Because I expect the economics of enough batteries to carry a data center’s worth of demand through the night and morning is too expensive compared to essentially free natural gas.

Data centers would ideally run at ~100% utilization, so any drop in solar output needs to be fully met by batteries.

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jeffbee a day ago | parent [-]

> Data centers would ideally run at ~100% utilization

I don't think this is broadly accepted among major data center operators.

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pixl97 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Of conventional data centers or one's running GPUs? If you're not saturating your GPUs you're likely leaving money on the table.

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jeffbee a day ago | parent [-]

I don't really agree. The energy component of opex still dominates over the depreciation.

	▲	hollerith 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For AI data centers? Depreciation on the GPUs and AI accelerators is a bigger cost than electricity. Now it might be that a new data center will find it more difficult to obtain a reliable supply of electricity than to obtain GPUs, but your statement was about expenses.

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Matticus_Rex a day ago | parent | prev [-]

IIRC ERCOT estimated from their experience it was something like 85% on average?