Comment on As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act
ulterno@programming.dev 1 week ago
I see white roofs that can be dark themed to reduce the load on the grid.
Wasn’t there a country with too much solar, causing electricity prices to fall too low?
Do they not have any space left for data-centres?
I3lackshirts94@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s probably true but you only get ⅓ of a day on average of power. Demands are still rising so the other ⅔ of the day prices are higher and likely still averages higher on average for an entire day even if ⅓ of it is so cheap.
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You could store surplus energy with batteries, pumped storage hydro power stations, gravity batteries and so on to bridge the gap at night. It’s just a matter of subsidies in the right direction and political will to get there. But currently in impending pre-war times it’s more like in a diesel-punk dystopy.
ulterno@programming.dev 1 week ago
I’d say you won’t really require batteries for something like this, that will mostly be generating less energy than it is expending at any point of time.
Note that I am only suggesting filling the roofs and not the rest of the area around it.
Besides, they most probably have a Double-conversion UPS, so they just need to make a controller that supports a side input channel for charging from the PV output.
I3lackshirts94@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah but all that costs money too, subsidies or not it comes from somewhere. Maybe your electric bill is lower but you’re paying higher on taxes or on something else that could have been subsidized.
The only good subsidies do is lower risk and advance technology. No one wants to take a chance on first generation products at high cost and high risk. So once the technology is developed, scalable, and sustainable someone begins to profit off of a subsidy. What good is a subsidy if it’s taken as profit somewhere on the chain of companies building it and not saving rate payers?
Regardless, there is going to be a bottleneck somewhere when demands are spiking and it takes years for this stuff to come online to support it. Data centers are gobbling up existing capacity that was built for long term projected growth. So how are utilities going to pay for future infrastructure to replace that capacity…. rate increases for everyone! The bottle neck of generation is caused by them and huge demands quickly, not because of subsidies, technology, or political will (related energy supply). You allow the generation to go to data centers then you are bottlenecking the materials or labor to replace the capacity later.