alt Hacker NewsThis is just a guess, but is the reason the same one that the gas is cheap all the way out in BFE west Texas? In other words, even if you could generate electricity from wellhead gas more cheaply than a bunch of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries just west of Fort Worth, can you actually export it to east Texas where all the demand is? The solution here being: let's build our giant demand machine directly on the steppe and skip all that expensive infra, because data is much cheaper to move than energy.
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I know this is nitpicking, but as a Texan I have to correct you on a point of grammar. The “west” in “West Texas” (and similarly for the other regions) isn’t an adjective; it’s part of the proper noun and should be capitalized. So it’s “West Texas,” not “west Texas.”
Yes, this is weird and no, I have no idea why we do it, but it’s really weird to read “export it to east Texas” — to the extent that I had to re-parse the sentence to figure out what you meant.
> let's build our giant demand machine directly on the steppe and skip all that expensive infra, because data is much cheaper to move than energy.
Who cares if it's cheaper. It's that you're moving less of it. The more processing you can do near the source the smaller and cheaper your pipe out to the consumer can be.
Cut the tree on the hillside. Mill it in the valley. Then spend your precious boxcar volume shipping only the finished lumber out of the valley.
> data is much cheaper to move than energy
It's something like 5-10 orders of magnitude cheaper to move information over fiber than it is to move the energy required to produce that same information through a [pipe/power]line.