TWO LESSONS FROM TEXAS
GET WIND AND SOLAR OFF THE GRID. SUPPLY DATA CENTRES WITH CONVENTIONAL POWER OFF-GRID.
In January this year, severe storms provided a natural experiment to test whether wind and solar are fit for purpose to supply power to the grid. In Texas, during the week of January 19-26, wind, solar, and batteries failed, while conventional power kept the lights on.
This contrasts with Storm Uri in February 2021, when Texas almost went black from end to end. Rolling blackouts persisted for weeks and cost hundreds of lives. Wind and solar struggled, and gas also underperformed. That enabled the wind and solar enthusiasts to spin the story and point the finger at gas. In fact, it wasn’t gas per se that failed; it just signalled that the system was winterised to the standard of the colder northern states.
Technical Elaborating on the problem with gas in 2021
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7448029240681263104?
Natural gas in TX didn’t fail during Uri, as such. Rather, there were two discrete failure modes; one was due to a combination of regulatory imposts (electrification of pipeline compression station equipment) and critical demand mismanagement (accidentally curtailing lines power to those compression stations - whoopsie!);
OFF-GRID POWER FOR DATA CENTRES
In brief, “bring your own power”.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ercot-connect-and-manage-spp-miso-eris/749083/
ERCOT uses a unique connect-and-manage, or C&M, interconnection process that is adding new generation faster than any other U.S. system.
ERCOT’s C&M approach “allows generators to enter the market as energy-only resources because it manages them as part of its proactive transmission planning process,”
Unlike ERCOT, most system operators’ reliability requirements and allocation of upgrade costs force detailed and redundant studies of generators seeking interconnection that result in backlogged queues..
POWER PROJECTS UNDERWAY
At present, two off-grid projects are being pursued to serve data centres with gas from the massive Permian basin
Pacifico Energy’s GW Ranch project is a private-grid power generation campus with approval for 7.65 GW of power generation with a mix of small and large-scale gas turbines.
The FO Permian/HiVolt Energy partnership has a 3,200 acre site, to deliver over 5GW of power from gas.
ANOTHER SUGGESTION: CO-LOCATE DATA CENTRES AND COAL POWER STATIONS
What if data centres are located in close proximity to coal stations to minimize the amount of new transmission lines and also to revitalise the coal mining districts that serve the coal burners?
Data centres in West Virginia, then?
Finding greenfield locations for Server Farms is getting more difficult it seems. We use to live just down the transmission lines from the Perry nuclear plant in Northeast Ohio. That facility was originally going to have two reactors, but only one was completed. There is a lot of inexpensive land just south of the facility and it seems an investor would like to develop the land-
https://bluewaterhealthyliving.com/news/national-news/ohio/perry-township-trustees-sign-off-on-tax-break-deal-for-new-data-center/
The Bad Boys had a great post today that discussed the costs of blackouts that you may find of interest.
https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/the-price-of-darkness-a-first-look/comments
We were given the choice of paying 20 bucks a month to have AI generated information to go with our security system. The AI figured out that our brown and tan dog was a German Shepard after a lot of training. The AI training never figured out that our big black dog was a Boarder Collie. We declined paying for the service.