These are some very tired arguments around the high low cycles of solar and wind.

I don't think anyone really believes that a zero - storage solution is viable for anything let alone data centers.

And hopefully in 20 years we're generating fuel from atmospheric carbon, using nuclear more intelligently, and have sane medium term storage options.

But that's the better point of TFA that they missed: trying to clean up data center energy use will spur those advances.

It can makes sense if your end product can be stored by itself, like desalinated water or hydrogen or ammonia or even heat.

porche is making sythetic gasoline. put it somewhere where electricity is dirt cheap cough iceland cough and you could easily fuel all the shipping containers with this new e-fuel. its gasoline so it stores like gasoline

The Autor doesn't mention googles announcement from a few years ago to go renewable 24/7.

So, what's the value of this 'analysis'?

More holistic would have been to mention this, also compute following the sun, data center energy values (forgot the term for this), storage calculation for the needed amount.

In my opinion there is nothing easier than making a data center green and DCs already ha e a huge CO2 savings aspect.

It's so much better to do banking business online than driving to a bank.

I'm annoyed by mention DC becoming green. It wastes energy for the real CO2 sources.

The full title of the article is: Why You Can't Power Your Data Center Only With Renewables – But Should Try Anyway

I know in states like Texas, you can only power your DC with renewables at certain times. They have recently had to curtail wind energy due to overproduction and lack of transmission capacity. We can't provision grid scale storage or transmission lines fast enough to keep up with wind production. However, data centers and other critical infrastructure are excellent places to start adding storage and direct consumption of renewable power.

Funny how Nuclear is never counted as renewable.

Like, the sun literally runs on nuclear fuel, with a finite amount of hydrogen and helium, and an expiration date. But it’s never considered “renewable energy” when humans do it.

LWRs are not renewable because the quantity of economically accessible U235 inferred to be in the world (not even the stuff discovered) is about enough to power the world for 10 years.

Breeders do not exist.

Ummm, about those breeder reactors ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Fast_breeder...

Now give me the list of ones that don't run on U235 or on a once through cycle (or a quantity of Pu greater than they produce which is the same thing with extra steps).

Just because you name something a unicorn doesn't make it shit rainbows.

The headline (even the full version) is incorrect. My personal web and mail servers, for example, are VPSs on 1984.hosting, which at least claims to be powered entirely by renewables (specifically: geothermal).

That said, the article's analysis is correct: solar/wind power require some way to store surplus power (and enough storage capacity to withstand changing weather conditions), and geothermal is geography-dependent and entails much higher upfront expenses. The article's conclusion is also correct: even if going 100% renewable is infeasible, there's no sense in letting perfect be the enemy of good, and any degree of renewables in a datacenter's energy mix is better than nothing.