This is Not Cool

Jigar Shah on Data Centers and Pipelines

Ahem.

Prompt:
Do gas pipeline constraints impact power for Data Centers?

ChatGPT:
Yes. In some regions, gas pipeline constraints can become a significant limitation on power availability for data centers, especially during periods of extreme demand.

Here’s why:

Gas plants often provide the marginal power

Many large data centers depend on the regional grid rather than having dedicated generation. In much of the Midwest, Texas, and the eastern U.S., natural gas plants are the primary source of dispatchable electricity that can ramp up when demand rises.

If pipelines are full, gas plants may be unable to obtain additional fuel, even if they are technically capable of generating more electricity.

Winter is often the biggest concern

During severe cold spells:

Residential and commercial heating demand gets first priority on many gas systems.
Pipeline capacity becomes constrained.
Gas prices spike dramatically.
Some power plants cannot obtain enough fuel.

This was a major factor during:

Winter Storm Uri in Texas.
Several cold-weather reliability events in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions.

Battery Demand, Driven by AI and New Tech, is Shocking

Ok, it’s “Electrifying”.

Financial Times:

Battery start-ups are moving into AI data centres where their specialist technology helps to smooth split-second power surges, driving what executives describe as “crazy” demand.

The rapid growth of AI data centres is creating a profitable niche for the battery makers, as operators seek technologies capable of responding to energy surges that can be equivalent to the electricity demand of a small town, occurring multiple times per second.
Alsym Energy, a US sodium-ion battery start-up backed by an investment arm of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, said interest had soared over the past three months from data centre operators seeking ways to manage the frequent power transients caused by AI computing.

These extreme energy fluctuations meant that the facilities were otherwise not able to connect to the grid, Alsym chief executive Mukesh Chatter told the FT. “Battery has become an essential component, not a desired component of data centres,” he said.
Sodium-ion batteries could discharge power more quickly than traditional lithium-ion products, making them suitable for balancing AI-driven fluctuations, he said.

Trump’s Nuclear “Renaissance” Sputtering

Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is so eager to see a nuclear power renaissance that it is starting to fund billions of dollars for reactor orders.

In a new deal expected to be announced Tuesday, low-interest loans amounting to $17.5 billion from the Energy Department will be available for utilities to finance equipment orders for the Westinghouse AP1000, the company’s flagship nuclear reactor, a version of which China is building at industrial scale.

The loans are intended to speed up construction of 10 reactors in the U.S. Five loans will be available for projects with two reactors each, the Energy Department said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the conditional loans were part of a broader Trump administration mission to “unleash the next American nuclear renaissance.”

They “will also help accelerate the timeline of building those large-scale reactors by up to three years, lowering construction costs and ensuring the United States is able to deliver on President Trump’s bold and ambitious energy addition agenda,” Wright said.

The hope is that new AP1000s could come online starting in 2035, said Dan Sumner, chief executive of Westinghouse Electric.

“It really kick-starts fleet-scale nuclear development in the United States,” Sumner said.

Seven utilities have already signed formal letters of intent for the five available project loans, according to the Energy Department, which didn’t name the utilities.

The companies would form partnerships with Westinghouse and each have at least one potential site for a reactor, primarily locations with an existing reactor or large power plant, or sites that have done previous licensing work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Energy Department said.

Several large power players have told regulators and investors that they aim to bring new large or small nuclear projects online sometime in the coming decades, including Duke Energy DUK -0.64%decrease; down pointing triangle, Dominion Energy D -0.73%decrease; down pointing triangleand PacifiCorp. States including New York and Illinois are also interested in expanding their nuclear generation.

Cleanup Begins on Storm Damaged Wind Farm in South Dakota

After a destructive thunderstorm, with wind gusts measured at 131 mph, damages at a wind farm in Highmore, South Dakota, will now have to be cleaned up.
Pictures indicate that typical safety setbacks for wind turbines are more than adequate. Stories about blades sailing thru the air are Bullshit. All infrastructure will need to be hardened as climate extremes increase.

Mathew Cappucci in The Washington Post:

Something powerful just hit Hyde County, South Dakota.

A severe thunderstorm brought tornado-like wind speeds to the area in the predawn hours on Monday morning, which resulted in a 131-mph wind gust recorded in Holabird in Hyde County at 6:15 a.m. local time. The same storms produced a 112-mph gust at the Joe Creek Recreation Center in Hughes County, and a separate 114-mph gust was logged in Highmore in Hyde County. Then again at 6:44 a.m., another 112-mph gust occurred just north of Ree Heights in Hand County.

These may be the strongest straight-line thunderstorm gusts directly measured since Aug. 1, 1983, when a microburst hit Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland shortly after Air Force One landed with Ronald Reagan. A gust to 149.5 mph was clocked that day.

Higher Costs Might Be The Business Downside to this Extinction Event

Who knew?

Above, Sarah Kapnick is former chief scientist of NOAA from April 2022 to October 2024, and presently the inaugural Global Head of Climate Advisory at JP Morgan Chase.

Bloomberg:

Extreme weather events — such as the heat wave gripping Europe — are making a growing number of assets too risky to insure, according to a director at Europe’s largest primary insurer.

“Certain locations and perils cannot be covered as we would wish them to be covered,” Günther Thallinger, who sits on the management board of Allianz SE, said in an interview. “We cannot help it.”

Heat, floods, storms and wildfires “could become so frequent that they challenge traditional insurance models,” he said. “Risk-adequate pricing would not be affordable any longer.”

Insurers, bankers and financial analysts are now trying to calculate the short-to-medium-term costs of continual temperature rises. Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING Group NV, said in a client note this week that heat waves represent a “new downside risk” to the region’s economic growth.

The analysis feeds into a growing awareness across Europe that homes, schools, hospitals, transport networks and other forms of infrastructure will need significant investments in order to adapt to the rapidly changing climate. Brzeski says Europe faces an accumulated economic loss equivalent to 0.8% by 2029, as tourists stay away, people become less productive and supply chains get disrupted.

Want Nukes? Waste Won’t Wait.

I fault nuclear proponents in the 60s for letting the cart get before the horse, and pushing nuclear development before a waste management scheme was in place.
I fault the anti-nuclear movement for refusing to allow a permanent solution to be deployed in Nevada, where a large potential geological repository has been largely completed.
Keeping this stuff above ground in temporary casks is not a solution. Time to grow up.

US Will Blackmail Europe on Climate Rules

You can force people to act against their principles for a while, but they will remember it.

Bloomberg:

A European Union climate law designed to tackle a potent greenhouse gas has drawn the ire of the Trump administration, potentially threatening billions of dollars of trade and the region’s energy security.

The bloc is targeting leaks of methane, the primary component of natural gas and a common byproduct of oil and coal production. Methane traps 80 times more heat over its first two decades in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Starting Jan. 1, European companies will need to show that fossil-fuel imports have been subject to monitoring and reporting standards equivalent to those within the bloc.

That represents an unacceptable intrusion into how US producers operate, according to the White House, which has championed an American energy dominance agenda that’s rooted in extracting and selling more of the nation’s natural resources.

Along with fellow energy exporters Qatar, Algeria and Nigeria, the US is demanding a rethink before the new obligations kick in. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg last week that the law as currently written would end up inflicting “serious pain” on the EU.

Fun in the Sun: Deaths Don’t Dampen Media’s “Go-To” Heat Wave Imagery

Climate Change: It’s a Beach and then you die.

BBC:

Europe’s unprecedented early summer heatwave may be responsible for hundreds of excess deaths, according to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Temperature records were broken across the continent again on Sunday – including in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic – as the extreme heat continued to move east.

In a post on X, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since 21 June “linked to high temperatures in Europe”.

Saffron O’Neill PhD, in the Academy of Social Sciences:

ne way in which many in the Global North will encounter climate news imagery is through reporting of extreme heat events. The UK, in particular, has a fascination with ‘weather talk’. So, what does heatwave news look like? Which sorts of images are used to portray the issue? And, what does this tell us about how we think about, and how we might respond to, climate change?

Together with a team of European researchers, I led a study which investigated the visual reporting of heatwaves over the summer of 2019 across four countries; the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. We analysed news stories from 20 major online news websites, whenever they mentioned ‘climate change’ and ‘heatwave’ (and their equivalents in Dutch, German and French). We analysed the text, but also the visuals that accompanied these news items. There were three key findings.

Clean up After Violent South Dakota Storm, and Coming Ring of Fire

Above, clean up in Highmore, South Dakota.

Is this just the opening shot?
Below, YouTube Meteorologist Max Velocity discusses the storm, and the setup for coming days as a giant heat dome settles over the Eastern US.

Below, more on “Ring of Fire” configuration.

131 mph Straight Line Winds Knock Down Wind Turbines, Silos, Barns in S. Dakota

Insane maybe, but not unexpected.
130 mph winds would be a Cat 4 Hurricane, FYI.

Max Velocity on X:

THIS IS INSANE! 130 MPH winds destroyed windmills in South Dakota this morning. This is very rare. We hardly ever see windmills take this much damage from straight-line damaging winds. But when you push over 110 MPH winds, it becomes a lot easier for the windmills to crumble. Photos via Storm Chaser Jakob McMillin

Accuweather describes set up that will make for severe storms all week long

More reports of widespread damage from tornado-force straight line winds below.