zlacker

>>tin7in+(OP)
What nobody is talking about here is that there is no more power available in the US. All the FAANGS have scooped up the space and power contracts.

You can buy all the GPUs you can possibly find. If you want to deploy 10MW+, it just doesn't exist.

These things need redundant power/cooling, real data centers, and can't just be put into chicken farms. Anything less than 10MW isn't enough compute now either for large scale training and you can't spread it across data centers because all the data needs to be in one place.

So yea... good luck.

>>latchk+Sh1
With things like solar and wind installs becoming more off-the-shelf, is there any path there? What does 10MW of solar/wind look like? Are we talking the size of a big ranch or the size of a small county?

>>vorpal+Vi1
It doesn't matter, this stuff wants/needs to be deployed yesterday, not in 2-3 years. I'm starting with raw power, but even that isn't the limiting factor... it goes deeper... try to buy a bunch of large transformers, those are year long waitlists.

Texas has a lot of wind. At this scale, it is mostly grid power anyway. Grid is a mixture of everything. Oh and solar has this pesky issue of not working in the evening, so then you have another problem... storage. ;-)

I should add... you want backup generators for your UPS systems? Those are a 4.5 years backlog.

>>latchk+Ej1
Is battery storage not yet commonplace? There are gobs of options: pump water uphill, spin giant flywheels, etc. Picking a battery with the right tradeoffs for your situation is a crucial consideration, I would think. And I am a subject matter expert here, having played several hours of Cities: Skylines in my day. Which gives me an idea...

Let's click 6 wind turbines down off the coast, shove our H100s underneath them for water cooling, and ah...separate the water/oxygen into tanks for hydrogen power when it ain't blowy no more? Or something? Someone help me out here.

>>a_wild+iq1
Grid-scale batteries are basically nonexistent in the US, but also aren't particularly common elsewhere. In 2016 there was only 160mW [0] of battery storage available to the grid. Battery prices have come down since then, but not enough for energy storage to make sense for utilities in a lot of cases. If capacity has doubled in the past seven years, the person you're responding to would still be asking for like 3% of available battery capacity nationwide.

As far as other storage methods, they're really cool but water and trains require a lot of space, and flywheels typically aren't well suited for storing energy for long amounts of time. That being said, pumped water is still about 10x more common than batteries right now and flywheels are useful if you want to normalize a peaky supply of electricity.

I'd like to believe we'll see more innovative stuff like you're suggesting, but I think for the time being the regulatory environment is too complicated and the capex is probably too high for anyone outside of the MAMA companies to try something like that right now.

[0] - https://www.energy.gov/policy/articles/deployment-grid-scale...