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from the stars-at-night-might-be-big-and-bright-but-the-street-lights-won't dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas, but as datacenter footprints explode amid the AI boom, regulators fear even the Lone Star state's utilities won't be able to keep up for much longer.
The Texas' Public Utility Commission is now warning datacenter operators looking to set up shop in the US state within the next 12 to 15 months that they won't be able to rely entirely on the local grid and will have to supply at least some of their own power. As some of you will know, Texas has at times suffered blackouts from demand overload, and outages sparked by storms damaging infrastructure.
"We can't afford to lose any of our resources off the system at this point, especially given those load-growth projections," Thomas Gleeson, who chairs the commission, told Blomberg during the Gulf Coast Power Association conference in Austin this week.
Chief among Gleeson's concerns is datacenters setting up shop near existing power plants and buying up the supply of electricity, making it harder for the grid to keep the lights on for everyone else. Instead, Gleeson wants to see datacenter operators arranging and supporting their own generation facilities before putting strain on existing infrastructure.
[...] To ensure their bit-barn projects don't run out of juice, some operators are cozying up to operating and even defunct nuclear power plants. This northern spring, Amazon paid $650 million for Talen Energy's Cumulus datacenter located directly adjacent to the 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant. Under the deal, Amazon will have access to up to 960 megawatts of power.
[...] However, bringing retired nuclear plants back online isn't always as easy as it sounds. As The Register recently reported, many older facilities will require extensive repairs and modernization before they're ready to start turning steam into electricity again.
Some operators hope to bypass the problems associated with legacy reactor designs by opting for small modular reactor designs from the likes of NuScale, Oklo, and others. During Oracle's Q1 earnings call last month, Ellison said the IT goliath had already secured building permits for a trio of SMRs.
But while SMRs have promise, none are operating.
[...] Some critics believe SMRs will never work. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis predicted the reactors will be "too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."
It's worth noting that while nuclear may be hot right now, it's far from the only option datacenter operators can consider – even it if is one of the cleaner alternatives.
AWS, for instance, briefly weighed using natural gas fuel cells to power some of its Oregon datacenters as an alternative to grid power, and ultimately abandoned the plan. In the energy-constrained Irish market, Microsoft is using natural gas to keep several of its datacenters online.
But, if Redmond is to be believed, the 170 megawatt power plant containing some 22 gas generators only supplies power during periods when the national grid is unable to keep up with demand.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2024, @10:17AM (9 children)
What happens when the Texas grid seizes up again in a cold snap?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday October 10 2024, @12:14PM (2 children)
I think this is interesting because it IS possible to have a business model where AI "soaks up" excess power but is limited during power issues.
Amazon EC2 instances are NOT cloud computing but there is (was?) a tier of service that boiled down to "when we have nothing better to do we'll run your stuff" almost like batch processing.
My interesting novel idea is I could see a scenario where AI service could reply with "I'm busy now talk to me again after sunrise" or email you a response later rather than instantly immediately, etc.
The net effect of lighting up 960 MW of data center under those conditions would be the Texas AIs go into slow responding mode while the rest of the grid gets an extra 960 MW, not bad.
Usually the strategies for excess solar/wind power has been to stockpile electro-refining of metals (copper, etc) or strange energy storage schemes, but AI could be added to the mix. So if there's excess wind power someplace, maybe the AI runs 2x faster because its not power limited. This would have weird budget effects where X% of your capex isn't being used. Also peak CPU power means peak cooling requirements so a bright sunny excess solar day might be be useful if the chillers in the data center can't keep up.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday October 10 2024, @02:37PM (1 child)
I am not sure about the commercial LLMs, but otherwise the main power investment is training, not inference. The models can be checkpointed during training and training can thus be smeared out over power excess moments at the cost of finishing later. As training can last weeks or even month, I could imagine interest in such tradeoffs. It boils down to the balance between hardware and energy cost.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Sourcery42 on Thursday October 10 2024, @04:05PM
This strategy would play well with the on-peak vs off-peak pricing that electricity often follows too. There should be some incentive to do this even outside of the more catastrophic supply interruptions that get more attention.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 10 2024, @01:00PM (3 children)
It could be interesting to know who the electricity company is going to prioritize. The AI-company feeding their datacenter(s) or humans that risk freezing to death.
(Score: 3, Touché) by BsAtHome on Thursday October 10 2024, @01:27PM (2 children)
That is a no-brainer! Of course you save the data centers!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday October 11 2024, @04:51PM (1 child)
Data centers continue to operate after being shut down in the winter. Shut a human's power down and there are no more bills being paid by him, because he's dead.
It would take a brain-dead CEO to prioritize data centers over humans in a cold snap.
What did you expect when you voted for a convicted felon, peace and rainbows?
(Score: 3, Touché) by weirsbaski on Saturday October 12 2024, @03:10AM
If you think like a bean-counter, you might be asking different questions.
Like, how much electricity would the human buy over the rest of his lifetime, if he didn't die? Versus how much electricity would the next Texas-based data center buy over the course of its lifetime, if an extended power-outage didn't encourage the developer to build it somewhere else?
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Thursday October 10 2024, @01:21PM
Hypothetically, if anyone in Texas cared at all, you could shut down the worthless spam generators long enough to exploit the extra capacity they pay for and stabilize the grid.
In practice: get fucked, Texans, sincerely, your government.
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday October 10 2024, @02:25PM
They pull out the control rods a little and everyone can huddle around the reactor?