If it wasn't profitable in 2019, why is profitable now? Because Microsoft is commiting to be a customer?
I also think you would need more than 24 hours battery. You have to prepare for freak weather events that reduce system capacity.
I also wonder what time horizon we are talking. solar and batteries presumably have to be replaced more often than nuclear.
In general, yes. Not really in the context of utility generation for a DC, though. A DC should have onsite backup generation, at least to supply critical loads. If your contracted utility PV + storage runs out, and there's no spare grid capacity available (or it's too expensive) you can switch to onsite power for the duration. The capex for backup power is already required, so you're just looking at additional spending for fuel, maybe maintenance if the situation requires enough hours on backup.
Civilian nuclear reactors replace fuel gradually over 3 to 6 years typically. 20 year old solar panels work now. New solar panels are expected to work over 30 years. Utility scale lithium ion batteries are expected to last 10 to 15 years.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
So Microsoft is less price sensitive than other electricity customers.
Plus they get the PR and hype boost from saying they are using nuclear, which is huge right now. Which is big enough that the other hyperscalers thought they had to announce new nuclear projects, even though it will be a decade before those new nuclear projects could ever come on line.
And unreliable energy sources routinely exclude the wildly uneconomical costs and environmental impact it would take to make them reliable.
See for example Oskarshamn 3 in Sweden having a 7 month long unscheduled outage this year.
Ringhals 4 had an 8 month unscheduled outage during the energy crisis.
Maybe modern day and tech has given "outage" a much shorter connotation than what it meant in the past.
7 months? That's almost longer than the Christmas offseason.
The greater the number and diversity of machines, as well as their geographical dispersion, the greater their availability.
In this respect, a mix of renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc.) deployed on a continental scale, along with storage (batteries and V2(G|H), hydro, green hydrogen...) is unbeatable (total cost, availability, risk, etc.).
For the right kind of workloads and at sufficient scale, I wonder if this is actually true. (It probably is, but it's fun to hypothesize.) I'm assuming the workloads are mostly AI-related.
AI training presumably isn't super time-sensitive, so could you just pause it while it's cloudy?
AI inference, at least for language models, presumably isn't particularly network-intensive nor latency-sensitive (it's just text). So if one region is currently cloudy... spin it down and transfer load to a different region, where it's sunny? It's kind of like the "wide area grid" concept without actually needing to run power lines.
Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy. Maybe in a world where hardware somehow got way cheaper but energy usage remained high we'd see strategies like this get used.
> Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy.
There's some balance between maximizing capex, business continuity planning, room for growth, and natural peak and trough throughout the day.
You probably don't really want all your DCs maxxed out at the daily peak. Then you have no spare capacity for when you've lost N DCs on you biggest day of the year. N might typically be one, but if you have many DCs, you probably want to plan for two or three down.
Anyway, so on a normal day, when all your DCs are running, you do likely have some flexibility on where tasks run/where traffic lands. It makes sense to move traffic where it costs less to serve, within some reasonable bounds of service degradation. Even if electricity prices are the same, you might move traffic where the ambient temperature is lower, as that would reduce energy used for cooling and with it the energy bill.
You might have some non-interactive, non-time sensitive background jobs that could fill up spare DC capacity... but maybe it's worth putting a dollar amount on those --- if it's sunny and windy and energy is cheap, go ahead ... when it's cloudy and still and energy is expensive, some jobs may need to be descheduled.
or pause it when "organic traffic" has a peak demand, and resume in off-peak hours, so that the nuclear powerplant can operate efficiently without too much change in its output.
not often and most importantly they are PREDICTABLE. You do understand why being able to control when a power plant is operating is a very important thing, right?
I guess if I knew there would be two months with less power I might design my data center to fit into 40 foot containers so I could deploy wherever power and latency are cheapest
https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...
As for France's capacity factor, that has a lot to do with the presence of intermittents on the continental grid, combined with the EU's Renewable Energy Directive making France liable to pay fines if they use nuclear power in preference to wind/solar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
In Sweden this year we’ve had 2 separate instances of 50% of the fleet being offline. With one reactor having a 7 month unscheduled outage.
I just don’t get where this ”100% reliable!!!!” is coming from.
2023: 93.0%
2022: 92.1%
2021: 92.7%
2020: 92.5%
Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable and secure power more than 92% of the time in 2024. That’s nearly twice as much as a coal (42.36%) or natural gas (59.9%) plant that are used more flexibly to meet changing grid demands and almost 3 times more often than wind (34.3%) and solar (23.4%) plants
Nuclear power plants had a 8% share of the total U.S. generation capacity in 2023 but actually produced 18% of the country’s electricity due to its high capacity factor.
You can have a 93% capacity factor and still have short time periods with 45% of the fleet offline simultaneously.
Another example is when half the French nuclear fleet was offline at the height of the energy crisis.
Are you saying that a grid collapse is acceptable if outages correlate for nuclear plants?
Only if you have a tiny fleet with very bad management.
The US fleet might be large in absolute numbers smoothing out the average, but multiple plants in Florida having simulatenous failures won't be saved by Washington State plants having amazing capacity factors.
We still have a grid to deal with.
Are you comparing cost against what electricity currently costs or what it would cost to add capacity? I feel like Microsoft is not acting on hype here, they're going to pay a premium just because it's cool to refire a nuclear plant? Surely they've done the math to decide the feasibility of building out a few acres of solar panels.
It’s not really that farfetched, either. If the government expects a conflict in the next few decades, solar build out might become much more expensive or impossible since our domestic production might not be enough to support NATO’s growth.
PV did get spectacularly cheaper, but is not a panacea.
Nuclear is great fit for constant load, for example a cloud datacenter where relatively constant utilization is also a business goal and multiple incentives are in place to promote this. (eg. spot pricing to move part of the load off from peaks)
The article cited Lazard analysts' estimates to say this was more expensive than solar or wind. But Lazard's report said new build solar and storage could cost from $50 to $131. And new build wind and storage could cost $44 to $123.
Costs will rise over 20 years almost certainly.
And Microsoft had already large solar and wind power purchase agreements.[1] These could be affected by China's rare earth export controls scheduled to start next year. Hedging this position would be sensible.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/09...