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Comment by pingou | Hacker News Reader

What about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?

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How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...

Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by power, by all means, offer users a discount when their queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to save cents to fill up their tanks - you can’t say there isn’t precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better question is, is it really a constraint?

Doesnt really work, as the biggest cost is buying GPUs etc which has to be paid for, and leaving them idle when the sun isnt shining doesnt pay the purchase costs. Their are industries where this does work though.

The customers time is not flexible like that.

And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money

> The customers time is not flexible like that.

haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually quite flexible

> The customers time is not flexible like that.

A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible. Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use naturally follows the sun anyway.

> And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money

Some companies already have more chips than they can feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle part of the night.

You both are talking about this stuff as if it is a new concept. Demand-based pricing is already commonplace for both electricity and compute.

The demand for both compute and electricity is higher while people are awake and using them. But not all demand is realtime, and some will shift in response to prices.

Reciprocating natural gas engines can be moved from [concrete] pad to pad and be up and running in under 24 hours. The portable turbines take longer but they’re still fast.

Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.

The density required for solar is also much lower - the coordination between different land parcels and routing power and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem gas turbines.

Takes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front investment, and requires a lot more land.

The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.

land. compute what surface you need for 1 GW of solar

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