Good morning with good news: US has ~600 GW of dispatchable solar/wind plus battery projects in interconnection queues! That's 35X new data center load (17 GW) forecasted by 2030. PJM says reliability value of solar/wind plus battery is similar to gas! emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/…
New large (& planned) US data centers are signing long-term industrial-price contracts for nuclear power. The data centers need 24/7 power & will be sited close to the nuclear plants. Intermittent "renewable" power is not useful for them. Nor for consumers. Intermittent renewables are simply a subsidy for the rich, payed for by taxpayers, and by ratepayers who don't own homes and/or who can't afford solar. They drive up prices for everyone, except the rich who are allowed sell their solar-generated electricity back to the utilities at *retail* rates when the power is not needed (and hence has a negative market value). This causes the utilities to lose money. And since they are mandated to buy solar at a loss, they shut down base load to save money. This drives grid instability, and drives up the spot prices of power by orders of magnitude when the sun isn't shining. It is exemplified by e.g. Germany and California, with the most mandates and subsidies for wind and solar. They have unstable grids and electricity prices that are the highest in Europe and the US mainland, respectively. Intermittent renewables aren't actually economically or reliably working (for anyone who isn't feeding from taxpayer- or ratepayer-funded subsidy trough). This is elementary stuff, which anyone who works in or follows the electric power industry sees happening on a daily basis. And it's getting worse.
@johnrhanger "35X new data center load (17 GW) forecasted by 2030" - so it seems that will be another "narrative" that some try to push it down our throat...
@johnrhanger Now if you just colocate the data center with the solar/battery, you could still be grid connected but with a smaller connection, since most load would be local. Inbound power for periods of lower solar and outbound power when solar production exceeds data center 24 hour load.
@johnrhanger 🤕 you should know better than this queues not the same as connection which is what is needed.
@johnrhanger That's encouraging, thanks for sharing. Clean renewables make sense!