cloud_herder
@cloud_herder@lemmy.world
- Comment on Honey 4 weeks ago:
That was rough.
- Comment on Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second 1 month ago:
I remember hearing that some may even have LTE to fallback to.
- Comment on US slows plans to retire coal plants because of AI power usage 3 months ago:
Yep! Base load generation is the amount of energy that is constantly required and it has to be consistent. Any city or area will always use a certain minimum amount of energy, at every hour of the day. There is never a minute that demand dips below and this is called the base load. Intermittent renewables without storage can’t cover it, yet.
The other problem is economics. Hydro, geothermal, natural gas, nuclear, and coal can be operated to generate consistent reliable amounts of energy to cover it but at different costs. Removing hydro and geothermal as not all regions can leverage it - leaves, generally, coal, nat gas, and nuclear. Coal has been generally actively phased out over the last decade (in the US at least, I’m sure elsewhere), leaving natural gas and nuclear as options.
Nuclear with a substantially lower, if not negligible, carbon footprint outside of construction has so much red tape and lack of expertise and economies of scale that each plant and part ends up being close to bespoke with high costs and long construction times. Something like eight years and multiple billions of dollars.
Natural gas plants can be brought online in something like 1.5 to 2 years for substantially lower costs due to mass production, broader expertise, and less regulation.
What this leads to is a price per kW for being something like $.80+ for nuclear and like ~$.20 for natural gas over the lifetime of the plant.
These are all figures I loosely recall and haven’t confirmed or updated in my mind in a few years so I’m sure I’m off but the differences are roughly the same.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are looking to innovate to solve this economic problem with nuclear by providing mass production capabilities of nuclear power but we aren’t there yet.
So, for now, economically, natural gas is often chosen over nuclear just as coal was before it. Hopefully that changes in the future sooner rather than later.
- Comment on How do Texas residents afford electricity? 4 months ago:
I’ve done lots of tech projects within the retail energy industry in Texas - this is the right answer.
To expand a little bit:
Retail energy providers (REPs), like NRG, ClearSky, Just Energy, etc. make their money by forecasting the amount of energy that will be needed as far in advance as possible and purchasing that amount from power generators like CenterPoint and marking it up a few cents. The farther out, the cheaper they can get it. I’ve helped build forecasting engines for a few that ingest historical usage data from meters (all meters in Texas are smart meters), weather data, and others to use machine learning to forecast how much individuals will need and aggregate it together to help the energy traders make better informed trade decisions farther out.
If they mess up or an unforeseen event happens and they don’t have enough energy bought for that time segment (forgot the term for a window of time they use), they have to go to the spot market which is where the prices fluctuate and can be many many multitudes higher than the rate the customers are contracted to pay.
In a storm scenario or a freeze, it can be thousands of times more expensive because demand is so high and supply is so limited. This is when REPs go bankrupt if they don’t have the cash on hand.
There are also insurance plans that the REPs pay for that cover very specific conditions for different types of events or outages that can kick in to cover the huge costs they would otherwise incur on their own buying electricity at that spot rate. I’ve known a few that were only able to stay operating because someone a few years prior had bought an insurance policy that covered said weather event.
Griddy died because of the ice storm in Texas a few years ago and the huge costs people incurred. I actually met with their CIO the year prior as part of a technology assessment of their stack. Nice guy.
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 6 months ago:
Damn you’re unionized IT? Where are you general located?
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg explained how Meta will crush Google and Microsoft at AI—and Meta warned it could cost more than $30 billion a year 9 months ago:
Gah he looks worse than usual in this shot.
- Comment on 23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch 10 months ago:
Lmfao what? I can’t wait to watch this play out…
- Comment on Twitch to shut down in Korea over 'prohibitively expensive' network fees 11 months ago:
What are you talking about? I work in cloud and fiber infrastructure - the major players pay for fiber connections and close proximity to their customers.
- Comment on Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO 11 months ago:
What was this? I didn’t catch it
- Comment on Tech office shuts down its free cocktail bar for employees, CEO says “The office is dead” — An experiment in 2020s, incentivizing the workplace as a dot-com-era adult playground where work also occ... 1 year ago:
It’s so insane to think of this being an office perk. Just there for you to use… My office has a kitchen…