alt Hacker NewsIt’s interesting that this implies that building natural gas pipelines to data centers is easy, at least easier than building out substations and transmission lines. Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
Replies
> Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
It's not necessarily easier to do one or the other. It's about which one is faster.
WA state has the advantage of cheap electricity due to hydro projects, and before they were able to ship off their surplus to CA, they did a lot of aluminum production here to take advantage of it. I can see natural gas working similar, but I’ve also heard data centers want to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power in western states.
They want to build them near the oil fields in texas. As of now most of those fields already run without much if any power infra in place on top of that they would be right by the natural gas generation.
Add that the manpower and expertise of running generators is abundant there and it's a prettt solid idea if they can actually make it.
Transmission loss in gas pipes is probably lower than electric transmission? Underground probably easier than above ground. Lastly I think they are building data centers near natural gas fields...
I'm guessing it's not just the overhead lines, but you need the actual power plants somewhere.
>Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.
In Texas a lot of natural gas is wasted/burned away as it is not profitable to collect and transport it from all oil fields. These days quite a few places put small turbines to generate electricity to do cryptocurrency mining.
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.