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Comment on Texas Needs Equivalent of 30 Reactors to Meet Data Center Power Demand

sleep_deprived@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Texan here. I don’t have a generator. Blackouts basically haven’t been a thing in my area since like 15 years ago, so it really depends on location. Also my electric bill works the same way as it would in any other state; the problem is when people buy electricity at what you might call “market price”; most of the time it’s cheaper, but you get fucked over sooner or later. It’s kind of like that story about people’s AC being controlled by the power company. They signed up for a program that explicitly set your AC higher during high-demand periods and then surprise Pikachu faced when the company did what they said they would do.

That said, our grid is still definitely trash (as are many other things here) and I’m desperately trying to move. Basically the only thing we’ve got going for us is the food is amazing.

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tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

They signed up for a program that explicitly set your AC higher during high-demand periods and then surprise Pikachu faced when the company did what they said they would do.

If the price swing between peak and off-peak is dramatic enough, I guess one could probably cool water during off-peak hours and then use a heat exchanger or something to use it to sink heat during peak hours.

home.howstuffworks.com/ac4.htm

Chilled water systems - In a chilled-water system, the entire air conditioner is installed on the roof or behind the building. It cools water to between 40 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 and 7.2 degrees Celsius). The chilled water is then piped throughout the building and connected to air handlers. This can be a versatile system where the water pipes work like the evaporator coils in a standard air conditioner. If it’s well-insulated, there’s no practical distance limitation to the length of a chilled-water pipe.

That’s not intended to store energy, just transport it, but I’d imagine that all one would really need is that plus a sufficiently-large, insulated tank of water.

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