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Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers, power grid requirements are 5 times higher than peak record demand — 474 gigawatts of power requests are now subject to new moratorium (www.texastribune.org)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1309635/texas-slams-on-the-brakes-for-1800-data-centers-power-grid-requirements-are-5-times-high

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[–] 10 points 1 month ago* (9 children)

Seems like a couple summers ago Texans were sweltering for lack of electric power to run their AC. Checking grid capacity should have been the job of whichever branch of state gov't handed out these 1800 permits. Was the approval fee a box of steaks?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    A lot of that AC usage comes down to poor insulation, older and poorly maintained units, single family housing, overly large housing, vacant housing that still needs to be cooled to keep it from deteriorating before someone can cover the inflated asset price, the need to insulate offices separately from housing because we've abolished work-from-home rules...

    A well-maintained stock of publicly accessible homes in dense mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, with a professionally managed building-wide AC unit, could reduce the per-capita electricity demand enormously.

    But instead, we've queued up billions of dollars in concrete and steel to build city-sized warehouses for scorching hot chipsets.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

    Bruh, a window a.c. is sold in grocery stores for under 200$.*

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    ? and how many to cool a house and how much power does each draw. Which was their point. Not the dollar cost of the unit.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    You don't need to cool an entire house unless you have a family or pets and even still you can get away with using a 24" pedestal fan with using the AC you can cool an additional 900 sq ft on top of what the ac is providing in the living room.

    I mean yeah a mini split is the modern option but not everyone wants to drill into their homes.

    It's all about needs vs generalizations. I don't need to cool every room in my house and I can get away with using one whirlpool brand window ac in my living room and sending the cool air through my house with a penguin pedestal fan from Ocean State job lot.

    Yeah it sucks having to put it in the window every year and it sucks bringing the fan down and walking by it but I have a natgas boiler based steam radiator system with heat in every room and given how the winters in New England are harsher than the summers, I think I'm okay.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    and how many to cool a house and how much power does each draw.

    Based on power consumption and practicality:

    Well obviously it would take more a.c.'s to cool a house but again it depends on needs. If the house was a single floor unit it wouldn't need a mini split. It could use a window a.c. which can be 120v; mini splits are 220v-240v. It's probably a little more on volts but that's if both are ran at the same time. If you're in a main room while the main bed room AC is off you're not consuming twice as much power.

    But the more cassettes with mini splits the more power you draw, the more you have them on the more energy you're consuming regardless.

    So if you have two cassettes running 4 units, you're running 2 zones per cassette at 220v-240v each cassette plus the refrigerant, plus the amount of time on which can get to over 1,000w each easily. How they make it cost effective, idk. Maybe city programs but they cost 4 times as much as my window ac, the unit not the amount of money to run them.

    I'm only going to use my AC 4 months out of the year, if that. It doesn't seem worth drilling into my house for 4 months out of the year.

    In my honest opinion, I believe you can lower power consumption by not using an ac as much and by not having as many but you gotta do it right based on living needs otherwise you're gonna have a heat stroke.

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