How does a data center run fully renewable, do they have huge battery installations or is it one of those "credits" things where, their consumption is compensated by production equal amount of solar and wind contracts they signed up to?
> We were one of the first corporations to create large-scale, long-term contracts to buy renewable energy directly; we signed our first agreement to purchase all the electricity from a 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa, in 2010. Today, we are the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy.
When a company that requires high levels of constant power "buys" that power, what are they buying, exactly? Because they're still just as reliant on nuclear/coal/natural gas as they were before they bought that power. Are they just signing up to pay a higher rate for those 114MW of power they get from the grid?
Every MW produced by the renewable is a MW not needed to be produced by natural gas/coal
This should be expressed in units of energy, not power, i.e. MWh.
On average though, 114 MW is pulled out of the grid by the datacenter and 114 MW is put in by the renewable energy company. The rest of the grid, bith producers _and consumers_, act as a battery for when the output of the renewables is either higher or lower than the contracted amount for the datacaenter.
That's simply not the case. Wind farms fluctuate greatly and produce on average no where near their max output.
> "they are only reliant on gas/coal/whatever when the wind is having a dip"
Which is all the time. I've worked on this problem, there isn't some constant output from wind farms.
Yes, they still rely on coal and natural gas to smooth the load, but his point was that by subsidizing the wind power, they still reduce emissions the same amount as if they didn't.
Obviously, this strategy only works when renewable penetration is fairly low, once you start having oversupplies then you no longer have 100% efficiency with this strategy.