Turning off the data center for 2/3rds of the year when the sun isn't shining sure is an idea.
The logical thing is to place the solar panels where sun shines for more than 1/3 of the year. Additional considerations: DCs are never at 100% utilization,and the hyperscalers won't keep up with their current pace of investment in AI for the next 5-10 years - they will gladly push the power generation CapEx risk onto someone else (existing utilities), and let the taxpayers take the fall.
People understand the fact it costs money to dig out coal from the ground and bring it to a power station. Yet they don't understand it costs money to take power generated at noon and shift it around. This is never included in the price for solar or wind.
The people who make those predictions are never held to account and can't find their ass with a GPS.
One only need to look at the fact that the best predictor for energy generation prices increasing is how much renewables have entered the grid. Anything over 5% and you start seeing the costs rise upwards.
> We find that renewable energy is associated with a significant reduction in wholesale electricity prices in Europe, with an average impact of 0.6 percent for each 1 percentage points increase in renewable share. We also find evidence for a nonlinear effect—that is, higher the share of renewables, the greater its effect on electricity prices. On the other hand, while quantile estimation results are mixed with regards to the impact of renewables on the volatility of electricity prices, we obtain evidence that renewable energy has a negative effect on volatility at the highest quantiles.
Having people betting on energy markets sounds like a bad thing.
When the people betting (and apparently winning those bets) also have false beliefs about renewables raising wholesale energy prices that are contradicted by evidence?
Well, at the very minimum, it's not a good look. At worst it's Enron.
In Australia the introduction of grid batteries made its money back in slightly over a year not because of buying and selling electricity, but from undermining the price setting collusion of the gas operators.
If your bet was in the form of "look, the weather's bad and there's not enough grid storage", obviously so — that's why all the battery factories are getting built :P
The cost of those batteries is low enough to disregard your conclusions in the long term.
Blacksmiths could bet their horseshoe business against the automobile, until they couldn't.
The price is the cost of transmission and/or storage. Even if you're also ignoring wind because dunkelflaute.
PV with storage costs about the same as nuclear, with broad variation between specific projects that means each can be a close winner in different cases.
A global power grid could, in principle, be built for approximately $239 billion worth of aluminium (caveat: only China makes enough aluminium to do this), with 1 Ω electrical resistance going the long way around the planet.
That price tag is 5-9 Sizewell C reactors, based on current cost estimates. That reactor took 14 years to go from "government wants new reactors on sites of existing reactors" to "planning permission granted", and is planned to have merely 3.26 GWe nameplate capacity.
From a purely economic perspective, power grids are fantastic.