Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Aldeer General Forum A.I. vs Net Zero?

How does that work?

One single data center can use as much energy as 30,000 single family homes.

We need to stay ahead of our enemies like China to win the A.I. race, yet according to the environmentalists we need to quit using so much power and the power we use should come from renewable. It seems like divergent goals...

We have a data center supposedly going in down 280 from where I live. They use a lot of water to cool too I think.

Nuclear is the answer

Solar farms are being built as part of data center plans. If they say a data center is costing Goggle a billion to build, 10% of that is a solar farm that goes with it. They are not mandated to do that, they just go ahead and build the solar farm because it can get done faster than getting APCO to build a Nat Gas plant or a nuke plant.

How much acreage in solar would be required to power one of those centers ? Doesn't seem possible in congested areas.

The solar farm is tied into the larger grid, but its about 80 to 100 MWac Here is a map you can scroll and hover around on. https://seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list/

Wow. Those jokers are popping up everywhere.

Mini nuke plants are the future of electricity. Y'all stock gamblers pay attention to that.

Data centers are stupid. There's not enough fresh water.

Data centers are stupid because the tech will improve to the point that their size and energy usage will become obsolete by the time they start making money.

Nope - they are making money on Day-1.

Improved tech requires more power, not less. I work in this field every single day - networks get larger and faster, compute gets smaller and faster - all of that requires more power. I have seen MANY data centers that submerge their network switching components in non-conductive chilled oil to keep the optics cool. Heat is the enemy of compute - and the cooling is the one of the largest costs of these hyper-scale data centers.

C‘mon now…..let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

A typical solar farm generates between 0.15 and 0.2 megawatts of electricity per acre. This can vary based on factors like panel efficiency, location, and available sunlight.

So to round that out, that works out to about 100 megawatts per 640 acres which is 1 square mile. So 100 megawatts per square mile.

A typical large coal burning power plant can like Plant Bowen between Rome and Cartersville, Georgia produces 3,450 megawatts.

So it would take 340 square miles to produce as much solar power as a large coal power plant.

That would be most of Etowah County, Alabama completely covered in solar panels.

I think nuclear in the future of AI

I listened to a podcast about the AI race recently. The speaker said this is how China will win. The have built, if I recall correctly, 30 nuclear plants in recent history, with 30 more planned or in process. I will try to find and link the podcast.

The solar projects I have mitigated are basically a full section or a half section. so thats 640 acres or 320.
The reason these data centers are going for solar is speed, not for being green and anti-coal or anti-nuclear. A solar farm can be planned and be generating power within a year. They dont generate power like a burner plant does but they get built much faster. Any kind of burner plant (coal, gas, nuclear) takes much longer. Even if the regulations that slow them down were tossed, they still have to be built. A solar farm can be built damn near overnight and they can start generating power as soon as the first panel is set in place.

I'm not anti-solar, just being a realist. Solar and wind have their place, but we have to use all the arrows in the quiver to supply the power the world will need.

I designed air pollution control for power plants. I doubt we will ever see a new coal fired power plant being built, that's just not going to happen, that time has passed, however natural gas fired combined cycle plants are very common and fairly easy and relatively quick to build using a common architecture.

Southern Company has probably built the last large scale nuclear units over at Plant Vogtle. Those were the first new ones in 30 years and will probably be the last.

The future of nuclear will be in small modular reactors used in a distributed power production model.

I'm not pro or anti-solar. I'm against good farmland being used for solar. Put them down the median of the interstates and highways, that would be enough to fill the gaps in the grid. Car wrecks would be the same kind of issue we have with guardrails and other crap today.
Just the fact is, getting solar up and running is 10x faster than other methods, and data centers need that kind of speed or else they wont make money.
Small nuke reactors are awesome but they are still a ways out from being practical for everywhere.

Spot on. Those small modular reactors are likely the best way forward when it comes to nuclear. There’s a good bit of research going on right now on the small scale reactors and just from a footprint standpoint it seems to make the most sense. There’s a nuke plant not far from me that has one reactor built in the 70’s. They literally made a very large lake out of rural farm land to service that one reactor. I just don’t see a project of that size ever being undertaken again in this part of the country. Not only has the population here boomed, the environmental regulations would make it nearly impossible to get off the ground. Just doesn’t make practical sense now when the technology seems to be trending towards smaller, more efficient ways to generate power.

Fun side note on solar farms. Clemson is doing a bunch of research on engineering crops that can be grown in conjunction with solar farms in order to make more efficient use of the land they take up. Will be interesting to see if they can develop some viable crops that can produce in the same space as the solar arrays. Definitely would be cool to see those spaces produce food and power at the same time.

Data center's are stupid?? That's some of the dumbest shit I've seen on here today and I saw someone say Trump is going to give "alsaka" to Russia!!!