What is it that makes gas power plants so much more attractive than renewable energy? From what I heard, it's a bit easier to build them very fast and they reliably produce energy on demand (as long as gas is available of course). But I imaging one could replicate this using solar/wind and storage units.

I could imagine that the challenge is that that having enough solar panels for a few gigawatts of consumption is hard to do on-site, so one needs to connect the data center to the grid, which, in turn, complicates matters and transformators are scarce right now.

Is this about right? I do hope that we find a way to do this more sustainably. AI doesn't solve climate change in the next few years, so clean energy isn't irrelevant.

My understanding is that you can turn gas plants on and off very quickly, and they can run at any time of day. That makes them excellent suppliers for peak demand. For much of the year, the evening peak occurs when the sun is not shining and the winds have died down, so renewables are not viable.

You can build gas power plants on site at your data center and don’t have to wait for the grid to be upgraded. In the long run gas will be replaced by cheaper renewables

As far as I understand, building a large solar farm is still considerably _faster_ than gas turbine plant.

It is hard to operate renewables 24/7. At night and winter, you need a big array of generators and LED lights to shine on solars. Very inefficient.

Or for every solar you need a generator as a backup!