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Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Except you can't power 24/7/365 with renewable alone, so you still need gas turbine backup.
A funny thing happened back in the middle 1800s. A man ran a 7-ton electric locomotive a mile and a half. The motor was powered by a storage device. In the late 1800s, people drove their cars around all day using a storage device. These storage devices became better and better, until they could power trucks and buses for hundreds of miles.
They are still getting better and better. Of course they can be depleted, and it's good to havea backup methods to cover these cases and to keep the storage devices charged when there's no sun or wind. Hydroelectric dams powered by water-storage are widely-used, and some flat places still burn fossil fuels to do that as well.
You need a buffer with at least 60 TWh in case of Germany. There is no economic electrochemical energy storage system for that capacity.
The easy solution is to just make green hydrogen. It's an already solved problem, lacking only political will.
It is expensive though, so not a self runner in a free msrket economy.
It will be cheaper than fossil fuels at some point in the future. The benefit of not being a finite resource. We can speed this process up if we scale up sooner rather than later.