A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine
boomsupersonic.com
boomsupersonic.com
It's a nice announcement. Here's a video that's been going around the pilot community on how, what Boom is calling "legacy" engines are made. You'll notice they're already using superalloys and single crystal blades and are running at temps that the metal should melt, but are using neat tricks to overcome that. And these engines are flying all around the world today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM
You can't build-fast-and-break-stuff with physics at this level. The rules are non-negotiable and you're taking the engineering right to the edge of what is possible and then pushing it a little further to differentiate your product. I think the GE, Rolls and Pratt are watching this and wondering how Boom is going to solve all the problems they've spent decades solving, and then still have time and budget to take it to the next level.
Edit: Superalloys in existing engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=fxzFXoSICX8dtsg5&t=1027 Single crystal blades in existing engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=XpnAgVH1QmLiX0g0&t=1650
There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.
The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.
Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.
I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
their current goal might already be "failing" (as in, lack of real demand for hypersonic travel). Investment getting hard to obtain means they're looking for more/broader investment from other investors. Thus, the hopping on of the AI bandwagon.
It doesn't paint a pretty picture tbh.
Presumably they deploy multiple engines so they can stagger maintenance and not have a single point of failure.
IDK, the first sign to me that Boom weren't likely to succeed was when Rolls Royce parted ways on engine development (1). Were the engines not technically feasible? Not economically feasible? Didn't believe in Boom's business model? We don't know Rolls Royce's thinking, but it's a vote of no confidence.
Taking it in house seemed like a last resort - designing "a new engine in a new airframe" is a known risk. A homebrew engine can't be benefit.
They don't even have the engine: Re-purposing the hypothetical jet engines as hypothetical LLM power plants seems like a nosedive, really.
https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...
I could off the top of my head name a few rich people that died from it. Hell, the titan submersible, while a very different animal, is a pretty clear indicator that vast wealth doesn't preclude a willingness to risk one's life in highly experimental "travel"
It'd be hard to spin that as being anything like as heroic as the risk of being killed or maimed whilst climbing Everest!
Booms claim is they're developing and will some day real soon have "one that works" and then it can be produced at a low-enough cost in sufficient quantity.
Yes, it's dubious.
All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs. It's not that crazy to assume that we can design a better and more efficient turbine today with all of the help of modern technology.
Not even remotely correct. The concept started in the 70s, and designs have been continuously improved, using the latest modelling techniques, for the last 50 years. Modern turbines are some of the most optimized machines humanity has ever produced.
What could be contributing to this is recently Vertasium did a whole video on how jet engines operate at temperatures above their components melting point.
And how the cold air at altitude is what keeps it from melting.
But maybe they aren't really thinking about that because it is nowhere near being done.
[0] https://aercoustics.com/blog/noise-vibration-gas-turbine-cog...
[1] https://www.powermag.com/major-noise-sources-and-mitigation-...
[2] https://www.turbomachinerymag.com/view/noise-levels-at-energ...
[3] https://turbinelogic.com/enc/cog-gt-units/regulatory-safety-...
>> Legacy turbines need huge quantities of water for cooling to avoid thermal derate in hot environments
Yup. Turbine-powered helicopters famously haul big tanks of water around when flying in hot environments. Heat is a problem, not a game changer.
Here, watch this which goes into detail on existing superalloy tech used in todays engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=coIv6w0N2BZ4EOTK&t=1027 and
And here's how single crystal blades are already being used in today's engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=XpnAgVH1QmLiX0g0&t=1650
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
It's not necessarily easier to do one or the other. It's about which one is faster.
A lot of the natural gas in the US is in Texas, and a lot of it is flared while pumping out crude. Putting data centers on turbines near the extraction fields out in the Permian Basin makes sense for power. You can build short pipelines or hook into the ones already there.
Add that the manpower and expertise of running generators is abundant there and it's a prettt solid idea if they can actually make it.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.
you need to look at numbers instead of intuition - intuition naturally gets us wrong when we deal with unfamiliar things like space.
A ready 10 ton house will cost $500K-1M to place in a well developed area - the cost of land itself, communications, permits, also delays and unpredictability of process, etc. Add to that yearly taxes. Add tremendous electricity costs in case of the datacenter. And all those costs have and will be growing.
Launching 10 tons on Starship - sub-$1M and that cost will drop down to about $100K-200K.
> It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there?
exactly. Space is cheap and plentiful :)
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.
The market seems to be settling on a 5 cable setup and 2GW power transmission (Tenet & other European TSOs have a 2GW Platform build out…).
You could handle that with one set of 1272kcmil aluminum conductors, or two sets of 300kcmil conductors, based off of this wire submittal: https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf
The voltage drop will be higher than HVDC, but AC transformers are probably an order of magnitude cheaper than HVDC switchgear. That’s the main issue with HVDC, interrupting HVDC current is very difficult since there’s no zero point like with an AC sine wave. High voltage AC breakers use SF-6 to extinguish the arc at the zero point, which happens 120 times per second at 60 hz (100 times per second for 50 hz)
> If America wants to build at the speed AI requires, vertical integration isn’t optional. We’re standing up our own foundry and our own large scale CNC machining capability.
Yet China, the industrial superpower, doesn't work like that. Nothing is vertically integrated and instead a massive amount of suppliers are part of a gigantic and flexible supply-chain.
The fact that CCP's China able to have a working market of independent industrial actors, whereas Venture Capital-funded America can only works with corporation-scale central planning is an interesting paradox that I would like to have an in depth explanation for.
Both have their place, but China is winning and has been for years now. They took over worldwide manufacturing because they were cheaper at it, first due to lower wages, but now due to their supply chains, resources, etc.
If this works as a rapid start gas peaker, it could help in the shift off coal and diesel. It depends on the CO/CO2 burden.
This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load?
Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here.. I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently.
If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere?
What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours.
There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
I think the turbine was used as a spare power generator to start the actual gas turbine, in case the plant itself lost power, if that makes sense.
Air blast chillers are common in this power category so water usage isn't very high.
More importantly gas turbine power figures are quoted at an ISO 15C. So if you require 42MW at 40C ambient you'll buy an overrated engine to maintain your output. They've written this as a gotcha that their engine is more powerful than a less powerful engine. Well yeah...
Turns out its all gas turbines.
The "supersonic engines are better because they are designed to operate at hotter temperatures" argument is particularly insane: turbine efficiency is driven by turbine inlet temperature (already 3000ish C), not ambient temperature.
I suppose it's only right that VCs are going to get scammed by LLM slop.
For all their discussion of high temperature operation, it seems the only advantage at the end of the day is to eliminate water consumption in cooling. I question if that's really so valuable?
They wanted to build a spaceship (project Orion), but first had to come up with something they could sell immediately, hence they designed the commercially very succesfull Triga reactor.
The top speed is interesting because they are claiming to go fast with relatively little power due to superior aerodynamics which would be more convincing if they demonstrated it.
Great analogy if it pays off.
I'd wonder how it competes with nuclear for scale and existing gas turbines for cost and efficiency.
The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow.
Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.
Also, this is only commercially viable because this regime has rendered the EPA functionally powerless.
I am hopeful that these constraints breed innovation and new solutions to the space.
China didn’t start adding much in the way of solar prior to about 2020, whereas they added lots of coal generation in the past 20 years.
This is very helpful to deal with variability with renewable output.
Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.
Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]
What, you think continued rapid decrease in cost of solar and storage will somehow make this not happen?
It’s sort of like how airlines like to fly their airplanes as much as possible.
it's a nice pivot though - turbines are just turbines.
In a 100% renewable world we would not be extracting or refining oil. Natural gas (used by these turbines) is a byproduct of oil drilling. Were we not burning the oil, the natural gas might be too expensive alone.
Also, in a 100% renewable world we would (by definition) have enough generation all the time - (covered by batteries and good baseload sources) that turbine power was no longer required to cover peak loads.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
Basically, you end up having to overbuild to crazy levels, or build insane amounts of battery storage, which only gets used a few days a year.
Things in the US are a bit more of a mixed bag, for better or worse, but there have been studies done that suggest that you can get very high renewables levels cost effectively, but not to 100% without new technology (eg “clean firm” power like geothermal, new nuclear being something other than a clusterfumble, long-term storage like iron-air batteries, etc etc etc).
There are interesting engineering problems for sources that are intended to operate very infrequently and at very low capacity factor, as might be needed for covering Dunkleflauten. E-fuels burned with liquid oxygen (and water to reduce temperature) in rocket-like combustors might be better than conventional gas turbines for that.
You'd have to pay for storage of water and LOX (and making the LOX) so this wouldn't make sense to prolonged usage. On the plus side, using pure LOX means no NOx formation, so you also lose the catalytic NOx destruction system a stationary gas turbine would need to treat its exhaust.
I vaguely recall some people in Germany were looking at something like this but I don't remember any details.
The second point is that the distribution has a long tail, especially when we consider the possibility of multiple independent incidents overlapping in time, to the point where it becomes infeasible to suppose that we could be prepared to continue operating as if nothing had happened in all conceivable scenarios, regardless of how accurately we could predict their likelihood.
We have coal fired plants in Australia with <90% uptime (often unscheduled), but somehow they're considered baseload rather than intermittent.
EDIT: I see the problem starts with the first sentence of your first post here: “Why can't we predict how big or how often those events would be?” - which is completely beside the point in my response to rgmerk, who wrote “It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.” My response to this and the follow-up is this: a) if we are talking about two percent, we can overbuild the renewable capacity, and b) if we are considering all eventualities, there inevitably comes a point where we say that we are not going to prepare for uninterrupted service in this event.
We've pointed out why this is a poor argument.
I'll state it plainly: to get to the same level of reliability as the existing grid with just wind, solar, and batteries requires unacceptable amounts of overprovisioning of these at high latitude (or unacceptably high transmission cost).
Fortunately, use of different long duration storage (not batteries) can solve the problem more economically.
"Creative" re/misinterpretation is becoming quite a thing here - what I actually did was agree that rgmerk had a more defensible position after he pivoted away from his original ~2% claim to a more reasonable one.
I'll state it plainly: rgmerk's subsequent pivot in his stated claims does not retroactively make my response to his original claim wrong! (Not even if the subsequent claim more accurately reflects what he really meant to say.) I am having trouble figuring out why anyone would think otherwise.
Also, if solar ends up much cheaper than wind there's going to be need for seasonal energy storage, which could be considerably more than 2% at high latitude. Batteries are unsuitable for this.
https://www.vantaanenergia.fi/en/about-us/projects/varanto-t...
Also this calculation probably assumes no baseload power imported from the grid, where means such as wind and tidal power work year-round and help offset the need for batteries.
This would also need some sort of turbine to convert back to electrical energy.
I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
Since the beginning they've been lying with green buzzwords or even "USD 100 in 4 hours to anywhere in the world". The reality is that the plane would be used by business and rich travelers burning more fuel just to save a couple of hours. Flying slower if always going to be cheaper and more efficient (unless they are working on a new technology, but they aren't). They even have the audacity to applaud themselves with the phrase "the first completely private supersonic plane", with a picture of their demonstrator beside a supersonic chase plane from the 60s.
Even private planes just don’t feel like they would make sense. Most private jets are used for regional and transcon, and the time savings would be much less significant at those distances. I feel like most wealthy individuals would rather upgrade to a larger, more comfortable, and/or longer-range jet than to sacrifice comfort, size, and range for supersonic. Only the truly ultra-wealthy seem like they might pick up a few, but that is such a vanishingly small market.
Also, I somehow doubt that an upstart aerospace company can make more efficient gas turbines than companies with ~sixty years of experience in this space (Siemens, Westinghouse, GE, Mitsubishi).
Using a turbine to generate electricity isn't innovative or brave, it's been done, the technology has been around for over a hundred years, but it's not widely used because there's better ways to generate electricity.
This is not brave or innovative, it’s a cash grab during a bubble. You can call a Siemens or GE sales rep and place an order right now for the exact same thing.
So it AI companies want to power their datacenters with gas turbines, they can just place an order right now. I'd guess it's probably not something they want to deal with, better to offload the risk/cost to the exciting power companies.
Siemens power-generating turbines are designed for -50C/+50C temperature envelope. All jet engines lose efficiency at higher ambient temperature due to thermodynamics, no matter how good their HP turbine blade tech.
Great Scott!
Make it make sense.
https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...
(Oh wow off peak will be 0.08$?!)
The cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed.
For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live.
In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
To quote one such government official:
> Sex is good but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn?
These guys are acting as though this is some new concept, whilst they've just rebranded it in a shiny silver package. Aero derived gas turbines like the RR RB211 are everywhere, already packaged like this, powering oil rigs and pipelines everywhere - I worked on them years ago.
Looking forward to coal companies jumping on the bandwagon if they haven't already - "Introducing CoalGen 3.0 - our new cloud connected, AI powering, next gen coal power station."
Every passing day it feels more and more like we're living in some Wall-E like, capitalist dystopia where everything has just lost all purpose and capitalism has just gone into runaway mode, having fine tuned everything for maximum profit, instead of us producing things we and the planet actually need.
Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet. Lots of pretty 3d renders and a wall of (what appears to be AI written) corpo-speak proposing some crazy technology that will revolutionize x.
It looks cool -- don't get me wrong -- but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
Presumably a static turbine is minimizing noisy thrust in exchange for torque while also exhausting through an expansion chamber surrounded by deflective earthworks or some other shielding. (Although the one in the article is indeed all outside in the open.)
But 42MW energy doesn't come from nowhere, fuel needs to be considered. And there everyone has their own constraints.
The AI companies will likely care about $ and little else.
Engineers will point out that 42MW fuel takes up space and supply on an ongoing basis.
Other people will be worried about the externalities of burning 42MW of something vs solar panels and batteries etc.
You can't please all of the people.
Another fit might be somewhere like singapore which is very space poor but very trade connected. But they're currently building a ocean power cable to Australia where they will tap a massive solar farm or existing grid.
It probably fits some use cases better than any alternatives, but for powering cities and suburbia I think renewables still make heaps of sense when space is available somewhere that can join the grid.
I hope that isn’t correct.
Noise, emissions, fuel storage, heat. There are issues that would have me annoyed if that thing appeared next door.
Building roads and running tankers is expensive. Ditto pipelines unless very close to suitable sources.
Especially when the moment these go online at any scale the price of natural gas starts getting jacked even further.
Unless you got cash, then it’s the same.
Presumably there's some benefit there too.
I think at this point LinkedIn culture is fairly globalized. Though America may be to blame for getting it there, largely via Deloitte & co originally. It's originally the language of managerialism.
And so it doesn't have to be looked up: Wind seems to peak at dawn/dusk when solar is not delivery much power, solar peaks in line with air-conditioning load, and there's a miniscule amount of grid scale battery to hold up the grid during a short gap between solar and wind. The batteries are recharged with solar. At least that was the pattern this summer- I need to check now that it's winter.
For gas turbines, n+1 is probably good enough for up to n=10, then n+2 and so on.
If one breaks down or is undergoing maintenance you have a spare.
Solar can’t work like this. Even if you build 2n solar capacity, you still have a not insignificant fraction of each day with no power.
Meanwhile a gas turbine can be running continuously for week to months between service intervals.
Just add batteries? Ok, but that’s no longer solar, and comes with not insignificant additional costs and maintenance etc.
Not "insane", just "lots". Everything in a nation of mere single-digit millions is "lots", let alone the whole world. The quantity isn't far off what's needed anyway to electrify road transport.
But also, the other option besides batteries, for people who want specifically PV to supply power at night to specifically high latitude locations with long winter nights, is to have a long power line going to somewhere less silly to put the PV:
Many such power lines already exist, upgrading them was already necessary even without any questions about the sources putting tension on the lines because they're just so old now, the only question is the *delta* in cost between what would have been needed with no changes in supply and demand vs. what is needed given those have both changed.
And before anyone says "what about grid losses?", right now, China (and only China, and yes I have checked) makes enough aluminium they could put a girdle around the earth with 1 Ω resistance the long way around using a bit less than 5% of their recent production in about 20 years.
The rest of us would need to massively increase our aluminium production to get close to that; it's not immediately obvious why we couldn't given they did.
If you don't have a pipeline, the lower bound is something like 10 LNG tanker trucks per day for each turbine at 42MW. Natural gas is incredibly efficient to transport in liquid form so you could theoretically get away with this for a little while.
It's not even a novel solution, jet engines as stationary emergency 'power stations' goes back to at least the 1950s (e.g. search for TURBOLEKT here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Entwicklungsbau_Pirna).
Actually, renewables seem to be such a no-no that the Boom blog even avoids mentioning them in the sentence "Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace — coal, gas, nuclear, everything" - even though China added overwhelmingly more renewable capacity last year than anything else: according to https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/..., solar increased by 43% from Feb. 2024 to Feb. 2025, wind increased by 17.6%, hydro by 3.5%, while thermal and nuclear increased by 3.9% and 6.9% respectively.
It is thought up to 35 turbines were present on the site of xAI’s existing data center, generating 422MW of power.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/xai-removes-some-...
I like the part where when considering a complex topic, "it became clear" to the guy after a few conversations. Confidence inspiring, no doubt innovative, we should probably not be asking impertinent questions! No idea if the tech is sound but I immediately get scam vibes just from how quickly it leaped into name-dropping Musk and Altman.
Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate.
Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years).
In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays.
A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics.
Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.
Interesting reading on the topic: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...
> Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen.
The US (or at least, fossil fuel interests in the US which seem to have a lot of influence over the current administration) seem determined to become an "energy superpower" by exporting oil and gas. In particular, seems they'd very much like Europe to switch from Russian gas to US LNG. We'll see how that goes. Personally, I find it hard to see how LNG from the other side of the world will remain competitive with ever-reducing costs of solar, wind, and batteries.
But as a business staggery for Boom Supersonic, it kind of seems like a good idea. They get a (hopefully short term) revenue stream, and a whole bunch of "real world" testing on their engine core.
The grid, at least in the UK, has a bunch of these industrial gas turbines for coping with peak demand, etc and being able to quickly add more power to the grid.
Not exactly something you want running in huge numbers for a long time or you may as well wave your climate emissions targets goodbye.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it probably that an early stage company like this can provide this at scale and have it work…
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use.
Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P
On the contrary, check out this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
Have you considered working for the IEA?
They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.
My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
And unless people are shoveling coal directly into the data centres this electricity generating gas turbine is intended to be used for the electricity generation mix is more appropriate to conapre:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
I mean... Seems obvious, no?
Even if we give China the most charity and take their 2025 results at face vault(even though they NEED to be independently verified) China is at best average when it comes % of gridpower that is renewable. Off the top of my head I think they are like 27-30% renewable. But its actually worse because they are the biggest polluter by a mile. Bigger the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
The coal line was slightly under the previous year’s and is now overlapping i.e. no growth compared with last year (data up to October)
The link you've given shows more coal energy being added over the last 5 years than solar. Looking at end of 2020 to end of 2024.
At some point you have to accept this is not some anomaly and there is a pattern in the data that you are trying to to ignore.
The 3 electricity sources mentioned in that quote combined together added less new generation in China than solar alone last year. Wind beat them all individually too.
This year will be the same but even more so.
That graph shows production, not capacity, nor installed capacity in each year.
Solar capacity and say nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil capacity
Are different beasts.
When solar advocates bang on about adding X gigawatts of capacity, they’re being dishonest. What they really mean is they added X/4, because, obviously, it’s sunny only about 25% of the time throughout a year.
Adding batteries doesn’t change that. Still have to over build.
So let’s focus on the numbers that reflect actual production, so we can have an honest conversation.
Nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil, even biomass have capacity factors typically about 80%, often about 90%.
Wind and solar are never going up ro those capacity factors, even with batteries (including pumped hydro).
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.
I mean, we have those regulations because nobody wants to live in Lahore, Pakistan.
Personal experience: In my town a public parking lot could not be built due to it possibly being "endangered moth" habitat.
There are places where you can still build things in the US, but they are more and more scarce.
Unless you're a developer/builder you have no concept of the projects KILLED by bureaucracy.
All you see is what was allowed to be built.
Such a cheap flex right up-front, and with an em-dash to boot. I get it, it's powerful to boast about such a connection. It's just not very classy.
> Sam Altman confirmed power was indeed a major constraint [1].
> [1]: Personal communication.
Or even better:
> Power is a major constraint (Sam Altman, personal communication, December 9, 2025).
What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
Maybe it started with Jobs, maybe it's always been a thing in other spaces (politics, religion...) and is now coming to business and these uber wealthy individuals who put their pants on two legs at a time
There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.
To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
Come on, get serious.
Be better.
Additionally,
1) Aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades. "Oh but we have supersonic engines" does not change the fundamental equation
2) They're proposing burning more fossil fuels dug up from the ground to feed a beast that in my opinion is destroying the entire world economy, and certainly harming freedom
3) Where are they even getting the fuel? Magic? Someone has to build the pipelines, and someone has to supply the fuel.
Note: edited for civility
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836368 - and we've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682844). If you keep posting like this, we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you because your account also posts good things, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
Thanks Blake. This is the sign I needed to cancel my Twitter subscription and hellban X from my LAN.
Is global warming solved? Last time I checked, I was to throw away my repairable ICE vehicle for an expensive unrepairable disposable vehicle in order to save the planet. Just curious how a 42-megawatt gas turbine is helping the planet.
A new Civic going 8,000 miles a years at will produce 2.4 tons. So yeah one new DC is 4,700 cars. Which you’re supposed to replace with electric cars that will be fed with a non-existent power source, which means apparently even more gas turbine power plants.
Most assumptions about renewables don’t account for continuous 24/7 loads. Stuff like storage doesn’t help with that. I have noticed very little talk about AI DCs varying their loads to match renewable generation from solar/wind.
Turns out printing t-shirts isn’t that different from printing silicon. Now Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.
Boom’s founder, Blake, comes from a e-commerce background. What a legend for this innovation.
I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wi...
> A federal judge on Monday struck down President Trump’s halt on approvals of all wind power projects on federal lands and waters, dealing a significant legal setback to the administration’s campaign against wind farms.
Nobody competes with China on lots of things because of government subsidies both direct and indirect (like devaluing currency). We could do those too if we had to.
I understand that turbines are very handy in power generation but we don't use gyroscopic power storage because the inertia gets scary at high RPMs. Turbines lake the momentum but make up for it by being entirely made of knives. You lose an engine mount or throw a blade and you're deep in the shit.
Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.
Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...
...and probably others.
(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)