According to Google, Texas currently has about 87GW of peak capacity & a data center production pipeline that will require 75-100GW. So the state will have to basically double its peak capacity to supply power to all those new data centers.
Using solar to cater to demand increase from data centers will compound the issue.
The 2021 grid failure was triggered by a winter storm which had 3 effects: pushed up energy demand for heating, kneecapped solar generation, and caused failures in bringing up backup sources online (because operators didn't invest enough in "winterizing" their equipment)
They only have 12 years of proven natural gas reserves left so you should take up whatever issues you have w/ lack of natural resources w/ mother nature. Most of the new capacity they are planning to build are natural gas & coal plants. Renewables are not reliable enough for data centers.
Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built?
If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything. Even on this supposedly 'intellectually-minded' forum the extreme irony flies over the heads of most.
> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
My town isn't perfect in those terms but it's probably about as good as possible, so yes I would have. Of all the places I've lived, tho, there's certainly lots of thing I would have opposed, given the chance, like all those highways.
> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of analysis, at huge cost to the surrounding communities.
> One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything.
This seems like you're being purposefully obtuse, given the context in long thread you're replying to. It's not against "building anything", it's data centers which harm the surrounding communities.
Hate to confront you with reality, but if you're in the US, 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed.
So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists.
Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I have some bad news for you.
Thanks for telling me how I think. If we're doing that, let me tell you how you think: you don't care about people and want to pursue profit over human life, and will go to any length to defend a private corporation over the people who have to live with the negative impacts of its poor decisions.
Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact studies existed caused severe health issues for the surrounding communities, including cancer and death. That's why we have environmental impact studies now.
Yes, and as with everything humans do as a mob, the pendulum tends to swing way too far in whatever direction the memes are trending.
We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you articulate exactly what about Datacenters is uniquely bad in comparison to anything else humans build (factories, houses, warehouses, malls, golf courses, pools, etc) that you believe needs to be stopped?
Would you be happier if we de-centralized data-centers as hardware in everyones homes and re-classified their resource usage as residential (basically where things are headed if we keep down this path)?
Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? Are we afraid water used in a data center is somehow destroyed and can no longer enter the water cycle?
> We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything
These kinds of generalizations are so ridiculous as to be completely useless. You keep saying that we're blocking "everything"... what? Nobody is claiming that we need to stop building (in your words) "literally everything". This is called a "straw man".
> But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
Yes, and environmental impact studies move us away from the "mass cancer and death" while still allowing "things" to be built.
> what about Datacenters is uniquely bad
- Excessive water consumption which is especially bad in areas that experience droughts
- Excessive electricity consumption which strains power grids which have not had time to adapt (also causing wildly increased bills for local residents)
- Continuous operation which exacerbates the above issues (compared to "factories, malls, golf courses, pools, etc" which largely operate for only a portion of the day)
- More land use, making the nearby land uninhabitable due to noise as well as other environmental impacts for local wildlife
> Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? I'm struggling to understand.
I'm struggling to understand where on earth you got this? It seems like you're just inventing arguments to debate against. I never said anything like this.
The previous failure was in 2011, and didn't happen again until a decade later. The root cause hasn't been resolved since 2021: the demand and weather conditions simply haven't recurred since.
Yes, it's just tiring to hear the same meme putdowns about how this Winter we're all going to suffer when we probably have less brownouts etc than a lot of other places.
I remember 2011 but I didn't actually have any issues with a power failure it was just extremely icy. These are freak weather events, generally the grid holds up fine. I'm not saying we don't have issues but it is kind o foverblown.
> I didn't actually have any issues with a power failure it was just extremely icy.
Maybe ask someone who lost power - or lost a loved one - and find out if they are as sanguine about the icy conditions. People died. "It's not a big deal since I wasn't personally affected" isn't a scalable position, but it is a quintessentially Texan attitude.
Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas.
Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout, and have resisted all attempts at increasing the governance of the gas generation.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas' "Capacity, Demand and Reserves report" even details a scenario in which massive energy demand growth in the state surpasses available supply in 2026.
Despite all the yapping, there's a crap ton of (ever growing) solar and wind and battery storage and what not in Texas. And ERCOT does have a power link with the neighboring SPP.
> The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with a 220 MW DC tie near Oklaunion, and a 600 MW DC tie near Monticello, and is tied to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico with a 300 MW DC tie near McAllen, and a 100 MW VFT tie near Laredo.[29] There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas
Including in-flight projects, that totals several GW. Texas demand today is pretty low for noon - clouds and rain in much of the state, and we're at 70 GW.
Building interconnects costs money. What's the ROI on building more?
Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.
Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?
Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.
Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.
I haven't been arguing for or against anything, and I don't think the original thread creator was, either.
The comment from @piltdownman merely clarified that Texas is for the most part an isolated grid. That if demand matches predictions from our state regulator, Texas needs to continue massively increasing energy supply.
Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to -- the Great Prairie? There's a whole New Mexico-worth of sparse population between Dallas/Austin/San Antonio before you get to New Mexico itself, which you would then need to cross halfway before you hit a major population center.
Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).
I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.
Most of Texas is on this grid, not connected to any other states. The total amount of power that can flow between the Texas Interconnect and the rest of the US grid is a small fraction of the Texas grid's demand. That was the point being made by the original commenter.
> Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to ...
Anywhere else in the transmission network that has excess generation capacity. If the biggest state benefits from interconnection, why wouldn't the second biggest benefit too?
Daily demand is cyclic, even with no additional capacity added, being connected to grids in other timezones that have different demand peak-times is a net win.
Completely serious. Sea water cooling for data centers is already in use here in Helsinki. And water temperature in the Gulf of America doesn't seem to go above 30 C even in the summer.
Sea water would have to be piped to places like Dallas, whereas much of Finland's people/data centers are closer to the shoreline. A solution that works in certain places does not generally work everywhere.
There's no need to build them in Dallas. Just keep them near the shoreline. The only reason you have so many data centers in North Jersey is so high frequency traders can make their calls 0.02ms before their competitors on the NYSE. For an average user, the 1ms ping between Dallas and Corpus Christi is not a problem.
We have a home in Houston. Over by the big gates down Sunset.
I have no particular objection to building datacenters there.
All that said, I think you're being real hand-wave-y here. The climate in Houston is materially different than it is in Dallas. So there's likely a reason these companies have been locating their enormously expensive assets where they have been locating them.
Houston floods. Often.
Houston gets hit by Hurricanes.
Houston is hot and humid with relatively high ground water tables.
Don't even get me started on the power and the durability issues arising from the use of sea water.
There's a lot to work out there. You put what you can afford to lose in Houston, but you don't bet the farm on coastal Texas. You just can't do that if you want resilient infrastructure.
