“some fields”, “parking lots”, “maybe some windmills” is a wildly vast under estimation of what would be required to do it.
7.65GW is A LOT.
The USA doesn’t even have an active 1GWh solar farm today. It’s 900MW, and it is 4600-5000 acres and is 1.3 million panels
To run batteries off that, you need to 3-4x that would be a 30GWh generation capacity battery to run in the non sun periods and give some buffer for bad weather. Then you need a massive battery as well to store it all. It would need to be able to run at least for a couple days, which means it needs to store 367.2 GWh (48h storage), so my solar numbers above are actually probably wrong since you won’t fill that up in 1 day, but maybe that’s okay if the size is just an emergency amount. 122GWh battery would probably the be minimum for a perfect summer condition 100% of the time day/night cycle.
The largest upcoming battery installation in the USA is 1.15 GWh, which is not built yet.
I’m not saying don’t do it, but you’ve really glossed over the sheer scale of it, and I doubt they’d be able to easily put the solar field near the datacenter, so there’s extra costs around transmission lines as well.
Edit: For 30GW of solar you’re looking at around 153,333 acres, or about the size of Dallas Texas, before the battery storage
I concede that my grasp of the scale involved was unrealistic. However, I don’t see a viable solution. The issue, I have realized, isn’t how to generate the power, it’s the scale of power needed to run these data center monstrosities.
So if solar and wind (with batteries, of course) would be very challenging, it is at least vaguely possible. Texas is a great state for wind, solar, and geothermal power. It already generates about 30% of it’s power from renewables. Texas has a lot of sunny days and a lot of open spaces for wind farms particularly in the western parts of the state. I can think of worse ideas than covering all those oil fields with solar panels or wind farms. You wouldn’t even need to stop producing oil. You can do both.
Nuclear really isn’t viable. Starting the approval process now, it would easily be 20 years before a new plant would start producing power. No one is waiting two decades to open their data center.
The only other option to power these data centers, the one they are going with, is fossil fuels. That means multiplying the amount of toxic and greenhouse gasses being pumped into our air which is the absolute worst option for everyone on the planet.
You aren’t thinking about the scale properly.
“some fields”, “parking lots”, “maybe some windmills” is a wildly vast under estimation of what would be required to do it.
7.65GW is A LOT.
The USA doesn’t even have an active 1GWh solar farm today. It’s 900MW, and it is 4600-5000 acres and is 1.3 million panels
To run batteries off that, you need to 3-4x that would be a 30GWh generation capacity
batteryto run in the non sun periods and give some buffer for bad weather. Then you need a massive battery as well to store it all. It would need to be able to run at least for a couple days, which means it needs to store 367.2 GWh (48h storage), so my solar numbers above are actually probably wrong since you won’t fill that up in 1 day, but maybe that’s okay if the size is just an emergency amount. 122GWh battery would probably the be minimum for a perfect summer condition 100% of the time day/night cycle.The largest upcoming battery installation in the USA is 1.15 GWh, which is not built yet.
I’m not saying don’t do it, but you’ve really glossed over the sheer scale of it, and I doubt they’d be able to easily put the solar field near the datacenter, so there’s extra costs around transmission lines as well.
Edit: For 30GW of solar you’re looking at around 153,333 acres, or about the size of Dallas Texas, before the battery storage
Edit: Updated battery figures
I concede that my grasp of the scale involved was unrealistic. However, I don’t see a viable solution. The issue, I have realized, isn’t how to generate the power, it’s the scale of power needed to run these data center monstrosities.
As you say, 7.65 gigawatts is a lot of power. According to ERCOT, Texas just set a new record for power demand in July of 91gw. So this plant, built to supply this one data center complex, will produce power equal to 8.5% as much power as the entire state of Texas required at peak demand this year (so far, anyway). 8.5% of peak demand for the entire state of Texas which, by the way, is the largest energy consuming state. Texas uses about 15% of the total power generated in the entire USA according to EAI.gov.
So if solar and wind (with batteries, of course) would be very challenging, it is at least vaguely possible. Texas is a great state for wind, solar, and geothermal power. It already generates about 30% of it’s power from renewables. Texas has a lot of sunny days and a lot of open spaces for wind farms particularly in the western parts of the state. I can think of worse ideas than covering all those oil fields with solar panels or wind farms. You wouldn’t even need to stop producing oil. You can do both.
Nuclear really isn’t viable. Starting the approval process now, it would easily be 20 years before a new plant would start producing power. No one is waiting two decades to open their data center.
The only other option to power these data centers, the one they are going with, is fossil fuels. That means multiplying the amount of toxic and greenhouse gasses being pumped into our air which is the absolute worst option for everyone on the planet.