The data centers may not be in the business of power generation but the general public rate payers aren’t in the business of paying for the data centers infrastructure for power. Push come to shove the data center operators will be more realistic on their power consumption and they will get active with onsite/near site generation with a third party. This will happen at the exclusion of the grid operators. And that is a good thing!
I have long thought that data centers would need their own generation. I met with a couple of developers a couple of years ago to discuss power from the grid. It wasn’t optimistic. Too expensive and too unreliable. They clearly favored on site gas turbines. This complicates siting but worth the hassle in their minds. Permitting never came up. I mentioned it and they just smiled. These are people who can get permits.
The part of natural gas we actually want for power generation - methane. Different sources have more or less CO2, which is just unwanted filler to energy companies, and varying quantities of heavier gasses, usually called condensate. They are useful but require more processing of the source gas.
It will be interesting to see how far this gets. AI is already capable of running on a couple of networked PCs, no data center required. Just an OS optimized for LLMs rather than desktop computing, as Windows has always been. In fact as hardware capacity was constantly growing (Moores Law) code optimization has pretty much been neglected for a couple of decades.
As far as AI is concerned the demand for massively increased amounts of power is likely to disappear, yes. We will still need data centers, but they will be smaller with time.
I'm thinking along those lines, too. China's DeepSeek was the harbinger that all the hype over AI has been overdone. I'm optimistic about the future, because AI and robotics will make all our businesses and industries more efficient, but in the near term, we will probably be seeing some adjustments.
The data centers may not be in the business of power generation but the general public rate payers aren’t in the business of paying for the data centers infrastructure for power. Push come to shove the data center operators will be more realistic on their power consumption and they will get active with onsite/near site generation with a third party. This will happen at the exclusion of the grid operators. And that is a good thing!
I have long thought that data centers would need their own generation. I met with a couple of developers a couple of years ago to discuss power from the grid. It wasn’t optimistic. Too expensive and too unreliable. They clearly favored on site gas turbines. This complicates siting but worth the hassle in their minds. Permitting never came up. I mentioned it and they just smiled. These are people who can get permits.
Thanks-very informative.
But I'm wondering what "Marcellus/Utica molecules" are?
The part of natural gas we actually want for power generation - methane. Different sources have more or less CO2, which is just unwanted filler to energy companies, and varying quantities of heavier gasses, usually called condensate. They are useful but require more processing of the source gas.
It will be interesting to see how far this gets. AI is already capable of running on a couple of networked PCs, no data center required. Just an OS optimized for LLMs rather than desktop computing, as Windows has always been. In fact as hardware capacity was constantly growing (Moores Law) code optimization has pretty much been neglected for a couple of decades.
Not sure I understand, but are you saying that the need and demand for date centers may not be as great as we thought?
As far as AI is concerned the demand for massively increased amounts of power is likely to disappear, yes. We will still need data centers, but they will be smaller with time.
I'm thinking along those lines, too. China's DeepSeek was the harbinger that all the hype over AI has been overdone. I'm optimistic about the future, because AI and robotics will make all our businesses and industries more efficient, but in the near term, we will probably be seeing some adjustments.
CH4 molecules