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Originally Posted by DoubleK
Great posts by SeeGeeWhy.
One of the projects I'm working on is in a 'data center' park near Reno. The size of these facilities is unlike anything I've seen in my life. I was as shocked as I was the first time I drove through Sherwood Park and saw the size of the refineries.
One of the emerging issues is the impact that these data centers are having on electricity costs. Arizona is looking at setting a separate tariff for data center customers and they are driving up power prices/causing supply shortages in Washington state.
The massive loads of these data centers are suspected to cause power system harmonics issues that will also need addressing. I do think that this is very similar to the issues Alberta is experiencing with inverter based resources causing frequency issues. Both of these are engineering challenges that are fixable, but it's something that I am keeping an eye on. |
This is fascinating as I hadn't heard about the bad harmonics issue. I wonder if cheap, small, load funded and localized batteries would be the answer? We don't get Chinese prices but they're now less than $90 USD/kwh installed. That probably undercuts most other solutions if properly located? I have no idea
As for data center loads increasing power consumption overnight (not necessarily what you're proposing here but the sentiment is ubiquitous), I'm not sure the semiconductor supply chain has any hope in supplying the demand for such a deployment. It's not like there's spare capacity laying around. This will buy utilities some time, but houses do need to start getting in order fairly quickly for sure.
The impact of rising electricity prices will inevitably delay important decarbonization adoption in key technologies like heat pumps because the spark gap between gas and electricity will likely get worse. The flip side here is that with so many new LNG terminals gas price will still rise a fair bit as US household will be competing with high paying Europe for their gas. Overall energy prices will rise for households considerably and there's pain ahead I think. On the flip side, solar and batteries are much more attractive in that scenario too.