There's not enough power for America's high-tech ambitions

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/data-centers-energy-georgia-development-7a5352e9

by fortran77 • 2 years ago

45 79 2 years ago

techcode2• 2 years ago

How is this different than many other "western democracies"?

For one specific example - The Netherlands with its various tax breaks/benefits - such as buying hybrid or fully electric car, installing solar panels, turning off natural gas (widely used for heating houses/apartments and domestic water) and switch to air based heat pumps and induction cooktop ...

All combined brought the country to a point where it's struggling with electrical grid capacity and availability.

While existing homes tend to have reliable supply of electricity. New homes and companies wait for electrical connection or they still go through with using natural gas despite hybrid heat pumps already being placed, during peak sun electrical grid operators turn off receiving electricity from private solar panels ...etc

Tknl• 2 years ago

The Netherlands is struggling with a lack of grid capacity due to political decisions to ignore the power network management companies that pleaded for at least a decade for expansion.

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

The same happened in both my home countries: US and Sweden.

davedx• 2 years ago

It is changing now though. TenneT now has some huge projects coordinated with the Ministry for Economic Affairs. All the doom and gloom is unhelpful, the Netherlands has come a long way in the last 10 years and we should celebrate the victories. People only want to see the bad news about a supermarket that couldn’t get a grid connection and declare that it’s all a mess.

There are definitely many places on the grid with big backlogs but the rate of upgrades to accommodate them has accelerated immensely.

toast0• 2 years ago

Hybrid cars is a good bet... They almost always use less fuel than the same model ICE, have a better emissions profile, and if they're plugin offer a lot of flexibility.

Adding solar panels when peak production is already too much can still make some sense, depending on circumstance. If it reduces long distance transmission by balancing use closer to generation, that's valuable. If it increases the length of time in a day where solar is dominant, that's valuable. If there's enough capacity that it makes sense to build export facilities, that's valuable, because it also brings import facilities and greater stability. If there's enough excess capacity to inspire storage facilities, that's good too.

Otoh, it could just be that the solar subsidies need to be turned off as they've done their job.

vertnerd• 2 years ago

At the same time, the New York Times (also paywalled) is writing about how some states (California) are extending solar and existing power sources using batteries: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...

There is an interesting graph at the top of the Times article showing the growth of battery use recently.

acidburnNSA• 2 years ago

This is what people said about nuclear power as it stopped being an exponential rise in the mid-1970s. As a power source becomes built it more places, its externalities generally get more regulated. Happened with coal (acid rain, air pollution) and nuclear (Browns ferry fire, TMI, Salem atws), happening now with wind and solar (land use, intermittency)

silverquiet4• 2 years ago

The Bloomberg Oddlots podcast had an episode a few weeks ago about a boom in starts for natural gas power plants; if I remember correctly, they were saying that the infrastructure people who normally run the grid are used to thinking in decades but are now thinking in years. So it seems we will be working hard to increase carbon emissions at a time when we should be cutting them drastically. It does not bode well.

croes• 2 years ago

Isn't the US power grid also a problem?

detourdog4• 2 years ago

The grid in Western Massachusetts is over burdened. Local colleges are building their own peaker co-gen plants to meet needs.

From my POV the US grid needs a rethink that prioritizes local production with large transmission lines used only for redundancy access.

We should probably break down our energy usage between heating and everything else. The heating load is my biggest obstacle to net-zero. I'm working on solar thermal designs to get to zero. Solar thermal avoids the need to interconnect with the grid which currently is maxed out.

techcode2• 2 years ago

It's basically same everywhere in the world - except some places don't mind nuclear, coal, or natural gas.

Few places have enough elevation and water for hydro (and don't mind submerging loads of land to make it happen).

For almost all countries - experts (engineers and scientists) have been warning grid and production will not be enough, and politicians kept focusing on shorter term wins of votes.

zbrozek9• 2 years ago

China electricity production from 2000-2020 overlaid on US electricity production from 1950-2023. Seems like it is definitely possible to achieve a steeper slope.

https://zlnp.net/serve/us_vs_china-electricity_production.pn...

roenxi• 2 years ago

Yes. But that sort of growth wasn't politically feasible in the US. The most economic options at the time were coal and nuclear, both of which were strictly off the table.

silverquiet4• 2 years ago

I always think of it like this - what job would you rather have your kid get into, working in construction, or as a lawyer arguing for or against that construction? One job is both a lot cushier and happens to pay multiples better.

zbrozek9• 2 years ago

That's sort of my unsaid point - we've made it politically infeasible to build much of anything in the United States. You can see it in everything from a local planning meeting when someone tries to build a fence or house all the way up to transmission lines and power plants. The process itself kills a huge amount of progress by making it a bad use of lifespan to pursue it.

tomatotomato37• 2 years ago

There is also hydroelectric, which the US can't grow in anymore because it already tapped all the river locations it could use when the US was industrializing, but China can because it is only fairly recently China had industrialized enough to start tapping its own rivers. Of course, once all the river sites in China are exploited, China's growth in that sector is completely done, so it's almost like a temporary boost more so than a long-term growth factor, for lack of better words.

newhotelowner• 2 years ago

USA became a largest oil producing nation within 15 years.

Wind and solar is an option

Retric5• 2 years ago

It’s more that growth just isn’t needed in the US. Nobody is plugging in an EV and not getting power and our population is only growing at ~0.5% per year.

Even with EV’s US electric demand is flat since 2010 while China’s grew 8% in 2023! When things are changing 10+x as fast you need to move faster.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electric...

melling6• 2 years ago

China did it with coal, which is highly polluting and emits a lot of greenhouse gas.

We have another goal in the world of having Net Zero Greenhouse emissions by 2050/2060

maxglute• 2 years ago

New US energy production since 2000s heavily leans fossil/shale (crude + lng), both ~doubled in past 20 years. Issue is, much of new extracted fossil energy is being exported. US generating more dirty energy than ever, it's just being consumed abroad, not in US.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.05.06/chart2.s...

Recent studies on LNG infra leaks show it's potentially no better to much worse than coal in terms of emissions. Meanwhile at least PRC is replacing old dirty coal plants with cleaner coal plants. And they stopped exporting coal overcapacity - stopped building coal plants abroad, vs US propping up global crude/lng use. And will continue to until shale fields run dry. TLDR is US produces a lot excess dirty energy already, it simply prioritizing exporting that dirty energy due to geopolitics than consuming it domestically.

zbrozek9• 2 years ago

That's beside the point and misses it entirely. Solar and wind are the cheapest thing to build right now, so it's not going to be coal going forward. We have an absolutely enormous interconnection queue because it's impossible to build infrastructure. We'd be much further along with the energy transition if we could stop tripping over ourselves and get on with erecting pylons and wires.

conradev2• 2 years ago

They installed quite a lot of coal capacity while also installing the most renewables of any country (by far):

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/net-solar-pv-...

emchammer• 2 years ago

There won't be if those ambitions are just increasingly complex and abstract financial instruments.

xyst• 2 years ago

Looks like all those resources burned up for an advanced chat bot are going up in smoke.

We had a good run. Met some good people along the way. Unfortunately it will end in the same way as “don’t look up”.

Enjoy your time on this planet. Stop grinding for a mega corporation.

bippihippi12• 2 years ago

Have faith, young xyst. The world is not as hopeless as some would have you believe. God is good, and he doesn't leave the faithful behind.

quickslowdown• 2 years ago

Not sure where you saw an opening to insert religion into the discussion, but there are those out there who aren't happy to sit back in ignorant bliss and pretend some spiritual entity will just swoop in to clean up the mess we've made.

I for one am happy there are more people interested in finding solutions to problems than there are lazy thinkers who will resign themselves to believing problems just fix themselves without input.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

It will end with a giant meteor striking the earth?

Because of chat bots?

I'm not connecting the dots.

(Unless this is a general "in the long term survival rate for everyone drops to 0.")

silverquiet4• 2 years ago

I suppose I’ve been a systems type thinker all my life and so it is strange to me how rarely most people connect dots. To me it is quite clear that the GP was referencing the externalities of fossil fuel based energy (the movie itself was a very thinly-veiled analogy for the same). Given that lack of systemic thinking as a species, it had become quite clear that we will indeed burn up all our resources to build as many paperclips or some other widget as possible. Look up “paper clip maximizer” for that reference if you’d like.

api• 2 years ago

There are tons of solar and wind projects everywhere held up by permitting.

We can build. We just can’t get out of our own way. Same story for everything else.

CatWChainsaw• 2 years ago

Why did this get flagged, exactly? WSJ is "reputable". There's no comment with an archive link to bypass the paywall (yet) but paywalled articles don't automatically get flagged AFAIK. The comments here don't give any hints thus far. I can only conclude it got flagged because it's so blatantly crushing the techno-optimist dreams of the median person here?

Edit: Touched a few nerves it seems. Go touch grass kiddos.

fortran77• 2 years ago

There are people who knee-jerk flag everything from WSJ. Usually because, in their words, "it's a Murdoch rag". They'd rather get their news from random blogs, splogs, and tweets I guess.

arp242• 2 years ago

No, I flagged it because it's paywalled and there is no workaround as near as I could find. So all most can do is discuss the title, which is not useful.

Someone told you this less than 3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40101710

tim333• 2 years ago

Paywall work around that worked for me - this https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2024/05/12/therersquos_not...

then click 'Full Article'

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/there-s-not-enough-p...

    tnftp -4o'|busybox grep -o "\"body\":\".*\"readTimeMin\""' https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/ar-BB1mfhwf \
    |(echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";sed 's/\"body\":\"//;s/\\//g;s/\",\"readTimeMin\"//') > 1.htm

    firefox ./1.htm

    links https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/ar-BB1mfhwf ;# press 'd' to display then press '\' key to read formatted text

neonate• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/jPFO2

There's not enough power for America's high-tech ambitions

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