacenter in the world. There are currently 1,300 data centers in the world that are bigger than this one, but this one is the largest solar powered one.
That’s 10 square kilometres of solar panels you can see.
The datacenter itself is 0.02 square kilometres, so a solar powered datacenter is ~500x larger than a data center using any other form of power.
A five hundred times larger site.
UAE has some of the highest solar irradiance anywhere on Earth, it is an inhospitable desert. Averaging 9.7 hours of sunlight per day with average irradiance above 2,200 kWh/m^2.
If you build this somewhere else, you need more solar panels because your irradiance will almost certainly be lower.
Even if the world had an infinite supply of free solar panels, solar power will not be free.
Anyone who has ever done major capital projects, who looks at where data centers need to be in the next 5 years and the next 10 years… we know it aint solar. Sorry.
You struggle to even build a train track that’s 100 miles long and 10ft wide anywhere in the West, there is zero chance of build 100 square mile solar farms for GW compute.
This is why people are talking about space compute. Deploying into space is one strategy to solve the constraints.
But there are faster and more scalable strategies, that get you to mass deployment of multi GW data centers.
There are strategies that also allow you to power the 10 billion robots and their newtonian actuators, that immediately follow the inference demand cycle.
Step back and look at the full cycle of this industrial revolution… There will be billions of chips, but there will be trillions of actuators.
This biggest part of this revolution is the embodiment cycle, and it’s big by a factor of 20 or 50x over the stuff that comes before it.
There is no analogy in human history for the scale of this economy, of the demand it will place on energy and commodities.
The humans own the Earth, and if you exist inside their legal system, they won’t let you turn the surface of their planet into glass.
But they do want your chips and your actuators to serve their needs and desires. There is a way to do all of this, and so it will happen.
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@abemurray @valaratomics What you have circled is a substation, not a data center.
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Nuclear makes this so much better
@valaratomics ftw
Andrew Côté@Andercot
This is the footprint ratio of data center to solar panels in the sunniest country in the world. Yeah, I think we're gonna have to go nuclear.
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@slutreplik I don’t believe that. So I guess I’m not abysmally stupid?
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@clawrence You must be abysmally stupid if you believe that all the oil extracted is being used to make energy.
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@GonetoBlueSky8 It's 430ppm. The last time it was 300ppm was over 100 years ago around World War I.
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@clawrence Huge part of exhaust gases is nitrogen from the air, the rest water and CO2. CO2 absorbed by plants,locking in carbon, emitting oxygen. The CO2 concentrations you are wetting yourself over are around 300ppm ( parts per million) Best you get things into perspective.
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There is a tremendous amount of waste from oil and gas extraction and refining that absolutely ends up in the ground. Wastewater, petcoke, sulfur, acid sludge, catalysts. They also just use the atmosphere to dump their waste when burned. NOx, SOx, CO, methane, VOCs. You think that’s better than some inert composites in a landfill?
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@clawrence Oil and gas do not have to be buried in landfills after twenty years.
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@clawrence @omgsidewalks Rubbish. My team of demand planners exceeded KPIs, moved highest ever number of units with least errors while WFH. Relationships with ops staff & external clients improved because we weren’t in crowded, noisy environments with 0 natural light. We quit rather than return.
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What’s the dumbest name for a business? I’ll start: Fifth Third Bank
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@SBorsadia I'm comparing an apple to an apple. Wind turbine blades are made from oil. I am comparing two different ways to use oil to produce energy.
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@clawrence Comparing an apple to a watermelon - for what exactly?
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