It’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?
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.
I have also heard about deployment of inference (LLMs etc) instead of crypto at these gas turbines. If you already have internet there, why not I guess.
a 16" natural gas pipeline moving 200 MMscf/d at pressures >1000 psi (relatively standard numbers, 16" can go up to ~600 MMscf/d) has a power transport capability of 2.5 GW (thermal). burn that in 60% efficient combined cycle turbines and you get 1 GW of electricity. that's a lot easier than building 1 GW of electric transmission lines.
1GW at 500kV three-phase AC is 1154 amps; 1 billion divided by 500,000 divided by sqrt(3).
You could handle that with one set of 1272kcmil aluminum conductors, or two sets of 300kcmil conductors, based off of this wire submittal: https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf
The voltage drop will be higher than HVDC, but AC transformers are probably an order of magnitude cheaper than HVDC switchgear. That’s the main issue with HVDC, interrupting HVDC current is very difficult since there’s no zero point like with an AC sine wave. High voltage AC breakers use SF-6 to extinguish the arc at the zero point, which happens 120 times per second at 60 hz (100 times per second for 50 hz)
>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.
Ultimately AI comes from space :) Just wait until Starship starts flying - with its projected $/kg launch costs the placement of solar + GPUs in space would be the cheapest option (10-20kg is 1 GPU, 5 m2 solar and 2 m2 radiator (at 70C radiating away 1.5 KW) - total launch cost would be around paltry $1-2K) .
you see my numbers in my comment. I don't see any numbers in your comment (please don't give any links to the articles whose authors don't understand black body radiation formula and thus reference ISS cooling in datacenter discussion :)
I'd really like to see the math on this one. It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there? It's not just counter-intuitive, it's bonkers.
you need to look at numbers instead of intuition - intuition naturally gets us wrong when we deal with unfamiliar things like space.
A ready 10 ton house will cost $500K-1M to place in a well developed area - the cost of land itself, communications, permits, also delays and unpredictability of process, etc. Add to that yearly taxes. Add tremendous electricity costs in case of the datacenter. And all those costs have and will be growing.
Launching 10 tons on Starship - sub-$1M and that cost will drop down to about $100K-200K.
> It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there?
In Texas the electric grid is regulated by ERCOT and gas pipelines are regulated (by accident of history) by the Texas Railroad Commission. ERCOT has a big network of producers who put energy into the grid, local companies like CenterPoint Energy who distribute it to customer sites, then retail electric companies sell the power and pay a line usage fee to the line owner (which tends to be a fixed monthly cost to the customer, listed separately on the bill from other fees or usage bills). The TRC deals with companies that own their own pipelines and bill the end customer directly.
A lot of the natural gas in the US is in Texas, and a lot of it is flared while pumping out crude. Putting data centers on turbines near the extraction fields out in the Permian Basin makes sense for power. You can build short pipelines or hook into the ones already there.
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.
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.
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 wouldn't expect so, because it's not just fugitive emissions we're talking about, but that you need to run a lot of big compressors to run pipelines. But often that cost isn't really counted because they just burn more gas to power them.
It's amortized for sure, gas is relatively dense in energy and can be transported long distance with minimal loss, unlike electricity. High voltage DC power lines are used in some places for long distance transport, but that's nowhere near the continent-spanning oil and gas pipes.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?