alt Hacker NewsOk. A serious question. I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
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Because the US has some policies that make those currently more expensive than they should be while. A combination of tariffs, removal of incentives for local producers, etc. has caused prices to be higher than they could be. All of this is because of fossil fuel lobby funded campaigns for exactly this to happen.
The flip side of course is that gas turbines are in short supply and manufacturers are in no hurry to build out production capacity for what is effectively obsolete technology with a very uncertain future. A lot of the projects being announced may never get delivered for the simple reason that there are long waiting lists for these things.
And there is the notion that related investments might end up under water when the few plants that do get built start struggling economically in ten years or so. These are not very attractive long term investments. The short term interest in securing any capacity at all is overriding this. Of the well over a hundred GW of data centers planned until 2035, probably only less than a 30-40% will actually get built; if not less. Michael Liebreich is predicting only about 35GW will be realized. His estimate is that there simply is no more production capacity that can be committed than that.
It will be interesting to see if this Amazon plant actually gets built. For now Amazon can afford to gamble on this and just write it off if it doesn't work out.
If policy changes in a few years, I expect a lot of these projects to get unceremoniously cancelled when it turns out that they are a combination of under water financially and behind on schedule because of component shortages anyway. Also, it only takes a few failed projects for everyone to get cold feet. Premature closures of new gas plants could happen if renewables get cheap enough. Those are already happening in some places.
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
It's because the permits are easier to get. It's very hard to get people to organize to make renewable energy permitting easier.
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
gas turbines are not intermittent
> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity
presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
You need a ton of land for solar and no renewable is as reliable as fossil fuels.
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.