All Things Environment

[youthathletics]

Is the science settled, NYT playing the odds?

https://x.com/junkscience/status/174631 ... a82I2GssRg

[NattyBohChamps04]

Is the science settled, NYT playing the odds?

https://x.com/junkscience/status/174631 ... a82I2GssRg

Clown tweet. Here are the two opinion pieces, which the clown didn't even bother to link. Keep sucking up the flavor-aid my man. You really owned the libs with that one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/us/g ... wfall.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/opin ... angst.html

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2DI-mdL ... BiNWFlZA==

Oh well.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C17M0CMO ... BiNWFlZA==

Nothing to see here….

[PizzaSnake]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C17M0CMO ... BiNWFlZA==

Nothing to see here….

Just a Spring clean for the May Queen…

[Farfromgeneva]

'We’re Not Even Close': Data Center Power Crunch Gets Worse, With No End In Sight
Data center developers are facing a worsening energy crisis that has escalated as utilities struggle to keep up with the needs of the booming industry. And with its power usage being exponentially increased by the adoption of artificial intelligence, experts say the problem isn't going away any time soon.

Placeholder
With soaring demand, rising rents and a flood of new investment, data centers are a rare, charmed corner of the commercial real estate landscape. Major tech companies’ massive investments in AI over the past 12 months have added fuel to a sector already experiencing unprecedented growth as firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon snap up the data center capacity needed to support these new technologies.

The industry is already having trouble building data centers fast enough to meet this growing need, largely due to growing difficulty securing the hundreds of megawatts of electricity these facilities require from utilities. Data centers are already maxing out the capacity of transmission infrastructure in the industry’s key markets, meaning it can take years for new data centers to be connected to power while the utility upgrades transmission lines and substations. These problems are only expected to get worse as data center demand continues to outpace the ability of utilities to make these improvements.

Speaking at Bisnow’s DICE Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling in Virginia last month, industry leaders pointed to mistakes that caused both providers and utilities to be caught off guard by the ongoing power crunch. They also looked at how providers are trying to navigate these constraints to ensure that insufficient data center capacity isn’t what limits innovation and development of AI and other technologies that their largest tenants have bet their futures on.

“It’s great to say that AI is going to change the world and everything else, but we have to look at what it’s going to take to get there, and right now we're not even close,” said Kevin Dalton, chief data center officer at Cumulus Data. “All of a sudden there’s all this demand and you have to wonder how this is going to happen. You can't just go turn on a switch and you get power. “

Power usage by the data center industry is expected to accelerate further in the coming months and years. While U.S. data centers used a total of 17 gigawatts at the end of 2022, a report from Newmark this month projected that the industry’s capacity will more than double to reach 35 gigawatts by 2030.

While much of this growing consumption is due to more data centers being built, the power requirements of a typical facility have also shot up due to AI. The high-performance processors needed for AI can consume 15 times more electricity than traditional computing, meaning that data centers developed today need significantly more power than a facility built on the same site just 18 months ago.

The problem is not the amount of power being generated. Industry leaders say there is plenty to accommodate growing data center demand.

The problem is transmission. The level of demand in a growing number of markets has surpassed the capacity of the grid infrastructure needed to bring electricity from power plants to data center development sites.

“We know that there's plenty of generation in the United States to support the current load plus probably 20%,” Dalton said. “The problem is, it's in places that people don't want to build.”

The power crisis has emerged in part because the majority of data center capacity in the U.S. is clustered close together in just a handful of markets — a system of regional hubs necessitated by the performance needs of major cloud providers and other large tenants. This means that the bulk of the industry’s skyrocketing power demand has been concentrated along a few specific transmission corridors that are now being pushed past their limits.

It has been the country’s two densest data center districts, Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County and sections of Silicon Valley, that have been the first to see new development effectively paused while transmission infrastructure is upgraded to improve capacity. But data suggests the crisis is coming for every corner of the data center landscape, from major hubs like Dallas and Atlanta to emerging markets like central Washington.

So how did things get to this point?

Utilities shoulder a share of the responsibility, panelists said. Power providers rely on their ability to predict demand years in advance, allowing them time to build or improve transmission lines or other infrastructure needed to expand capacity. But utilities in major data center markets were taken completely by surprise by the explosion of demand from the sector over the past three years, said Microsoft's Yue Tu.

“Every utility was the same story: they were projecting very flat demand growth and maybe even some small decreases over the next decade due to energy efficiency,” said Tu, a product innovation manager at the tech firm. “I remember sitting down with a utility executive in 2018 and asking if they were ready for one gigawatt of new demand coming in the next five years. He didn’t think I was serious.”

Placeholder
Bisnow/ Katy Frazier

Cumulus Data’s Kevin Dalton, MIRATECH’s Jim McDonald, Microsoft’s Yue Tu and Jenbacher’s Michael Collins speaking at Bisnow’s DICE National Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling event in Virginia in December.

Utilities are now behind the eight ball and struggling to catch up with demand from data centers that continues to accelerate.

Adding capacity to regional grids is a slow process, requiring major capital projects that take years to complete. Making matters worse, timelines for improving transmission infrastructure are getting longer due to supply chain constraints for key equipment and new regulatory hurdles in certain markets.

The fact that utilities were blindsided by data center demand growth is largely the responsibility of the data center industry itself, Tu said, as neither individual operators nor industry groups adequately communicated anticipated growth trends or the growing scale of new development to utilities. It’s a failure he attributes to both a culture of secrecy regarding development plans within the data center sector and industry leaders incorrectly assuming that utilities had the data they needed for accurate planning.

“There's a lot of opaqueness in terms of how our industry grows,” Tu said. “We need to have greater transparency in the industry to provide the appropriate signal to utilities and other stakeholders that need to understand our growth trajectories.”

The power crisis is fundamentally changing how data center providers and their tenants operate. As Bisnow has reported previously, power constraints are pushing development into new markets where energy is more readily available. Tenants are increasingly willing to lease outside of the industry’s traditional hubs and sacrifice certain performance standards as long as new capacity can be built quickly.

Cloud providers and other hyperscalers are also looking to build or lease close to power plants in order to reduce the number of potential transmission pinch-points as well as the time and money required for any needed infrastructure improvements, Dalton said.

He also points to transmission constraints as the driving force behind the industry’s trend toward gigawatt-scale, multi-tenant campuses like Maryland’s Quantum Loophole or data center districts like Digital Gateway in Prince William County, Virginia. When there needs to be a massive investment in new transmission infrastructure that will eventually be reflected in the cost of power, economies of scale matter, Dalton said.

“It’s why people are building campuses now,” he said. “Our campuses are at minimum one gigawatt at this point, and you're going to see more of that because, if you look at the economies of scale, the bigger you build the cheaper it gets.”

Developers looking to build in markets where the grid has been pushed to the brink are also exploring ways to skirt transmission constraints by generating their power on-site with diesel and natural gas generators or emerging technologies like fuel cells, geothermal, and even small nuclear reactors.

While there has been some limited adoption of on-site generation at data centers in the U.S., it has not proven to be an economically viable approach to developing new capacity at scale in tapped-out markets. But it is happening in Ireland, where at least 11 data centers being developed by Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud providers will generate 100% of their own power via gas turbines until the national utility can connect them to the grid.

The power shortages and market dynamics are different than in the U.S., but industry leaders are keeping their eyes on Ireland to see whether a similar approach could work in American markets.

“In Ireland they can't get the power at all, so they don't have a choice. On-site generation is the only way they're going to be able to build,” said Jim McDonald, cofounder and director of environmental impact at Miratech Corp. “Folks are having to do a belt and suspenders approach over there, and hopefully we'll learn a little bit from what they're doing so we can bring it stateside.”

Ultimately, the path out of the industry’s power quagmire may not be determined by data center providers or utilities, but by the big tech tenants, who account for the lion’s share of demand, changing where and how they process data. Companies like Google and Microsoft are exploring ways to change their data processing and network architecture that limit the computing tasks handled in capacity-strained markets, ensuring that only workloads with certain latency requirements are processed there.

It is unclear whether these changes are close at hand. But, according to Microsoft’s Tu, this kind of approach may well end up being cheaper and more effective than utilities and data center providers trying to build their way out of the problem.

“Solving this with infrastructure will be very slow, painful and expensive,” Tu said. “There’s other parts of the system that need to be looked at.”

[youthathletics]

This power issue was news last year when Dominion Electric said ‘no more permits’ it’s why that have moved out of Loudoun county and in to Prince William, Faquier, and even north to Washington County in MD.

I think the next step will be some flavor of on premises generation, coupled with nex gen processor development.

[Farfromgeneva]

This power issue was news last year when Dominion Electric said ‘no more permits’ it’s why that have moved out of Loudoun county and in to Prince William, Faquier, and even north to Washington County in MD.

I think the next step will be some flavor of on premises generation, coupled with nex gen processor development.

I’m waiting for it to be an issue for high growth areas like Atlanta MSA and Huntsville which have to expand capacity for other consumer and commercial uses age has same time they’re getting this pressure. At least NOVA/MD/DC is flat ish on pop growth. I worry about the potential for southern Company to have a major issue as large or larger than the PG&E issues. Unconstrained growth and lack of oversight in SO markets just as bad as the govt slush fund management of Pg&-E

[Typical Lax Dad]

This power issue was news last year when Dominion Electric said ‘no more permits’ it’s why that have moved out of Loudoun county and in to Prince William, Faquier, and even north to Washington County in MD.

I think the next step will be some flavor of on premises generation, coupled with nex gen processor development.

I’m waiting for it to be an issue for high growth areas like Atlanta MSA and Huntsville which have to expand capacity for other consumer and commercial uses age has same time they’re getting this pressure. At least NOVA/MD/DC is flat ish on pop growth. I worry about the potential for southern Company to have a major issue as large or larger than the PG&E issues. Unconstrained growth and lack of oversight in SO markets just as bad as the govt slush fund management of Pg&-E

https://www.clarionpartners.com/invest- ... t7-norwalk

One data center consumes 4x-5x the electricity that this complex draws at its peak in the summer….. all day… every day.

[Farfromgeneva]

This power issue was news last year when Dominion Electric said ‘no more permits’ it’s why that have moved out of Loudoun county and in to Prince William, Faquier, and even north to Washington County in MD.

I think the next step will be some flavor of on premises generation, coupled with nex gen processor development.

I’m waiting for it to be an issue for high growth areas like Atlanta MSA and Huntsville which have to expand capacity for other consumer and commercial uses age has same time they’re getting this pressure. At least NOVA/MD/DC is flat ish on pop growth. I worry about the potential for southern Company to have a major issue as large or larger than the PG&E issues. Unconstrained growth and lack of oversight in SO markets just as bad as the govt slush fund management of Pg&-E

https://www.clarionpartners.com/invest- ... t7-norwalk

One data center consumes 4x-5x the electricity that this complex draws at its peak in the summer….. all day… every day.

I’m familiar with that property. Is that clarion formerly the ING one?

Consider the heat generated in a data center in general, I’ve seen the cooing buildings at this Facebook comped they are large barn sized. Maybe 5-10k sq Ft.

Then imagine that in flat a** land 70mi east of Atlanta in late July early Aug (near a cabin my FIL has on this lake so nice that I can take kids out for weekend if wife works out at project which is semi frequent last few years)

https://www.commercialsearch.com/news/f ... expansion/

[PizzaSnake]

'We’re Not Even Close': Data Center Power Crunch Gets Worse, With No End In Sight
Data center developers are facing a worsening energy crisis that has escalated as utilities struggle to keep up with the needs of the booming industry. And with its power usage being exponentially increased by the adoption of artificial intelligence, experts say the problem isn't going away any time soon.

Placeholder
With soaring demand, rising rents and a flood of new investment, data centers are a rare, charmed corner of the commercial real estate landscape. Major tech companies’ massive investments in AI over the past 12 months have added fuel to a sector already experiencing unprecedented growth as firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon snap up the data center capacity needed to support these new technologies.

The industry is already having trouble building data centers fast enough to meet this growing need, largely due to growing difficulty securing the hundreds of megawatts of electricity these facilities require from utilities. Data centers are already maxing out the capacity of transmission infrastructure in the industry’s key markets, meaning it can take years for new data centers to be connected to power while the utility upgrades transmission lines and substations. These problems are only expected to get worse as data center demand continues to outpace the ability of utilities to make these improvements.

Speaking at Bisnow’s DICE Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling in Virginia last month, industry leaders pointed to mistakes that caused both providers and utilities to be caught off guard by the ongoing power crunch. They also looked at how providers are trying to navigate these constraints to ensure that insufficient data center capacity isn’t what limits innovation and development of AI and other technologies that their largest tenants have bet their futures on.

“It’s great to say that AI is going to change the world and everything else, but we have to look at what it’s going to take to get there, and right now we're not even close,” said Kevin Dalton, chief data center officer at Cumulus Data. “All of a sudden there’s all this demand and you have to wonder how this is going to happen. You can't just go turn on a switch and you get power. “

Power usage by the data center industry is expected to accelerate further in the coming months and years. While U.S. data centers used a total of 17 gigawatts at the end of 2022, a report from Newmark this month projected that the industry’s capacity will more than double to reach 35 gigawatts by 2030.

While much of this growing consumption is due to more data centers being built, the power requirements of a typical facility have also shot up due to AI. The high-performance processors needed for AI can consume 15 times more electricity than traditional computing, meaning that data centers developed today need significantly more power than a facility built on the same site just 18 months ago.

The problem is not the amount of power being generated. Industry leaders say there is plenty to accommodate growing data center demand.

The problem is transmission. The level of demand in a growing number of markets has surpassed the capacity of the grid infrastructure needed to bring electricity from power plants to data center development sites.

“We know that there's plenty of generation in the United States to support the current load plus probably 20%,” Dalton said. “The problem is, it's in places that people don't want to build.”

The power crisis has emerged in part because the majority of data center capacity in the U.S. is clustered close together in just a handful of markets — a system of regional hubs necessitated by the performance needs of major cloud providers and other large tenants. This means that the bulk of the industry’s skyrocketing power demand has been concentrated along a few specific transmission corridors that are now being pushed past their limits.

It has been the country’s two densest data center districts, Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County and sections of Silicon Valley, that have been the first to see new development effectively paused while transmission infrastructure is upgraded to improve capacity. But data suggests the crisis is coming for every corner of the data center landscape, from major hubs like Dallas and Atlanta to emerging markets like central Washington.

So how did things get to this point?

Utilities shoulder a share of the responsibility, panelists said. Power providers rely on their ability to predict demand years in advance, allowing them time to build or improve transmission lines or other infrastructure needed to expand capacity. But utilities in major data center markets were taken completely by surprise by the explosion of demand from the sector over the past three years, said Microsoft's Yue Tu.

“Every utility was the same story: they were projecting very flat demand growth and maybe even some small decreases over the next decade due to energy efficiency,” said Tu, a product innovation manager at the tech firm. “I remember sitting down with a utility executive in 2018 and asking if they were ready for one gigawatt of new demand coming in the next five years. He didn’t think I was serious.”

Placeholder
Bisnow/ Katy Frazier

Cumulus Data’s Kevin Dalton, MIRATECH’s Jim McDonald, Microsoft’s Yue Tu and Jenbacher’s Michael Collins speaking at Bisnow’s DICE National Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling event in Virginia in December.

Utilities are now behind the eight ball and struggling to catch up with demand from data centers that continues to accelerate.

Adding capacity to regional grids is a slow process, requiring major capital projects that take years to complete. Making matters worse, timelines for improving transmission infrastructure are getting longer due to supply chain constraints for key equipment and new regulatory hurdles in certain markets.

The fact that utilities were blindsided by data center demand growth is largely the responsibility of the data center industry itself, Tu said, as neither individual operators nor industry groups adequately communicated anticipated growth trends or the growing scale of new development to utilities. It’s a failure he attributes to both a culture of secrecy regarding development plans within the data center sector and industry leaders incorrectly assuming that utilities had the data they needed for accurate planning.

“There's a lot of opaqueness in terms of how our industry grows,” Tu said. “We need to have greater transparency in the industry to provide the appropriate signal to utilities and other stakeholders that need to understand our growth trajectories.”

The power crisis is fundamentally changing how data center providers and their tenants operate. As Bisnow has reported previously, power constraints are pushing development into new markets where energy is more readily available. Tenants are increasingly willing to lease outside of the industry’s traditional hubs and sacrifice certain performance standards as long as new capacity can be built quickly.

Cloud providers and other hyperscalers are also looking to build or lease close to power plants in order to reduce the number of potential transmission pinch-points as well as the time and money required for any needed infrastructure improvements, Dalton said.

He also points to transmission constraints as the driving force behind the industry’s trend toward gigawatt-scale, multi-tenant campuses like Maryland’s Quantum Loophole or data center districts like Digital Gateway in Prince William County, Virginia. When there needs to be a massive investment in new transmission infrastructure that will eventually be reflected in the cost of power, economies of scale matter, Dalton said.

“It’s why people are building campuses now,” he said. “Our campuses are at minimum one gigawatt at this point, and you're going to see more of that because, if you look at the economies of scale, the bigger you build the cheaper it gets.”

Developers looking to build in markets where the grid has been pushed to the brink are also exploring ways to skirt transmission constraints by generating their power on-site with diesel and natural gas generators or emerging technologies like fuel cells, geothermal, and even small nuclear reactors.

While there has been some limited adoption of on-site generation at data centers in the U.S., it has not proven to be an economically viable approach to developing new capacity at scale in tapped-out markets. But it is happening in Ireland, where at least 11 data centers being developed by Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud providers will generate 100% of their own power via gas turbines until the national utility can connect them to the grid.

The power shortages and market dynamics are different than in the U.S., but industry leaders are keeping their eyes on Ireland to see whether a similar approach could work in American markets.

“In Ireland they can't get the power at all, so they don't have a choice. On-site generation is the only way they're going to be able to build,” said Jim McDonald, cofounder and director of environmental impact at Miratech Corp. “Folks are having to do a belt and suspenders approach over there, and hopefully we'll learn a little bit from what they're doing so we can bring it stateside.”

Ultimately, the path out of the industry’s power quagmire may not be determined by data center providers or utilities, but by the big tech tenants, who account for the lion’s share of demand, changing where and how they process data. Companies like Google and Microsoft are exploring ways to change their data processing and network architecture that limit the computing tasks handled in capacity-strained markets, ensuring that only workloads with certain latency requirements are processed there.

It is unclear whether these changes are close at hand. But, according to Microsoft’s Tu, this kind of approach may well end up being cheaper and more effective than utilities and data center providers trying to build their way out of the problem.

“Solving this with infrastructure will be very slow, painful and expensive,” Tu said. “There’s other parts of the system that need to be looked at.”

Gets crowded in the lifeboat when the “madding crowd” clambers aboard.

How much of market activity is made up of people who miss the wave?

Do any surfing? Seems luke a perfect metaphor for business cycles.

[Farfromgeneva]

'We’re Not Even Close': Data Center Power Crunch Gets Worse, With No End In Sight
Data center developers are facing a worsening energy crisis that has escalated as utilities struggle to keep up with the needs of the booming industry. And with its power usage being exponentially increased by the adoption of artificial intelligence, experts say the problem isn't going away any time soon.

Placeholder
With soaring demand, rising rents and a flood of new investment, data centers are a rare, charmed corner of the commercial real estate landscape. Major tech companies’ massive investments in AI over the past 12 months have added fuel to a sector already experiencing unprecedented growth as firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon snap up the data center capacity needed to support these new technologies.

The industry is already having trouble building data centers fast enough to meet this growing need, largely due to growing difficulty securing the hundreds of megawatts of electricity these facilities require from utilities. Data centers are already maxing out the capacity of transmission infrastructure in the industry’s key markets, meaning it can take years for new data centers to be connected to power while the utility upgrades transmission lines and substations. These problems are only expected to get worse as data center demand continues to outpace the ability of utilities to make these improvements.

Speaking at Bisnow’s DICE Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling in Virginia last month, industry leaders pointed to mistakes that caused both providers and utilities to be caught off guard by the ongoing power crunch. They also looked at how providers are trying to navigate these constraints to ensure that insufficient data center capacity isn’t what limits innovation and development of AI and other technologies that their largest tenants have bet their futures on.

“It’s great to say that AI is going to change the world and everything else, but we have to look at what it’s going to take to get there, and right now we're not even close,” said Kevin Dalton, chief data center officer at Cumulus Data. “All of a sudden there’s all this demand and you have to wonder how this is going to happen. You can't just go turn on a switch and you get power. “

Power usage by the data center industry is expected to accelerate further in the coming months and years. While U.S. data centers used a total of 17 gigawatts at the end of 2022, a report from Newmark this month projected that the industry’s capacity will more than double to reach 35 gigawatts by 2030.

While much of this growing consumption is due to more data centers being built, the power requirements of a typical facility have also shot up due to AI. The high-performance processors needed for AI can consume 15 times more electricity than traditional computing, meaning that data centers developed today need significantly more power than a facility built on the same site just 18 months ago.

The problem is not the amount of power being generated. Industry leaders say there is plenty to accommodate growing data center demand.

The problem is transmission. The level of demand in a growing number of markets has surpassed the capacity of the grid infrastructure needed to bring electricity from power plants to data center development sites.

“We know that there's plenty of generation in the United States to support the current load plus probably 20%,” Dalton said. “The problem is, it's in places that people don't want to build.”

The power crisis has emerged in part because the majority of data center capacity in the U.S. is clustered close together in just a handful of markets — a system of regional hubs necessitated by the performance needs of major cloud providers and other large tenants. This means that the bulk of the industry’s skyrocketing power demand has been concentrated along a few specific transmission corridors that are now being pushed past their limits.

It has been the country’s two densest data center districts, Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County and sections of Silicon Valley, that have been the first to see new development effectively paused while transmission infrastructure is upgraded to improve capacity. But data suggests the crisis is coming for every corner of the data center landscape, from major hubs like Dallas and Atlanta to emerging markets like central Washington.

So how did things get to this point?

Utilities shoulder a share of the responsibility, panelists said. Power providers rely on their ability to predict demand years in advance, allowing them time to build or improve transmission lines or other infrastructure needed to expand capacity. But utilities in major data center markets were taken completely by surprise by the explosion of demand from the sector over the past three years, said Microsoft's Yue Tu.

“Every utility was the same story: they were projecting very flat demand growth and maybe even some small decreases over the next decade due to energy efficiency,” said Tu, a product innovation manager at the tech firm. “I remember sitting down with a utility executive in 2018 and asking if they were ready for one gigawatt of new demand coming in the next five years. He didn’t think I was serious.”

Placeholder
Bisnow/ Katy Frazier

Cumulus Data’s Kevin Dalton, MIRATECH’s Jim McDonald, Microsoft’s Yue Tu and Jenbacher’s Michael Collins speaking at Bisnow’s DICE National Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling event in Virginia in December.

Utilities are now behind the eight ball and struggling to catch up with demand from data centers that continues to accelerate.

Adding capacity to regional grids is a slow process, requiring major capital projects that take years to complete. Making matters worse, timelines for improving transmission infrastructure are getting longer due to supply chain constraints for key equipment and new regulatory hurdles in certain markets.

The fact that utilities were blindsided by data center demand growth is largely the responsibility of the data center industry itself, Tu said, as neither individual operators nor industry groups adequately communicated anticipated growth trends or the growing scale of new development to utilities. It’s a failure he attributes to both a culture of secrecy regarding development plans within the data center sector and industry leaders incorrectly assuming that utilities had the data they needed for accurate planning.

“There's a lot of opaqueness in terms of how our industry grows,” Tu said. “We need to have greater transparency in the industry to provide the appropriate signal to utilities and other stakeholders that need to understand our growth trajectories.”

The power crisis is fundamentally changing how data center providers and their tenants operate. As Bisnow has reported previously, power constraints are pushing development into new markets where energy is more readily available. Tenants are increasingly willing to lease outside of the industry’s traditional hubs and sacrifice certain performance standards as long as new capacity can be built quickly.

Cloud providers and other hyperscalers are also looking to build or lease close to power plants in order to reduce the number of potential transmission pinch-points as well as the time and money required for any needed infrastructure improvements, Dalton said.

He also points to transmission constraints as the driving force behind the industry’s trend toward gigawatt-scale, multi-tenant campuses like Maryland’s Quantum Loophole or data center districts like Digital Gateway in Prince William County, Virginia. When there needs to be a massive investment in new transmission infrastructure that will eventually be reflected in the cost of power, economies of scale matter, Dalton said.

“It’s why people are building campuses now,” he said. “Our campuses are at minimum one gigawatt at this point, and you're going to see more of that because, if you look at the economies of scale, the bigger you build the cheaper it gets.”

Developers looking to build in markets where the grid has been pushed to the brink are also exploring ways to skirt transmission constraints by generating their power on-site with diesel and natural gas generators or emerging technologies like fuel cells, geothermal, and even small nuclear reactors.

While there has been some limited adoption of on-site generation at data centers in the U.S., it has not proven to be an economically viable approach to developing new capacity at scale in tapped-out markets. But it is happening in Ireland, where at least 11 data centers being developed by Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud providers will generate 100% of their own power via gas turbines until the national utility can connect them to the grid.

The power shortages and market dynamics are different than in the U.S., but industry leaders are keeping their eyes on Ireland to see whether a similar approach could work in American markets.

“In Ireland they can't get the power at all, so they don't have a choice. On-site generation is the only way they're going to be able to build,” said Jim McDonald, cofounder and director of environmental impact at Miratech Corp. “Folks are having to do a belt and suspenders approach over there, and hopefully we'll learn a little bit from what they're doing so we can bring it stateside.”

Ultimately, the path out of the industry’s power quagmire may not be determined by data center providers or utilities, but by the big tech tenants, who account for the lion’s share of demand, changing where and how they process data. Companies like Google and Microsoft are exploring ways to change their data processing and network architecture that limit the computing tasks handled in capacity-strained markets, ensuring that only workloads with certain latency requirements are processed there.

It is unclear whether these changes are close at hand. But, according to Microsoft’s Tu, this kind of approach may well end up being cheaper and more effective than utilities and data center providers trying to build their way out of the problem.

“Solving this with infrastructure will be very slow, painful and expensive,” Tu said. “There’s other parts of the system that need to be looked at.”

Gets crowded in the lifeboat when the “madding crowd” clambers aboard.

How much of market activity is made up of people who miss the wave?

Do any surfing? Seems luke a perfect metaphor for business cycles.

Only surfed once, late Sept 2010 in SW Ireland. It was cold as balls and I got up for what felt like five minutes at the time but was in reality, stripped of adrenaline, was probably 8 seconds.

I find the lack of communication and forecasting to be stunning. Then again we've gotten to a point that public resources and goods are being commandeered all over the place for private enterprise. Silicon Valley made sport of it over the last 15yrs.

[PizzaSnake]

'We’re Not Even Close': Data Center Power Crunch Gets Worse, With No End In Sight
Data center developers are facing a worsening energy crisis that has escalated as utilities struggle to keep up with the needs of the booming industry. And with its power usage being exponentially increased by the adoption of artificial intelligence, experts say the problem isn't going away any time soon.

Placeholder
With soaring demand, rising rents and a flood of new investment, data centers are a rare, charmed corner of the commercial real estate landscape. Major tech companies’ massive investments in AI over the past 12 months have added fuel to a sector already experiencing unprecedented growth as firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon snap up the data center capacity needed to support these new technologies.

The industry is already having trouble building data centers fast enough to meet this growing need, largely due to growing difficulty securing the hundreds of megawatts of electricity these facilities require from utilities. Data centers are already maxing out the capacity of transmission infrastructure in the industry’s key markets, meaning it can take years for new data centers to be connected to power while the utility upgrades transmission lines and substations. These problems are only expected to get worse as data center demand continues to outpace the ability of utilities to make these improvements.

Speaking at Bisnow’s DICE Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling in Virginia last month, industry leaders pointed to mistakes that caused both providers and utilities to be caught off guard by the ongoing power crunch. They also looked at how providers are trying to navigate these constraints to ensure that insufficient data center capacity isn’t what limits innovation and development of AI and other technologies that their largest tenants have bet their futures on.

“It’s great to say that AI is going to change the world and everything else, but we have to look at what it’s going to take to get there, and right now we're not even close,” said Kevin Dalton, chief data center officer at Cumulus Data. “All of a sudden there’s all this demand and you have to wonder how this is going to happen. You can't just go turn on a switch and you get power. “

Power usage by the data center industry is expected to accelerate further in the coming months and years. While U.S. data centers used a total of 17 gigawatts at the end of 2022, a report from Newmark this month projected that the industry’s capacity will more than double to reach 35 gigawatts by 2030.

While much of this growing consumption is due to more data centers being built, the power requirements of a typical facility have also shot up due to AI. The high-performance processors needed for AI can consume 15 times more electricity than traditional computing, meaning that data centers developed today need significantly more power than a facility built on the same site just 18 months ago.

The problem is not the amount of power being generated. Industry leaders say there is plenty to accommodate growing data center demand.

The problem is transmission. The level of demand in a growing number of markets has surpassed the capacity of the grid infrastructure needed to bring electricity from power plants to data center development sites.

“We know that there's plenty of generation in the United States to support the current load plus probably 20%,” Dalton said. “The problem is, it's in places that people don't want to build.”

The power crisis has emerged in part because the majority of data center capacity in the U.S. is clustered close together in just a handful of markets — a system of regional hubs necessitated by the performance needs of major cloud providers and other large tenants. This means that the bulk of the industry’s skyrocketing power demand has been concentrated along a few specific transmission corridors that are now being pushed past their limits.

It has been the country’s two densest data center districts, Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County and sections of Silicon Valley, that have been the first to see new development effectively paused while transmission infrastructure is upgraded to improve capacity. But data suggests the crisis is coming for every corner of the data center landscape, from major hubs like Dallas and Atlanta to emerging markets like central Washington.

So how did things get to this point?

Utilities shoulder a share of the responsibility, panelists said. Power providers rely on their ability to predict demand years in advance, allowing them time to build or improve transmission lines or other infrastructure needed to expand capacity. But utilities in major data center markets were taken completely by surprise by the explosion of demand from the sector over the past three years, said Microsoft's Yue Tu.

“Every utility was the same story: they were projecting very flat demand growth and maybe even some small decreases over the next decade due to energy efficiency,” said Tu, a product innovation manager at the tech firm. “I remember sitting down with a utility executive in 2018 and asking if they were ready for one gigawatt of new demand coming in the next five years. He didn’t think I was serious.”

Placeholder
Bisnow/ Katy Frazier

Cumulus Data’s Kevin Dalton, MIRATECH’s Jim McDonald, Microsoft’s Yue Tu and Jenbacher’s Michael Collins speaking at Bisnow’s DICE National Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling event in Virginia in December.

Utilities are now behind the eight ball and struggling to catch up with demand from data centers that continues to accelerate.

Adding capacity to regional grids is a slow process, requiring major capital projects that take years to complete. Making matters worse, timelines for improving transmission infrastructure are getting longer due to supply chain constraints for key equipment and new regulatory hurdles in certain markets.

The fact that utilities were blindsided by data center demand growth is largely the responsibility of the data center industry itself, Tu said, as neither individual operators nor industry groups adequately communicated anticipated growth trends or the growing scale of new development to utilities. It’s a failure he attributes to both a culture of secrecy regarding development plans within the data center sector and industry leaders incorrectly assuming that utilities had the data they needed for accurate planning.

“There's a lot of opaqueness in terms of how our industry grows,” Tu said. “We need to have greater transparency in the industry to provide the appropriate signal to utilities and other stakeholders that need to understand our growth trajectories.”

The power crisis is fundamentally changing how data center providers and their tenants operate. As Bisnow has reported previously, power constraints are pushing development into new markets where energy is more readily available. Tenants are increasingly willing to lease outside of the industry’s traditional hubs and sacrifice certain performance standards as long as new capacity can be built quickly.

Cloud providers and other hyperscalers are also looking to build or lease close to power plants in order to reduce the number of potential transmission pinch-points as well as the time and money required for any needed infrastructure improvements, Dalton said.

He also points to transmission constraints as the driving force behind the industry’s trend toward gigawatt-scale, multi-tenant campuses like Maryland’s Quantum Loophole or data center districts like Digital Gateway in Prince William County, Virginia. When there needs to be a massive investment in new transmission infrastructure that will eventually be reflected in the cost of power, economies of scale matter, Dalton said.

“It’s why people are building campuses now,” he said. “Our campuses are at minimum one gigawatt at this point, and you're going to see more of that because, if you look at the economies of scale, the bigger you build the cheaper it gets.”

Developers looking to build in markets where the grid has been pushed to the brink are also exploring ways to skirt transmission constraints by generating their power on-site with diesel and natural gas generators or emerging technologies like fuel cells, geothermal, and even small nuclear reactors.

While there has been some limited adoption of on-site generation at data centers in the U.S., it has not proven to be an economically viable approach to developing new capacity at scale in tapped-out markets. But it is happening in Ireland, where at least 11 data centers being developed by Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud providers will generate 100% of their own power via gas turbines until the national utility can connect them to the grid.

The power shortages and market dynamics are different than in the U.S., but industry leaders are keeping their eyes on Ireland to see whether a similar approach could work in American markets.

“In Ireland they can't get the power at all, so they don't have a choice. On-site generation is the only way they're going to be able to build,” said Jim McDonald, cofounder and director of environmental impact at Miratech Corp. “Folks are having to do a belt and suspenders approach over there, and hopefully we'll learn a little bit from what they're doing so we can bring it stateside.”

Ultimately, the path out of the industry’s power quagmire may not be determined by data center providers or utilities, but by the big tech tenants, who account for the lion’s share of demand, changing where and how they process data. Companies like Google and Microsoft are exploring ways to change their data processing and network architecture that limit the computing tasks handled in capacity-strained markets, ensuring that only workloads with certain latency requirements are processed there.

It is unclear whether these changes are close at hand. But, according to Microsoft’s Tu, this kind of approach may well end up being cheaper and more effective than utilities and data center providers trying to build their way out of the problem.

“Solving this with infrastructure will be very slow, painful and expensive,” Tu said. “There’s other parts of the system that need to be looked at.”

Gets crowded in the lifeboat when the “madding crowd” clambers aboard.

How much of market activity is made up of people who miss the wave?

Do any surfing? Seems luke a perfect metaphor for business cycles.

Only surfed once, late Sept 2010 in SW Ireland. It was cold as balls and I got up for what felt like five minutes at the time but was in reality, stripped of adrenaline, was probably 8 seconds.

I find the lack of communication and forecasting to be stunning. Then again we've gotten to a point that public resources and goods are being commandeered all over the place for private enterprise. Silicon Valley made sport of it over the last 15yrs.

Varying temporal perception is fascinating. Suggests something about “consciousness.”

[Farfromgeneva]

'We’re Not Even Close': Data Center Power Crunch Gets Worse, With No End In Sight
Data center developers are facing a worsening energy crisis that has escalated as utilities struggle to keep up with the needs of the booming industry. And with its power usage being exponentially increased by the adoption of artificial intelligence, experts say the problem isn't going away any time soon.

Placeholder
With soaring demand, rising rents and a flood of new investment, data centers are a rare, charmed corner of the commercial real estate landscape. Major tech companies’ massive investments in AI over the past 12 months have added fuel to a sector already experiencing unprecedented growth as firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon snap up the data center capacity needed to support these new technologies.

The industry is already having trouble building data centers fast enough to meet this growing need, largely due to growing difficulty securing the hundreds of megawatts of electricity these facilities require from utilities. Data centers are already maxing out the capacity of transmission infrastructure in the industry’s key markets, meaning it can take years for new data centers to be connected to power while the utility upgrades transmission lines and substations. These problems are only expected to get worse as data center demand continues to outpace the ability of utilities to make these improvements.

Speaking at Bisnow’s DICE Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling in Virginia last month, industry leaders pointed to mistakes that caused both providers and utilities to be caught off guard by the ongoing power crunch. They also looked at how providers are trying to navigate these constraints to ensure that insufficient data center capacity isn’t what limits innovation and development of AI and other technologies that their largest tenants have bet their futures on.

“It’s great to say that AI is going to change the world and everything else, but we have to look at what it’s going to take to get there, and right now we're not even close,” said Kevin Dalton, chief data center officer at Cumulus Data. “All of a sudden there’s all this demand and you have to wonder how this is going to happen. You can't just go turn on a switch and you get power. “

Power usage by the data center industry is expected to accelerate further in the coming months and years. While U.S. data centers used a total of 17 gigawatts at the end of 2022, a report from Newmark this month projected that the industry’s capacity will more than double to reach 35 gigawatts by 2030.

While much of this growing consumption is due to more data centers being built, the power requirements of a typical facility have also shot up due to AI. The high-performance processors needed for AI can consume 15 times more electricity than traditional computing, meaning that data centers developed today need significantly more power than a facility built on the same site just 18 months ago.

The problem is not the amount of power being generated. Industry leaders say there is plenty to accommodate growing data center demand.

The problem is transmission. The level of demand in a growing number of markets has surpassed the capacity of the grid infrastructure needed to bring electricity from power plants to data center development sites.

“We know that there's plenty of generation in the United States to support the current load plus probably 20%,” Dalton said. “The problem is, it's in places that people don't want to build.”

The power crisis has emerged in part because the majority of data center capacity in the U.S. is clustered close together in just a handful of markets — a system of regional hubs necessitated by the performance needs of major cloud providers and other large tenants. This means that the bulk of the industry’s skyrocketing power demand has been concentrated along a few specific transmission corridors that are now being pushed past their limits.

It has been the country’s two densest data center districts, Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County and sections of Silicon Valley, that have been the first to see new development effectively paused while transmission infrastructure is upgraded to improve capacity. But data suggests the crisis is coming for every corner of the data center landscape, from major hubs like Dallas and Atlanta to emerging markets like central Washington.

So how did things get to this point?

Utilities shoulder a share of the responsibility, panelists said. Power providers rely on their ability to predict demand years in advance, allowing them time to build or improve transmission lines or other infrastructure needed to expand capacity. But utilities in major data center markets were taken completely by surprise by the explosion of demand from the sector over the past three years, said Microsoft's Yue Tu.

“Every utility was the same story: they were projecting very flat demand growth and maybe even some small decreases over the next decade due to energy efficiency,” said Tu, a product innovation manager at the tech firm. “I remember sitting down with a utility executive in 2018 and asking if they were ready for one gigawatt of new demand coming in the next five years. He didn’t think I was serious.”

Placeholder
Bisnow/ Katy Frazier

Cumulus Data’s Kevin Dalton, MIRATECH’s Jim McDonald, Microsoft’s Yue Tu and Jenbacher’s Michael Collins speaking at Bisnow’s DICE National Data Center Management, Operations and Cooling event in Virginia in December.

Utilities are now behind the eight ball and struggling to catch up with demand from data centers that continues to accelerate.

Adding capacity to regional grids is a slow process, requiring major capital projects that take years to complete. Making matters worse, timelines for improving transmission infrastructure are getting longer due to supply chain constraints for key equipment and new regulatory hurdles in certain markets.

The fact that utilities were blindsided by data center demand growth is largely the responsibility of the data center industry itself, Tu said, as neither individual operators nor industry groups adequately communicated anticipated growth trends or the growing scale of new development to utilities. It’s a failure he attributes to both a culture of secrecy regarding development plans within the data center sector and industry leaders incorrectly assuming that utilities had the data they needed for accurate planning.

“There's a lot of opaqueness in terms of how our industry grows,” Tu said. “We need to have greater transparency in the industry to provide the appropriate signal to utilities and other stakeholders that need to understand our growth trajectories.”

The power crisis is fundamentally changing how data center providers and their tenants operate. As Bisnow has reported previously, power constraints are pushing development into new markets where energy is more readily available. Tenants are increasingly willing to lease outside of the industry’s traditional hubs and sacrifice certain performance standards as long as new capacity can be built quickly.

Cloud providers and other hyperscalers are also looking to build or lease close to power plants in order to reduce the number of potential transmission pinch-points as well as the time and money required for any needed infrastructure improvements, Dalton said.

He also points to transmission constraints as the driving force behind the industry’s trend toward gigawatt-scale, multi-tenant campuses like Maryland’s Quantum Loophole or data center districts like Digital Gateway in Prince William County, Virginia. When there needs to be a massive investment in new transmission infrastructure that will eventually be reflected in the cost of power, economies of scale matter, Dalton said.

“It’s why people are building campuses now,” he said. “Our campuses are at minimum one gigawatt at this point, and you're going to see more of that because, if you look at the economies of scale, the bigger you build the cheaper it gets.”

Developers looking to build in markets where the grid has been pushed to the brink are also exploring ways to skirt transmission constraints by generating their power on-site with diesel and natural gas generators or emerging technologies like fuel cells, geothermal, and even small nuclear reactors.

While there has been some limited adoption of on-site generation at data centers in the U.S., it has not proven to be an economically viable approach to developing new capacity at scale in tapped-out markets. But it is happening in Ireland, where at least 11 data centers being developed by Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud providers will generate 100% of their own power via gas turbines until the national utility can connect them to the grid.

The power shortages and market dynamics are different than in the U.S., but industry leaders are keeping their eyes on Ireland to see whether a similar approach could work in American markets.

“In Ireland they can't get the power at all, so they don't have a choice. On-site generation is the only way they're going to be able to build,” said Jim McDonald, cofounder and director of environmental impact at Miratech Corp. “Folks are having to do a belt and suspenders approach over there, and hopefully we'll learn a little bit from what they're doing so we can bring it stateside.”

Ultimately, the path out of the industry’s power quagmire may not be determined by data center providers or utilities, but by the big tech tenants, who account for the lion’s share of demand, changing where and how they process data. Companies like Google and Microsoft are exploring ways to change their data processing and network architecture that limit the computing tasks handled in capacity-strained markets, ensuring that only workloads with certain latency requirements are processed there.

It is unclear whether these changes are close at hand. But, according to Microsoft’s Tu, this kind of approach may well end up being cheaper and more effective than utilities and data center providers trying to build their way out of the problem.

“Solving this with infrastructure will be very slow, painful and expensive,” Tu said. “There’s other parts of the system that need to be looked at.”

Gets crowded in the lifeboat when the “madding crowd” clambers aboard.

How much of market activity is made up of people who miss the wave?

Do any surfing? Seems luke a perfect metaphor for business cycles.

Only surfed once, late Sept 2010 in SW Ireland. It was cold as balls and I got up for what felt like five minutes at the time but was in reality, stripped of adrenaline, was probably 8 seconds.

I find the lack of communication and forecasting to be stunning. Then again we've gotten to a point that public resources and goods are being commandeered all over the place for private enterprise. Silicon Valley made sport of it over the last 15yrs.

Varying temporal perception is fascinating. Suggests something about “consciousness.”

I know so very little about physical sciences beyond what was required of me but I have always found that fascinating. For some reason in ninth grade I tripped across a reference to Xeno from a Lord Byron poem and got a hard on for his idea in the Paradox. (Distance/time)

I can never recreate it in my mind from various train wreck football collisions to two head on, probably shouldn’t be chilling like I am today car accidents (one being pushed into a tree directly off the road at about 35MPH-still need my fight club invite for that one) or jumping out of a plane. I can’t make my mind replay it the same way ever. It’s always a transcendent abstraction of the experience

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/ ... index.html

[PizzaSnake]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/ ... index.html

And who said projectionists died out with the adoption of digital screenings?

[youthathletics]

Time to pick your poison....Trusted Harvard and Smithsonian Employee or backed by big coal.

Dr. Wille Soon: https://x.com/SpartaJustice/status/1746 ... 19624?s=20

Trust the science, from a scientist they say...

[Farfromgeneva]

Time to pick your poison....Trusted Harvard and Smithsonian Employee or backed by big coal.

Dr. Wille Soon: https://x.com/SpartaJustice/status/1746 ... 19624?s=20

Trust the science, from a scientist they say...

So…trust nothing?

Seems to me the clerics have god on their payroll so they can win the right against the stronger and more honest blonde beasts.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-riches ... =share_via

[RedFromMI]

Willie Soon is a known crackpot wrt climate science and is getting a lot of play lately due to Tucker Carlson.

[a fan]

Time to pick your poison....Trusted Harvard and Smithsonian Employee or backed by big coal.

Dr. Wille Soon: https://x.com/SpartaJustice/status/1746 ... 19624?s=20

Trust the science, from a scientist they say...

You don't have to so much as listen to scientists.

Ask your local farmer. Ask them about wild weather swings, and how much more frequent they are then when they were kids.

Republicans believe farmers, right? Talk to them. If you don't leave the conversation scared, or at least worried, you're not listening.

Or listen to people like me who work with farmed materials.

I just listened to an entire Master Brewer's Assn broadcast where the entire industry, for the first time ever, has to seriously consider changing the raw materials used to make beer because the quality of malting-barley is all over the place. And this is ALL growing regions of the world.

The long and the short of it is that for the last 150 years, you'd get one crazy year for barley for every ten years of normal. Now it's the other way around......9 years of abnormal crop years, and 1 that's "normal".

You can say that we're not getting the cause of this issue correctly identified if you want. But no bones about it.....our Earth is changing. And not in a good way.