Except you can't power 24/7/365 with renewable alone, so you still need gas turbine backup.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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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.
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!
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
One hundred kilobit per second is my final offer
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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.
That's cost, not efficiency...
It's Cost Efficiency, which is a vital calculation in any business enterprise.
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.
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.
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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huh, so AI WILL solve climate change, lol
Of course. Renewable blows nuclear out of orbit when it comes to price. Nuclear plants take decades to build and are generally a lot more expensive than estimated.
The Vogtle scam's end cost was $17/watt. $8B or $4/watt was just financing costs prior to eventual operation that Georgia Power got to charge its customers for its share, over the 20 years before it gave them power from the boondoggle.
Solar costs under $1/watt to deploy, and batteries in a container (can fit under solar) costs $1 per 10 watt-hours of storage. Both last over 30 years.
SMR's can pretend lower capital costs per watt, when excluding design/prototype time, but trade much more expensive enriched (proliferation risk) fuel that is less efficient, needs breeder reactors to provide likely from Russia, and carries higher security costs per watt. SMRs are simply a new scam to defraud investors with because nuclear is worthless as energy, and only ever is for military applications.
SMR’s can pretend lower capital costs per watt, when excluding design/prototype time, but trade much more expensive enriched (proliferation risk) fuel that is less efficient
The primary appeal of SMRs is their portability. Pointless for a data center, but vital for a large vehicle like a cruise liner or a shipping frigate.
Replacing our fleet of bunker fuel powered ships would be enormously beneficial.
The primary appeal of SMRs is their portability
There are micro/nano nuclear designs meant to fit in a truck trailer. They are under 1mw power, and not meant to be affordable for those who need more power than that. They are not space efficient to power ships. They may never be made, and just investor scams.
As for shipping, civilian use would be nightmare. Virginia class nuclear subs cost $2.7B. 5x more 2.2B more than best diesel submarines and have operational costs that are 4x higher than diesel subs. Wind power is path to decarbonizing shipping. That chinese airborne blimp windmill posted recently would work.
Virginia class nuclear subs cost $2.7B.
Submarines aren't normally used for bulk transport of civilian cargo.
The prototype NS Savannah cost $46M to build in 1955 (roughly $500B today) with half the cost being its nuclear engine. So, on the high end of modern container shipping, but with the benefits of rarely needing to refuel.
And that's before an economy of scale on bulk construction.
Wind power is path to decarbonizing shipping.
Sailing ships don't operate well at the scale we're building.
The nuclear industry likes to lowball the cost of SMRs (heart of nuclear ships), but the overall cost difference of power types is the truth. Aircraft carriers are also 4x the cost of diesel, but with only 2x the operational costs (inclusive of similar functions of managing planes). An aircraft carrier requires 1000 extra crew to supervise the reactor.
That's mostly because the west has become a bad place to build things, bike-shedding and a general loss of nuclear building expertise lost due to successful campaigning against nuclear by the fossil fuel industry.
We could be scaling up nuclear right now to help the goals for 2050 to be reached and then coast for a while as renewables pickup pace and fusion is finally cracked.
But no only thing people care about is immediate cost.
Yes renewables are cheaper per kw at the moment but they are also putting a lot of strain on the grid that's not accounted for that's expensive to upgrade, they are also not scaling up fast enough, which means there will be added cost to climate change.
Vs we could build nuclear reactors at a loss and bring on serious gigawatts of clean energy in a decade that would provide a stable baseline.
The west, the east, the north, the south... Wherever you build your reactor it will overshoot its estimated budget and wil be overshadowed by renewables.
But yes, there are many variables and the answer always lies in differentiating.
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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Wind and solar ᵃⁿᵈ ᵍᵃˢ
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.
It's very easy mix in radioactive materials with conventional explosives to make a dirty bomb... provided you have access to radioactive materials. You put nuclear reactors in cargo ships, anyone that can board and commandeer a cargo ship now has access to radioactive materials and therefore the capability building a dirty bomb.
There’s an R^2 drop off as you travel away from the sun. Sure if you're going to Saturn, solar isn't going to work well. We already use nuclear batteries for those missions, but it's some butt clenching with that because if the rocket goes boom instead of getting to space (which happens sometimes) it would spread some radioactive material around.
But it's going to be a long time before we're building space stations beyond Mars (it'll be a long time before we go beyond the Moon the way things are going) so it's going to be solar power for most space things other than the odd probe we send to the outer planets.
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
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