This sounds like a good reason to have a lot of batteries.
Keeping the data center up is completely different from keeping the grid up.
Not only are the batteries too small; they're also on the wrong side of the disconnect.
I really don’t want to incentivize private power plants that aren’t on grid. Or just running tons of industrial sized generators instead.
If we’re going to allow enough of this stuff to be built that it can destabilize things why not require they behave and don’t stop off like that? Some sort of organized draw down?
And if they don’t? Mandatory cutoff for X amount of time. Weeks/months.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-confirms-1...
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-announces-...
Elon definitely got the “you can just do things” memo.
It is not politically easy, but it is logistically straightforward.
If you pass a nuance-free emphatic rule that says no fossil fuel generators, does that include the backup generators at a hospital? If it does and then the hospital loses power, that's not just a political problem, that's a "people will die" problem. But if it doesn't then you're going to turn around and find that Elon Musk's data center is hosting some hospital's IT system and then running the generators (that happen to also power the rest of the entire facility) to keep it online. Time will pass before this loophole can be detected, more time until new rules can be promulgated, and then they'll find a different loophole and the process begins again.
That process tends to make people frustrated and then they want to abandon the rule of law. Stop having rules that say what you can't do and just have rules that say you can't do anything and then selectively prosecute the people you don't like. The modern system has been evolving to work more like that, but that's how you enable people like Trump. Making the system work like that is a disaster.
What you need to do is find a better way to solve the problem in general, like a carbon tax, rather than trying to play whack a mole with overly-specific rules until there is such a thicket of them that you're really playing "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" -- or setting things up for someone else to.
If you ever visited the town and hit the restaurants during the summer you get a nice taste of the lake bottom when it flips. Pretty nasty yet few restaurants use water filtration to deliver fresh-tasting tea and water to their customers.
That's OT though.
The county will have a special meeting on data centers this Tuesday, June 9 where they are seeking public input. I expect that there will be plenty of people and hope they have time to give people an opportunity to speak. I visit this county regularly for grocery shopping, fuel, etc and if you go south one county there are already plenty of people who are sick and tired of the bitcoin operations and how they have disrupted life in that county. I hope we have a good turnout for this meeting so that this new operation gets canned before they build anything.
[0]https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article315770666.ht...
Here is a quick overview of the proposed site. [1] You can see in yellow the 200 acre section where turbine generators will be sited. In the light blue area adjacent you can see a small part of the larger parcel where the data centers will be built. This is part of one of the last large ranches in this part of the county. The others are actively being developed for large (>50000 residents) developments that were supposed to be self-contained communities but which have evolved to be large residential areas that dump traffic onto undersized freeways which are currently under construction to handle the huge volume of new traffic and traffic from all the other losers who will live out there.
The red polygon show existing grid substation intertie where high tension power lines converge or radiate out across the countryside. The light blue polygon is an active natural gas production and compressor station. There is more natural gas infrastructure just below the red polygon too. The lake is obvious in the lower left corner. The natural gas wells and compressor station date to early Barnett Shale production in the county, before 2008. The electrical substation is legacy and has been expanded more than once during the last 15 years.
The black polygon is a small rural subdivision of 8 ~2.2 acre ranchettes around one original ~4.2 acre home site. Those people bought a small plot of ranchland for their own slice of rural Texas. That section was subdivided into lots about 9 years ago so every one of those people bought homes next to an operational gas compressor station. I wonder whether they will be at the meeting.
*The US should implement this policy for real for my personal amusement.