Without having read it myself, perhaps they mean 5% of total usage. So the gas generation is built to be able to handle 2/3rds of the power demand, in case of outage as a backup, but in normal operation will only contribute 5% of the energy demand. That way, in the event of a failure of the renewable energy source for whatever reason, or a failure in the batteries, the gas can kick in and keep the servers online while cutting disposal operations that represent 1/3 of the total.
Comment on Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 months ago
Actual paper (not calling this a study since this appears to be non–peer-reviewed and only self-published): https://microgridai.centrefornetzero.org/ Be advised that this website relies on some Chromium-only trickery.
renewable microgrids [...] compared to nuclear small modular reactors
A 95% renewable microgrid with 5% gas backup - in line with the UK’s Clean Power 2030 target - was modelled at almost a third (31.7%) lower cost than [nuclear] in today’s prices.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Extreme incompetence in modeling. the github is complete crap. otoh their angelfire site does actually list some costs for the SMR.
They make the SMR side look absurdly cheap. $55/mwh power costs with 30c/watt capital costs is just absurdly low. Conservative SMR power estimates start at $180/mwh, and so actual microgrid costs would be over 80% lower.
More incompetence has their microgrid using off shore wind which is just stupid for HVDC requirement for small scale. Automatically too incompetent to trust their modeling. They don’t specify cost assumptions for any of the microgrid components.
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 months ago
wdym the github is complete crap? it has everything you mentioned you wanted to look at. and wouldn't a too-low estimate for nuclear costs give extra validity to the claim that microgrids are much cheaper?
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
what is .nc file format? their csv data has no cost numbers.
It is much cheaper. Everywhere. But the modeling done in this instance can still be completely incompetent.
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 months ago
is this not cost? https://github.com/ryanjenkinson/data-centre-modelling/blob/main/notebooks/costs_2020.csv
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36360469/read-nc-netcdf-files-using-python. and regardless, is a single file you don't understand that is clearly read by the notebooks as input solar data enough for you to evaluate competence‽