Wind and Solar Will Power Datacenters More Cheaply Than Nuclear, Study Finds (theregister.com) 131
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Renewable energy sources could power datacenters at a lower cost than relying on nuclear generation from small modular reactors (SMRs), claims a recently revealed study. ... [A]nalysis from the Centre for Net Zero (CNZ) says it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy, when compared with an SMR. It claims that a microgrid comprising offshore wind, solar, battery storage, and backed up by gas generation, would be significantly cheaper to run annually than procuring power sourced from a nuclear SMR.
[...] CNZ describes itself as an open research institute, founded by Octopus Energy Group in the UK, and claims to advise the State of California and Europe's International Energy Agency as well as the British government. While CNZ's study applies to the UK sector, where energy costs are among the highest in the industrialized world, it is likely that the overall conclusion would still be valid in other countries as well. Its analysis shows that renewables can meet 80 percent of the constant demand from a large datacenter over the course of a year. Offshore wind can provide the majority of load requirements, with gas generation backed by battery storage as a stopgap source of power representing the most cost-optimal mix.
Greater capacity in the on-site battery storage system would reduce the reliance on gas power, and this would likely happen over time as the cost of such systems is expected to come down, the report claims. But perhaps the real kicker is that CNZ estimates that microgrids powered largely by renewables could be built in approximately five years, while operational SMRs are not expected to be widely available until sometime in the next decade. CNZ says that it calculated the typical yearly resource cost (capex and opex) of powering a datacenter with a nuclear SMR, and modeled this using Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), an open source energy modeling tool, against two renewable energy scenarios. One was the wind, solar, battery, and gas mix, while the other omitted solar.
[...] CNZ describes itself as an open research institute, founded by Octopus Energy Group in the UK, and claims to advise the State of California and Europe's International Energy Agency as well as the British government. While CNZ's study applies to the UK sector, where energy costs are among the highest in the industrialized world, it is likely that the overall conclusion would still be valid in other countries as well. Its analysis shows that renewables can meet 80 percent of the constant demand from a large datacenter over the course of a year. Offshore wind can provide the majority of load requirements, with gas generation backed by battery storage as a stopgap source of power representing the most cost-optimal mix.
Greater capacity in the on-site battery storage system would reduce the reliance on gas power, and this would likely happen over time as the cost of such systems is expected to come down, the report claims. But perhaps the real kicker is that CNZ estimates that microgrids powered largely by renewables could be built in approximately five years, while operational SMRs are not expected to be widely available until sometime in the next decade. CNZ says that it calculated the typical yearly resource cost (capex and opex) of powering a datacenter with a nuclear SMR, and modeled this using Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), an open source energy modeling tool, against two renewable energy scenarios. One was the wind, solar, battery, and gas mix, while the other omitted solar.
OMG here comes the flood (Score:3, Funny)
But all those windmills in Texas are killing whales!
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Well, it looks like [statista.com] nuclear is right in between solar and wind.
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Well, it looks like nuclear is right in between solar and wind.
Consider that is a statistic that includes the very deadly Chernobyl disaster, a reactor that failed in the most basic of safety mechanisms like a containment dome used everywhere else in the world. Had there been a containment dome, such as those at Fukushima and Three Mile Island, then Chernobyl would likely have been a relative nonevent like Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Chernobyl would likely have still ended up as an expensive cleanup event, people could have still died, but it would have meant th
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the very deadly Chernobyl disaster, a reactor that failed in the most basic of safety mechanisms like a containment dome used everywhere else in the world.
They had a alternative containment strategy and it failed to operate as designed. Just like the Three Mile Island containment failed to operate as designed except with far more catastrophic results at Chernobyl. Your argument seems to be until there is an equally catastrophic failure of design we should assume our engineers are smarter than Ukrainian engineers. Chernobyl is just a living example of the possible damage if you are wrong. Give us the dice, we haven't rolled snake eyes so you can be sure we won
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They had a alternative containment strategy and it failed to operate as designed.
So you admit that not all nuclear power plants have the same safety features. Tell me something, how may other nuclear power plants have the same "alternative containment" that failed at Chernobyl? I'm fairly certain that all other reactors with this flawed containment were in the Soviet Union, and after Chernobyl those reactors were modified to have a new containment structure, were decommissioned, or were under construction and never completed.
Just like the Three Mile Island containment failed to operate as designed except with far more catastrophic results at Chernobyl.
I have no idea what you are talking about a since I could fi
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So you admit that not all nuclear power plants have the same safety features.
That is your admission, since you are claiming current plants are ALL safe.
Everyone involved in nuclear power learned from Chernobyl so it is safe to assume they are all smarter now. You expect they learned nothing from the experience? It seems you learned nothing from the experience.
What I learned is not to trust over-confident engineers who claim they have the perfect ability to anticipate every future problem. A lesson you clearly did not learn.
Or, more accurately, the proponents of nuclear power who claim that perfect ability for them even if the engneers themselves know better.Every computer programmer knows their programs will have bugs even after they do their best to catch them. But the marketing dep
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Just because there are many reasons (Score:1)
Old crusty nerds are obsessed with nuclear because that was the power source in the third rate science fiction novels we liked to read during lunch break instead of playing with the other kids.
I get it. I did it too but I didn't really pay much attention to the technology that closely. I don't know why angry old nerds are obsessed with nuclear power when wind and solar are right there and they are cheap
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Doesn't mean I'm going to go adding one for no particularly good reason or no particular benefit....Old crusty nerds are obsessed with nuclear
Ahem. Installing a SMR has an obvious benefit: base electrical power generation. If you're not able to see that it's difficult to have a rational conversation about it.
Whether that benefit is worth the cost or risk is a different question. Just please don't ignore that there is a reason people want to install nuclear. It makes you seem like the crusty nerd who is fixated on wind/solar as the only possible solutions because that's what you were told as a kid.
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Whether that benefit is worth the cost or risk is a different question.
No, that isn't the question. The question is whether it is a good way of providing any benefit and if you don't see that, there is no basis for a rational discussion. Should we rely on proven currently available technology or support an unproven speculative technology of unknown availability and cost.
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Should we rely on proven currently available technology or support an unproven speculative technology of unknown availability and cost.
You could say that about any new technology. You could have said that about solar and wind 30 years ago. You could have said it about the Interwebs or computers. You could have said it about color TV, B&W TV, radio, cars, railroads, plows, the wheel, anything new.
Here's the thing: if someone wants to pay for it, I don't have a problem with them risking their own money. If someone asks me to fund it, well, make a good case. If someone wants to use tax money to fund it, that's yet another discussion. And
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You could say that about any new technology. You could have said that about solar and wind 30 years ago.
The first modern solar panel was created in the 1950's, so more like 70 years ago. Which was my point. New technology that is still in the concept stage is not a solution for a critical current problem like global warming. Your list should include nuclear fusion, steam driven cars and endless other technologies that never developed into their imagined possibilities.
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Baseload is good but load following is better.
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Baseload is good but load following is better.
Well, you need both.
Just thinking about it, you need base generation and you'd hope that would be cheaper per Joule than load-following capacity. If it's not, it's not an effective base load system. Then you need some sort of generation you can spin up and down. If that's cheaper than your proposed base generation, you'd just use that for everything.
I personally know nothing about how much wind, solar, nat gas, coal, traditional nuclear, and proposed nuclear solutions cost so I don't have an opinion about w
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You got it stuck in your head from too much SimCity and The Simpsons on the dangers of nuclear power. If you want to lecture people on how ideas that people pick up in their youth stick with them until they die then consider what you picked up in your youth and have trouble letting go of now.
Nuclear power plants aren't built like Chernobyl to where they can blow up and contaminate the land for miles around with radioactive isotopes. Even when Chernobyl was built the rest of the world learned that a proper
Nuclear failed in Texas (Score:3)
The Nuclear plant south of me (Houston metro) lost half its output during the '21 grid failure
How and why a nuclear reactor shut down in Texas cold snap when energy was needed most [washingtonexaminer.com]
Re:I've said it before (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't the nuclear is going to kill me the problem is it's going to contaminate the land I own and all of the property on it.
Yes. Just look at France, which has been getting almost all its electricity from nuclear power for decades. Everything is fatally contaminated, and people are dying in droves from radiation sickness.
China too, which uses an increasing amount of nuclear power.
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China's share of nuclear is very small, something like 5%, so it is one of the least important among the fatal contamination sources over there.
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your're funny using a percent, that's 58 nuclear power plants.
You're funnier confusing plants, reactors and the context of the discussion. So?
USA has 54.
Yes, it isn't a big secret that nuclear power is not very popular in the US. This isn't going to change, especially after the inevitable bust of the "AI industry" kills all those announced "new" projects. So?
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The more I read from you the more I'm convinced you're a conservative troll playing a leftie.
You just tick too many boxes to be real.
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think you want to solve the social and political problems though because I don't think you want that much change in your society.
The entire time I have been here pointing out the nuclear is not safe when privately run for real, and buy for real I mean not like in America where there are so many subsidies and regulations it's basically a public run plant that we just pretend is private. The entire time I've b
Research funded by venture capital (Score:4, Informative)
A bit of clicking and the research institute is funded by Octopus Energy Group which is funded by Octopus Group, a venture capital firm.
Suggestion here is to not report research paid for by venture capitalists for the same reason why /. should be skeptical of oil industry lobbyist funded research.
Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] where research is published because it agrees with a political viewpoint.
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A bit of clicking and the research institute is funded by Octopus Energy Group which is funded by Octopus Group, a venture capital firm.
Maybe they could venture some capital and build a demo then.
Agree (Score:3)
We should start by asking the research think tanks, political parties, media outlets a simple "How much did you spend last year to directly build solar or wind based electricity projects?"
If not, then follow up with "How much are you going to spend this year on them?"
The 50+ year of talk only researchers, institutes, non-profits, NGOs, World Bank, UN and politicians has been talk with no direct building action.
It's all "someone else has to take the first step" nonsense.
This is not left, right or center. It
Re: Agree (Score:3)
Good idea, but I'll extend it a bit.
From now on, only people who have built nuclear plants are allowed to argue for them.
I think your suggestion has merit. It solves a lot of problems.
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My idea is that talk only nonprofit, think tanks, research centers need to pay something of their budget to directly build renewable energy generating plants.
They have spent 50+ years talking about it and always want 'someone else to take the first step' so that they can keep talking about it.
The key phrase here is that many nonprofits, experts, politicians, social agitators, diplomats advocate for something and always want 'someone else to take the first step, pay the taxes, fund it, etc.'.
It is time that
Re: Agree (Score:2)
"If not, then follow up with "How much are you going to spend this year on them?""
I'd drop this question. Promises are cheap, as every international conference on CO2 proves.
In short, let's disregard anyone without a proven track record of already investing in the field. That would make what they say vastly more credible.
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Re:Agree (Score:5, Interesting)
The EU is phasing out natural gas not due to pollution but due to dependency on Russia.
https://commission.europa.eu/n... [europa.eu]
6 May 2025
Roadmap to fully end EU dependency on Russian energy
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The EU is phasing out natural gas not due to pollution but due to dependency on Russia.
Donald Trump mocked the EU for buying anything from Russia while in what amounts to a proxy war with them in Ukraine, and rightfully so. America's allies were warned for many years on becoming reliant on Russian energy and how that could be used against them in the future. That time has come.
The powers that be in Europe must know that by buying fuel from Russia they are funding the war in Ukraine. They can't find a way to cut Russia off completely? Should not Russia as a whole be considered a persona no
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Do you mean the pseudo-dictator that can't make up his mind on whether the world should buy American Goods or not by trying to extort everyone?
Do you have evidence that the USA is selling LNG to the EU at extortionate prices? With so much of the LNG shipped to the EU coming from the USA I'd expect the prices would be average to low compared to the rest of the world. The USA doesn't have a monopoly on LNG.
Let's be real. The reason why Europe has been using Russian Gas was the basic economic argument that nothing was cheaper.
No shit. While Russia is selling natural gas on the cheap they use that money to fund their war in Ukraine. It's like you would keep going to the hot dog stand where the vendor punches you in the face every time because it's cheaper than buyin
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I concur on all points but this one:
"we need only see Congress get a clue that maybe their rules on mining for rare earth metals need to be updated so it's not prohibitively expensive to mine them"
Not really. The US can mine although it could be better. The problem is the refining, which is admittedly "dirty." I bet, however, that non-monetary incentives in addition to deregulation could make it attractive for full-cycle rare-earth production in the US.
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America's allies were warned for many years on becoming reliant on Russian energy and how that could be used against them in the future. That time has come.
How is it being "used against them"? Europe's own decisions and its own allies sabotaging gas pipelines from Russia are the only reasons Europe has a shortage or natural gas.
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How is it being "used against them"? Europe's own decisions and its own allies sabotaging gas pipelines from Russia are the only reasons Europe has a shortage or natural gas.
Here's a hint at how Russia has been using natural gas supplies as leverage against Europe:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/w... [pbs.org]
I don't know how much leverage remains given that so much of Europe has adapted by importing LNG, conservation efforts, and shifting around supplies of gas and oil from pipelines leading to other nations. With so little natural gas flowing from Russia to Europe today Russia likely has little leverage left, they kind of burned bridges there by attempting to influence European governmen
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Yes, you can find all sorts of reports from anonymous sources in western media of Russian pressure, including claims it blew up its own pipeline. But even the article you linked seems to indicate it was Europe, not Russia, that initiated the cutbacks.
From the article:
"Gazprom cut off a number of European countries after they responded to the outbreak of the war by banning many dealings with Russian banks, businesses and persons."
And while the article highlights the role of Russian gas for several parag
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You are truly not comprehending the problem Europe created for itself by relying so heavily on Russian natural gas?
The problem was ending that reliance. Except, of course, that the pipelines transporting that natural gas were blown up by their allies so they really have no choice. Moreover, according to your article they now seem to be doing quite well without it.
then call it "propaganda" to dismiss it.
Its propaganda to spin their current energy issues as caused by the prior use of cheap natural gas from Russia. If there are problems its their lack of access to that cheap natural gas now. That problem is not a result of the previous dependence. Its a result
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The EU is phasing out natural gas not due to pollution but due to dependency on Russia.
https://commission.europa.eu/n... [europa.eu]
6 May 2025
Roadmap to fully end EU dependency on Russian energy
Full Context:
- The EU has massively INCREASED dependence on Russian energy by phasing out local energy production.
- The EU has massively INCREASED foreign industry dependence by phasing out local industry.
- The EU could easily have instead phased out dependence on foreign energy while maintaining its own industrial and energy production.
In effect, the EU has simultaneously:
- increased its local costs
- transferred the burden of these costs to its working class
- moved environmentally dangerous energy and indu
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There is an active element in US society that is against renewable energy because it seems leftist to them.
I'm seeing opposition to renewable energy because it seems expensive to them. One example: https://nypost.com/2025/09/23/... [nypost.com]
This article compares renewable energy to SMRs, not all nuclear. Why would that be? My guess is because traditional nuclear power was discovered to be lower cost but the people that did the study didn't want to report on that as it might disturb the people that pay their bills.
I live in "tornado alley"... um, I mean the "wind corridor" and so there's windmills being put up all over
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Interesting. what got me in the summary is that they want to use offshore wind. Now they do give the disclaimer that it's UK market that they're basing it on, but in the US off-shore wind is like 2+x as expensive as on-shore, and not near competitive basically with anything right now.
w/ some handwaving and not counting for storage or dispatchability, on-shore wind and solar are , in the US the cheapest to new build (in favorable areas) then gas, then nuclear and then off-shore wind.
Not too clear why o
Re: Research funded by venture capital (Score:4, Informative)
Storms resistance makes for a difficult design requirement with off shore wind on the Eastern seaboard. The extremes in the US are worse than what the UK typically faces on its shores.
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Is that why the USA has only three offshore windfarms all of which are located on the Eastern Seaboard? You want the challenge?
Sorry but your post just doesn't understand the realities of wind farm design. These are not difficult design requirements. You want a difficult design requirement look at actual deep-water projects in the gulf. If the energy industry can drill and operate hundreds of wells at multiple km depths and trivially process the result on floating structures in cyclonic conditions a shitty
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The lack of lease availability in the Gulf is the current obstacle there rather than the depth.
There are are some projects in the planning stages on the Pacific Coast, with lease agreements completed, but none in the Gulf of Mexico. But given the current administration I think the California projects will be indefinitely mothballed.
Of the Eastern seaboard sites, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and South Fork Wind are at a 40 m depth. To put that into perspective, Hywind Scotland's 110 m depth. There are mult
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It's not that hard, especially compared to the alternatives. And it's a huge opportunity to develop the technology before anyone else.
Re: Research funded by venture capital (Score:2)
You'd need a time machine to beat the Danes at developing off shore wind farms.
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Re: Research funded by venture capital (Score:2)
This seems like something that just shouldn't be ignored:
While CNZ's study applies to the UK sector, where energy costs are among the highest in the industrialized world, it is likely that the overall conclusion would still be valid in other countries as well.
"Where energy costs are among the highest"
"It's likely...would still be be valid in other countries"
Please, tell me how big the required battery is to make this work, and how much this battery will cost.
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Suggestion here is to not report research paid for by venture capitalists for the same reason why /. should be skeptical of oil industry lobbyist funded research.
By the same logic we should not pay attention to research funded by anyone at all.
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By the same logic we should not pay attention to research funded by anyone at all.
I'm not sure that follows. While I can agree that any study will have a bias due to who is writing the check there must be a way to find organizations that make their bias clear up front, have little reason for their bias to color the results, or share their bias with the intended audience.
What do people want from the energy they consume? If I were to guess it is some balance on costs in dollars and costs in harms like global warming and air pollution. If we had infinite money then we'd do all we could t
Re:Research funded by venture capital (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you could address the numbers and the data rather than rely on ad-hominem attacks, especially when the conclusion they reached is mind bogglingly fucking obvious. That is that the two technologies currently the cheapest on the market, paired with batteries which have plummeted in costs are cheaper than a fantasy technology that doesn't exist yet which is effectively a scaled down, less economical version of the most expensive technology on the market.
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Except you're just wrong.
By the time you deploy enough solar and wind to charge the batteries *as well as* supply the load while the batteries charge, you're deploying ~6-10x your required load in watts. Add to that the MWh required (remember, power vs capacity), and you'll also need 3-4x the amount of storage as your daily usage - most of the time, that will be idle and unused.
Capacity factor in renewables still isn't anywhere near traditional generation - whatever type you compare it to. Nuclear is normal
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It sounds scary having to overprovision something, but you simply are clueless as to the underlying numbers. Yes all analysis takes into account having to over deploy wind + solar, and takes into account that storage doesn't generate anything.
It still comes out cheaper. Even with the capacity factors taken into account. It comes out cheaper during construction, it comes out hysterically cheaper during operation, and let's not even get into the discussion of decommissioning since that's a dirty word that the
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A bit of clicking and the research institute is funded by Octopus Energy Group which is funded by Octopus Group, a venture capital firm.
Suggestion here is to not report research paid for by venture capitalists for the same reason why /. should be skeptical of oil industry lobbyist funded research.
Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] where research is published because it agrees with a political viewpoint.
We need to get past this idea that the only unbiased source of research funding is federal dollars. Because guess what? They're biased too.
Hard to believe (Score:2)
There are a lot of risks in the SMR approach, but some of these data centers being built are pretty much capable of consuming all the power from an AP1200. The SMRs add redundancy and an opportunity for co-location where the value is greater than the feed-in tariff alone.
If SMRs are able to hit an LCOE of around $200/MWh they still might work out cheaper than a solar farm 200 miles away. Offshore wind is likely more cost effective for costal data centers, but you lose that benefit of co-location.
Re:Hard to believe (Score:5, Informative)
There are a lot of risks in the SMR approach
The biggest risk is that they don't exist yet.
all the power from an AP1200.
What is an AP1200?
If you mean AP1000 [wikipedia.org], those take twenty years to build and cost 300% of the initial estimate.
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but some of these data centers being built are pretty much capable of consuming all the power from an AP1200.
[Citation required]. The current largest data centre in the world uses less than 1/10th of the power from an AP1200.
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The 1GW threshold is multi-hall facilities. Switch has been well over 100MW per hall for over a decade. I believe FB has a 2GW facility under construction in Louisiana, and Microsoft is over 400MW per. You also have locations with clusters of multiple independent facilities that are contenders.
SMRs simplify the scaling problem though.
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No FB's facility isn't 2GW. There's a 2GW power station going in because economies of scale benefit producing power at mass, but it's not dedicated to Facebook's datacentre. Their Power Purchase Agreement was for less than 1/4 of the new power station capacity.
Report is a bit content free (Score:2)
Stitch up. Here is the report https://microgridai.centreforn... [centrefornetzero.org] How to accelerate the UK’s AI revolution
Latest strike price for offshore wind (AR7) is UKP113/MWh, they've assumed 50. Oh.I imagine an error of 125% might change the results a bit.
Serious question about applying science (Score:2)
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When you analyze the costs it goes against political dogma they’ve been trained on and it angers them. They respond by doubling down.
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Actually looking for references to training LLMs, but yours is the only mention of "train" in the discussion (so far).
If I've reconstructed the context, then I think the answer to the branch question is related via the training, though my original focus was on the economic advantage of deliberately scheduling training for periods when the renewable energy is available. Sun shining or wind blowing... No need to store the electricity if you're always ready to use it.
But branching back to the thread OP, the an
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Well that probably true right now⦠(Score:1)
Paid study. Forget it. (Score:2)
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As soon as I saw "Centre for Net Zero" I knew this couldn't be trusted. Its like asking vegans to do a study on meat.
They even failed on being net zero. From the fine article:
But analysis from the Centre for Net Zero (CNZ) says it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy, when compared with an SMR.
It claims that a microgrid comprising offshore wind, solar, battery storage, and backed up by gas generation, would be significantly cheaper to run annually than procuring power sourced from a nuclear SMR.
I'd ask them to remove the option for "a small amount of gas-generated energy" (whatever "small" means in this context) then recompute. If the goal is to be rid of electricity from fossil fuels then they failed to make their point.
They hobbled the nuclear power option by limiting it to SMR than already established technologies. They then gave wind, solar, and storage a cost advantage by allowing for some natural gas backup.
This is clearly a flawed
If Wind and Solar is better, write the contract (Score:3, Interesting)
This is exactly opposite the demand curve. The only thing I can offer as the DC operator is that 80-160 hours a year I would be willing to fire up both my A and B side generators and use a bit of my UPS lifetime to cut my load off the grid. The utility at least has to guarantee me that they will pay for the NG cost for the generators.
If I were building 10 data centers that could be turned on and off in 10 minutes, cheap unreliable power would be attractive, attractive enoght to hire weather forcasters 24/7/365 to tell me top up my 10 minutes of backup power at prime rates because it certain that the automation will flip the switch. But I am building 2 data centers to finance the other 8 over the next 20 years, it is right there in my business plan. With a pair of small power plants within my grid operator footprint, I do not have to invest a ton in storage and THE COSTS ARE FIXED UP FRONT. My investors only risks are returns on AI vs inflation and interest rates. If someone is willing to produce a must deliver contract at anything under 15c/KWH and pro rate that with inflation as a data center, they have a customer of the datacenter and their tenates. The data center clients are free to have a contract with the utility and the solar wind to shut down compute for a fee/hr, those clients can offload to my competitor, I really cannot write a contract telling them they must.
I have to figure when I am contracting power for the 9th and 10th data center, the power provider has figured out how to make this deal profitable. The weathermen are already on payroll, so that is a fraction cheaper per region. Most importantly I have a standard contract to take to solar/wind provider, the nuclear competitor has figured out the downsides, the utility has gotten over dreams of windfall profits and the customer of the data center has figured a strait forward load shed agreement with both the DC operator, the utility and the provider.
Or a Power Plant operator can sign a fix rate contract with a data center to maintain 92% utilitzation of a stated max for 10 years with the rate specified at the time of signing. Any growth is on another contract, directly related to the cost of construction. Nuclear or NG, 10 year contract with a 10 year option for 99.99% power uptime is 3 pages of tables on a contract. Solar, Wind has to be able to offer the same known cost and that same 99.99 uptime.
Obvious if you account for waste and collateral (Score:2)
CO2 from fossils cost easily 5,000$ per ton in collateral damage. Nuclear is not as easily calculatable, but sure nuclear power plants make up good targets in times of war.
No study needed for that calculation then ..
Obviously an UNBIASED Study. (Score:1)
Big surprise! (Score:1)
Cheap energy will power things that need energy cheaply! Who would have thought.
Do you know what it costs alone to safely decomission a nuclear power plant? If you take that in account, nuclear is the most expensive option, and we did not even talk about how to keep the used rods safe for the next million years. And surprise, the fresh rods also do not grow on trees.
In 1955 they hoped that plutonium would be available in every pharmacy in 1985, but now we have 2025 and the stuff is still expensive as hell.
Solar is the future. (Score:3)
The Economist (www.economist.com) convinced me with their June 22nd 2024 issue ( https://www.economist.com/week... [economist.com] ). Specifically, see the article: https://www.economist.com/inte... [economist.com] among others in that issue.
Solar is cheap, abundant, and will come out on top due to economic reasons alone. No subidies required.
Batteries are also needed, of course, but they're also dropping in price as China ramps up production.
The entire thing will be a slam dunk. It'll be entirely obvious 5 years from now, but we're still in the phase where a lot of people haven't caught on and realized that this is the cheapest option.
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Solar is cheap, abundant, and will come out on top due to economic reasons alone. No subidies required.
Batteries are also needed, of course, but they're also dropping in price as China ramps up production.
The entire thing will be a slam dunk. It'll be entirely obvious 5 years from now, but we're still in the phase where a lot of people haven't caught on and realized that this is the cheapest option.
You are talking about the wrong thing. The salient issue isn't generating energy it is storing it so it can actually be used at the time and place it is actually needed.
The economist article you cite briefly touches on and then dismisses reality. "All real issues. But the past 20 years of solar growth have seen naive extrapolations trounce forecasting soberly informed by such concerns again and again. "
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> realized that this is the cheapest option.
It's cheaper if the financing an be achieved.
The capital costs for a retrofit are impossible for the 60% of this country who live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Then there's the matter of being responsible for your own energy system maintenance in the highly-distributed model (which is more resilient). Folks with ceiling bird aren't going to.
And of course I can design my own system but many need professional help and it's more difficult than plumbing or residential ele
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I think I see what happened here; With "people" I didn't think of individuals adding it as rooftop solar, although that's nice too. I meant people who make financial decisions for power plant buildouts. People who make financial decisions for where their business is going to get power, etc.
I'm mostly thinking of grid scale projects. Which are already happening in both Texas and Arizona in the US from what I gather from articles in The Economist.
I'm also thinking of places like the Atacama desert between
This seems impossible (Score:2)
Scenario 2 is 43.4% the cost of nuclear using 20% gas backup.
The same scenario is 31.7% the cost of nuclear using 5% gas backup.
Below 20% you basically run into a brick wall with skyrocketing costs many times what was necessary to get to 80% in the first place /w ever diminishing environmental returns vs burning hydrocarbons. Here it is much worse than the utility modeling because we are talking about microgrids without geographic reach and assumptions with much less baked in diversity in sourcing. One is
Duh... (Score:3)
Wind and solar with batteries (SWB) has been the absolute least expensive source of energy for several years.
People keep trying to revive nuclear but it has always been the most expensive (as well as longest lead time) source of energy.
Objective energy analysis (Score:1)
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For anyone interested in an objective review of energy sources.. It's out of date having been put together a decade ago, and most of the cost comparisons will be pretty out, but it's still a useful resource, getting rid of the hyperbole you always get from biased protagonists.
I do not believe Dr. MacKay's studies are outdated since he gave renewable energy options considerable latitude for showing their best, including potential future improvements, and then showing that nuclear power is superior even if it saw no improvements in the forseeable future.
If there is a flaw in "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" then it is in the presentation than anything in the data. Dr. MacKay didn't want to lead people to any conclusion, rather he wanted to show the data and then expecte
Re: Objective energy analysis (Score:1)
haha good one (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course intermittent unreliable power is cheaper than reliable power, if it actually is, which it probably isn't if it includes the need for reliable power.
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Of course intermittent unreliable power is cheaper than reliable power, if it actually is, which it probably isn't if it includes the need for reliable power.
From the summary:
Renewables plus a gas plant are just as reliable as a nuclear plant. This analysis appears to have taken reliability as a pre-requisite, then with that addressed they compared costs.
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We're already starting to get deployments of 47kW per rack.
Please factor this into your "120MW data centre".
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We're already starting to get deployments of 47kW per rack.
Please factor this into your "120MW data centre".
Given that the comparison is with a Small Modular Reactor, this isn't really relevant. If we end up with GW data centers then the comparison result may change, since it will be comparing a full-sized reactor against much larger renewable plants. I doubt the results will be much different, but they might be.
This why I use AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) (Score:2)
This why I use AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) for my workloads.
It's powered mostly by hydroelectricity and some solar.
There's a Facebook data center there (I visited it a few times), along with Apple's "Pillar" data center across the street which nobody can visit.
To the north is AWS us-west-2, Google, and Microsoft Azure, which are much closer to the hydroelectric dams.
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Serious studies
Name one.
My quick search turned up things like this:
Solar, battery capacity saved the Texas grid last summer
https://www.dallasfed.org/rese... [dallasfed.org]
Texas storage deployment saved at least $750M since 2023
Approximately 5 GW of new capacity added since last year has improved reliability while lowering electricity prices on the ERCOT grid
https://www.utilitydive.com/ne... [utilitydive.com]
https://insideclimatenews.org/... [insideclimatenews.org]
https://comptroller.texas.gov/... [texas.gov]
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now the goalpost is "cheaper" (Score:1)
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This study assumes energy storage comes in the form of steel tanks full of natural gas.
I can agree that solar power is cheap so long as there is storage available. That storage can take many forms. There's some assumption that when solar power comes up that energy storage comes in the form of batteries. That's a fair assumption to make if the goal is to be rid of fossil fuels but that was apparently not the case in this study.
It appears to me that many studies showing wind and solar to be cheaper than nu
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Well, since it's pretty simple to generate methane, gas *could* get us away from fossil fuels. And since it's just there as a backup, it would definitely be *less* fossil fuels.
Of course, the problem is that we need negative amounts of CO2...and thermodynamics says that isn't going to be cheap.
Re: "Environmentalist" strategy (Score:2)
I should point out the obvious: there is no need for any Soviet involvement when the oil companies have had a disproportionate impact on public debate for a long time.
Leaded fuel? Not a problem until they had a cheap replacement. It just lowered average IQ in inner cities because of the brain damage to infants and children. But hey, oil executives don't live in inner cities.
Taxes? They rarely pay any, and if they do they get them back through subsidized investments, profits sharing agreements and other inst
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Ok, Boomer.
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I get that you are very pro-nuclear, and it WOULD have lots of advantages were it done honestly and safely. Unfortunately there's a long history of management cost cutting on any safety measures they're allowed to. (This is not limited to private industry. ALL management. Look up the Hanford reactors.)
The advantage of solar in this area is that problems can be limited. I think more people have died doing solar installations that nuclear reactors have killed, and there's currently no good way to recycle
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Look up the Hanford reactors.
The Hanford Site was built for the production of nuclear weapons, done in secret, in a time of war, when we didn't know as much as we did about nuclear fission as we do now. That's hardly representative of the "honestly and safely" that we'd expect of a civil nuclear power reactor.
If you are wanting honesty on the safety record of nuclear power then you don't get there by starting with dishonesty equating civil nuclear power reactors with reactors built with wartime haste for the production of weapons.
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The problems I'm thinking of are those of the last several decades. That's LONG after they were useful military reactors. But if you prefer I could talk about the PG&E reactor built below a cliff and just about on an active earthquake fault (Diablo Canyon). That one got enough public notice that it was shut down, Perhaps many of the reasons were silly, but that was an EXTREMELY stupid location.
And, of course, one of the real problems is that there's no way to reprocess the spent fuel. And no accept
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If you use nuclear generated electricity there is only one cost. If you choose wind & solar, when the wind isn't blowing or it's dark you need to provide a backup power source e.g. nuclear. Consequently wind and solar can never be cheaper. And don't get me started on storage costs.
If the wind is blowing to the sky dark then the cost of wind and solar is zero; that really keeps average costs down...