Comment by maxglute | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxglute | Hacker News Reader

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Now deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators.

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.

> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra.

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)

You can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.

Hence Islanded i.e. skip grid because US incompetence is inability to hook up grid with multiyear lead times due to skilled labour shortage. The entire point is to skip the grid or rather, due to US constraints, hook up to grid not really an option to meet rollout timelines.

The final analysis is still pending, afaik. In any case maintaining grid stability is a good problem to have and likely much easier to solve than generation. Worst case, you spin some flywheels to get inertia.

I was going to mention China, but you already did; if the US really wants to scale up electricity generation and do it fast, they can get China involved. China's doing it everywhere else in the world already, and (tin foil hat on) it's why they will overtake US as the biggest and most influential super power.

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