this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Choosing a few solar panels on the roof seems a bit stupid, though. Last time I checked, there was a lot of wind available at the shore and on the ocean. Even at night.
Fewer moving parts means it's a little easier to maintain a panel array than a turbine. If they need someone to go up there with a feather duster once in a while, that's easier to find than a turbine/rotor specialist.
But in turn they generate less power, meaning they maybe have to pay extra for power. And run a cable to the platform. And they're talking about batteries, meaning they'd need to maintain that instead and that also requires experts. So yeah, idk. I'd say it's likely much more expensive that way, and they'd better train some engineers to maintain wind turbines. Those are build to last like 30 years. And wind power is supposedly cheaper anyways, with maintenance included in the calculation.
Yeah I have not analyzed whether they think they have enough power to run 10,000 Nvidia H100s on solar but it is still more hands off if they could. Back of the napkin ideas would say floating pontoons or barges with solar panels would at least make it theoretically possible. No way a 200 n.mi. cable is going to be able to transmit the power you need without specialized infrastructure, and it appears a country's EEZ includes a claim over harnessing wind power as a resource.
Most available maintenance calculations probably deal with wind power on land, remote mountains, and a short distance offshore where a technician can get to multiple sites in a day. Getting a specialist out to the middle of absolutely nowhere by boat or capable seaplane if they are really in "international waters" sounds expensive and a good chunk of engineers and technicians would not be interested in making the trip even at a significant premium.
I think they fly those technicians out by helicopter. There are some offshore wind farms. And as far as I know they work, and they're not particularly high maintenance. But you're right. Both maintenance and initial investment to build them are way higher than for wind on land. And seems even with all the wind on sea, they don't make up for that, resulting in a higher cost for the energy than what's possible with wind turbines on land. I did not know that.
You're right. I kind of missed the international waters part. That's a completely ridiculous idea. And probably also requires some riduculous arrangements.
I'd say judging by this calculation, we're looking at like 15MW of power for one of those platforms. The internet says solar gets you about 200W per square meter. Let's make up a factor of 3 if we have like 8h of sun and we need to store energy for the night. That'd be 225,000m² of solar panels. Or like 42 US football fields. If they're packed and you're at the equator. Or 5 wind turbines. Or they want some of those small nuclear reactors that currently get hyped by the big AI companies.
Well, I want to thank you for the interesting thought experiment on this preposterous article on an "Independent Nation-State AI compute platform".