solar farms are worst kind of power source for constant loads like datacenters running AI training
And grid battery works and is cheap enough now.
In the real world you'd need to add some cost to account for the externalities on water and GHG.
Do the numbers still work out for the gas powered plant? If not then you're just exploiting unaccounted for externalities.
But I haven't looked into where these datacenter are being placed, I'm assuming that although solar is cheap now, the surface needed would make the purchase of nearby land probably not worth it. These new categories of datacenters are becoming very energy dense...
- battery storage
- and in the article
"However, AI labs and some hyperscalers have relaxed those requirements as there is now a lower uptime tolerance applied to both inference and training, not just training. Many of Meta’s self-built AI datacenters, for example, target just two nines of uptime and forgo backup generators entirely, as detailed in our Industrials Model."