[trhway]

Alternatively the crisis can be used to accelerate right development - quickly build up solar farms and transmission lines. Both of these can be done quickly if there were a political will. Yet, that will is missing.

So, we're talking 40GW. Lets see what China does:

https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

"In the first two months of 2026, China added:

32.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity, down 18% from last year. 11 GW of wind power capacity, up 19% from last year. 20 GW of thermal power capacity, up 414% from last year. 1.2 GW of hydro power capacity, down 36% from last year. 1.2 GW of nuclear power capacity. "

Edit: to the proponents of nuclear - i think nuclear is very damaging to society as it promotes corrupt crony-government capitalism instead of market forces.

[cloudie78]

Right off the top of my head, to power a 500MW Datacenter we need:

2.2-2.5 GWdc solar capacity which at 600W/panel amounts to 14-17sq mi plus additional 8-12GWh of storage to deal with nighttime, two-three days of cloud cover is not going to work with these numbers.

Ballpark 5-7BN$

Nuclear otoh, 1GW continuous - gives constant power, badly managed first of a kind (or first one after decades) build will be at around 10-15BN and that’ll cover two 500MW data centres.

There’s also the second/third degree order effects nuclear power stations have of creating jobs and industrial manufacturing demand. To run a nuclear power station you need to employ 1000 people (engineers plus support staff) - that’s a small town’s worth of adults. So you’ll need a town with a school, hospitals, stores - those need staffing as well.

Unfortunately building nuclear is not something that’s currently a feasible path as it requires patient capital and long term vision and planning.

So gas turbines it is at around ~1BN$

[psd1]

> is not something that’s currently a feasible path as it requires patient capital and long term vision and planning

HN arguing in favour of a planned economy - see, we aren't free-market cultists!

[clarionbell]

I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

In Europe, we approach energy generation as a political, or climate problem. We are building solar and wind power sources, not to make energy cheaper, or to make grid more resilient, but to fulfill an ideological goal.

The results are, not great, to be honest. The energy prices have increased substantially, and are now driving our chemical industry bankrupt.

Edit: I do not dispute the climate change. I am only highlighting impacts of current policy.

[psd1]

Energy prices globally spiked in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine (again). I conclude that energy is tied more closely to fossil than solar. Happy to stand with you and throw rocks at stupid solar policy, though.

[toast0]

China is building all types of generation because they are rapidly growing their electric network (generation doubled from 2014 to 2024).

Europe's generation is roughly flat during the same period.

It doesn't make sense to build a lot of everything in a system without growth in generation. Replacing decommisioned generators would be enough. Growth in solar and wind generation (for ideological or economic reasons) means there's less reason to build new capacity of other types. There's complications there with firm vs intermittent capacity, but that's a different discussion.

US electrical generation was also flat from 2000 to 2020, but seems to be growing again since then, but not anywhere near China's growth rate.

[energy123]

They're not really building anything other than renewables. Nuclear is a rounding error and new coal is just replacing old coal.

[toast0]

Stats on wikipedia [1] stopped breaking out coal from other fossil fuel ('thermal') production in 2021.

But coal was 4.1 million GWh in 2014 and 5.0 million GWh in 2021; that's a lot of (relatively) new coal. Fossil fuel growth since 2023 is a lot less than earlier years, so maybe they have hit saturation for fossil fuel generation. I would expect high fossil fuel prices so far this year would drive usage lower, the stats for 2026 should be interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

[trhway]

>I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

yes, they don't seem to fall for the "solar is unstable" trap and recognize new reality - the solar + wind smoothed by nuclear/gas is the new baseline

To the comment on the coal below : not really. You don't need that much as a smoothing capacity.

[boelboel]

You mean + coal, they don't have a meaningful amount of nuclear (just under 5% of electricity mix and 2% of energy). 50% of electricity is coal.

[stouset]

If we build a terawatt of green energy capacity then turn around and immediately use it for datacenters rather than to replace fossil fuel generation, we haven’t gained anything. If anything we’ve lost out.

[spacington]

Yeah and the richest person on the planet with full vertical integration (with partner) Elon musk and Tesla aka solar roof and power wall wants to sell DC in space and hasn't fixed any use of gas turbine for Colossus 1&2.

Without enforcement it will happen continuously with snail pace

[PunchyHamster]

solar farms are worst kind of power source for constant loads like datacenters running AI training

[adornKey]

Why? Unlike loads involving a real physical process there is absolutely no need for AI-training to be constant.

[everfrustrated]

You are correct in the sense that they can stop work in a way many generic server use cases can't (which is seen in lowering power supply reliability requirements as the article mentions), but running expensive servers at 50% utilization would dramatically affect the revenue generated per capital invested - IE you couldn't afford to buy the servers.

[pu_pe]

If you invest into chips that deprecate in value really fast, not utilizing them to their full capacity because of power constraints would be counter productive.

[spacington]

Solar power still can take a certain amount of load from any other source and saving money and CO2 while doing so.

And grid battery works and is cheap enough now.

[alex_duf]

I'm hoping the kind of gas turbines being installed on these datacenters are capable of quickly responding to a load change, meaning the primary source of energy could be solar during the day and complement when there isn't enough energy.

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...

[numpad0]

but you can't trust especially hyperscalers with securely sealed HEUs in shipping containers

[trhway]

you're just incorrect. You probably missed 2 points :

- 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."

[actionfromafar]

That's why we are getting clean, beautiful coal the likes of which nobodys ever seen before!