Inspired by an episode of SHIFT KEY by @robinsonmeyer and @JesseJenkins I recreated the infamous NERC fan for the last 30 years.
(I'm just here for the pretty graphic. I point to more rigorous work by @RockyMtnInst and @EIAgov for actual residuals)
https://t.co/UySquEvF0k
This would be the most water consumptive on-site feature of a closed-loop datacenter outside of the bathrooms. Residential pools evaporate like 100 gallons a day.
Everything MPU posts about data centers is complete garbage. They have zero respect for their audience. Literally no one here is losing power. This tweet is a complete lie.
What's actually happening is that a supply contract between two utilities is ending, and the small one is just buying power from elsewhere, and this was all expected to happen since 2009.
The company that serves homes on the California side of Lake Tahoe is a small utility called Liberty. Liberty buys about 75% of its electricity from a much larger utility, NV Energy in Nevada, and generates the other 25% itself from solar farms it owns. Liberty then sells that to 49,000 customers. NV Energy has told Liberty it will stop selling them wholesale power after May 2027.
It's kind of like Liberty's a coffee shop that buys beans and sells coffee to customers. The customers are the homes, and the beans are the electricity it buys from NV Energy or makes itself. This is like your local coffee shop ending a contract with a specific bean company and started buying the beans from somewhere else. It doesn't stop you from buying coffee.
Why is their contract ending with NV Energy? NV Energy selling to Liberty was understood as transitional since it started in 2009. Long story short, NV Energy was basically Liberty's only wholesale option, but a new transmission line opening in May 2027 gives Liberty access to a much wider Western market, with among other things a much larger share of solar and wind and hydro. That's the whole story here. Ending the contract with NV Energy and opening up this much wider pool with much more renewable energy was the plan here completely separate from data center demand.
NV Energy is ending the contract right as the new high-voltage transmission line comes online, and is opting not to extend past that date. In its filing with California regulators, Liberty said NV Energy cited growing data center demand as one of several reasons it would not offer another extension. But the town will have the high-voltage transmission at that point. No one's losing power. This was always the plan.
This is like if a local coffee shop were buying beans from Starbucks, and then started buying beans from somewhere else instead, and the headlines all saying "Nearly 50,000 people have been told that Starbucks will stop providing coffee to them, because it's redirecting it elsewhere."
MPU just chooses to send out these unbelievable lies and gets millions of views every time.
@BenjaminHilborn If you can do honest to god synthetic inertia, that’s awesome. But if you’re imagining some control loop reacting to load fluctuations, it’s likely too slow. Torsional frequencies for CCGTs are fast!
@JigarShahDC@duncancampbell This 11% is Model Flop Utilization, not nameplate power utilization. It’s scoring how efficiently a training run is using the hardware. You can have a datacenter at max load and a terrible MFU
The highest concentration of beautiful people in SF is in the Indian restaurant with big windows on my block. Perhaps everyone looks radiant enjoying biryani with friends
@sdamico free idea: 1000% more knobbly and brassy magnetic toggles and you find somewhere to do a nice ceramic coat in pastel colors.
You will be one Architectural Digest video away from ten bajillion units sold and when that time comes I will accept a free one
The Social Network is a much better movie about what elite higher education felt like around the Great Recession — that particular froth of anxiety, enthusiasm, adolescence, and sociopathy — than about the tech industry imo