Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power | Hacker News Reader

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

msn.com

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39629271

Oops, my bad

By law it should be compulsory to install enough renewable power to one’s requirement and grid should only be used as load balancing body.

That would sucks for my downstairs neighbours, then. And for the company across the backyard, which makes radios and stuff, centrally located in the city. The school in the next street it would have a problem, too.

Summing up: You want more suburbia and less city center.

The power generation wouldn't necessarily need to happen on-premises, would it?

You could outsource it to specialised power generation companies. Like you do in today's world.

I'm confused why that would result in more suburbia.

Can you explain?

Because only single-family suburban homes have enough roof space for house dwellers to install renewable power.

Roof space on large apartments isn’t enough to accommodate solar panels providing sufficient energy for every resident.

Sorry, are you discussing residential power use? TFA was about industrial power use.

It does mention residential though:

>Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.

I thought we were discussing data centers, not apartments.

Industry has the same issue, mutatis mutandis. The company across the backyard from me has a five- and six-floor complex of buildings close next to one of the central transport hubs, where it makes hightech radio parts. A nice central place to work, but not even nearly big enough to generate significant renewable power.

The school in the next street is similar: Five floors, very central, but that site will neither generate sun or wind power. It was rebuilt recently. If it were to generate it own power, that renovation would have been a a relocation to one of those spread-out lowrise buildings in suburbia.

With this fantastic suggestion, I am proud to bestow you the honorary title of Certified Armchair Expert. To accept, you need only to recite the creed of the order: "It's all so simple!"

Think hard and write better solution.

It's not necessary to come up with some novel whackadoodle idea to fix this.

The solution is to charge enough for power that the grid can be maintained to deliver it. The public have been giving themselves a pass on this since the 1960s with some fanciful idea that noting will ever break or fail and we will someday reduce our energy consumption -- something which has yet to occur in the entirety of human history. Energy is way too cheap; modern habits are the result of decades of market dumping. The bill is due; it must be paid.

The energy efficiency initiatives of the 1970s significantly reduced the energy cost of economic activity. (Ironically, this helped kill nuclear, by undercutting the expected increase in demand that utilities built all those nuclear power plants to meet.)

The ongoing clean energy transition could bring us cheaper energy and divorce grid energy usage from greenhouse gas emissions.

I feel like the future is looking bright.

Sorry in advance for a fatalistic argument.

I disagree. Efficiency gains lead to more economic opportunity and therefore increase demand. People are not content to "do the same with less;" they will instead "do more with the same."

I will leave it to say that there's no evidence that any kind of "energy transition" is or will take place any time soon, at least not at the global scale. Pick any source of energy you like; our peak consumption of that energy source throughout the entirety of of human history is today.

Today is peak oil; today is peak solar; today is peak nuclear; today is peak wood burning stove. We can't even "energy transition" people off of open flame kitchens! Whatever belief you hold that that things are in motion that will fix this -- they seem to be very much not.

Also, everybody should be required to grow their own food. Food insecurity solved!

Or invest in food producing company, better explicit than implicit

Instead of investing money a food producing company, people could purchase forward contract from a food producing company, allowing investors and entrepreneurs to focus on investing in capacity.

Isn't that "futures" in a nutshell?

Heavily subsidized according to property value / income level? I’d love to pay some more taxes to proliferate solar, hydro, wind, and tidal power.

> In Texas, a dramatic increase in data centers for crypto mining is touching off a debate over whether they are a costly drain on an overtaxed grid. An analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the energy needed by crypto operations aiming to link to the grid would equal a quarter of the electricity used in the state at peak demand. Unlike data centers operated by big tech companies such as Google and Meta, crypto miners generally don’t build renewable-energy projects with the aim of supplying enough zero-emissions energy to the grid to cover their operations.

> The result, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who authored the Wood Mackenzie analysis, is that crypto’s drain on the grid threatens to inhibit the ability of Texas to power other energy-hungry operations that could drive innovation and economic growth,

But what would we do without crypto mining?

Strange that adjusting taxes toward energy/resources and away from labor hasn't happened naturally given that labor can vote.

Looking at Tuesday's ballots, the modus operandi of voting in Texas appears to mostly consist of people toeing the line on some of the most absurd and leading questions I have ever read in my life [1]

1. https://texasgop.org/republican-primary-ballot-propositions/

Labor is legally entitled to vote but practically prevented from doing so - time off from work is hard to come by in America and states like Texas make it a point to have as few polling places as possible with as few hours as possible in the locations that "labor" lives and works.

Also, labor "votes" for representatives, but money votes for bills.

Energy/resources can't vote, but they can fund campaigns easier than labor. There's also some complications around taxing energy/resources since some businesses operate on thin margins. Not that taxing labor is simple, but taxing energy isn't as simple as tacking on a tax per kWh.

Eg smelting aluminum is extremely energy intensive and important (gotta recycle those cans), but I bet their margins are awful and further I would bet that "energy/resources" comprises the majority of their expenditure (that basically only leaves wages as untaxed).

It's certainly not impossible, it's how we did taxes up til the New Deal, but we would need to be very careful not to crash essential, energy-intensive industries like metal smelting.

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