The Dark Year
EMPs, solar storms and the forces that could switch off civilization.
electricity
US Energy Data: a new platform to explore American energy, state-by-state
Trying to make some of the richest energy data in the world accessible and understandable.
Small modular reactors
Cheaper nuclear new builds
Why American data centers can't plug in
The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy. But America has the electricity to power its data centers; the problem is getting it to them.
That process is significantly backlogged. Though the median power plant in 2005 waited less than 20 months for interconnection, this had jumped to 55 months by 2023.
The interconnection process wasn’t created for today’s world. Grids use an inflexible first-come, first-served queue that leaves some of the most valuable projects stuck behind less important ones.
Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas
For the better part of the last several hundred years, coal was the fuel of choice for generating power.
Frontier | Winston (@frontiermap)
The steel almost nobody can make. Grain-oriented electrical steel, or GOES, is the material at the heart of every large transformer core. It is a silicon-iron alloy at roughly 3% silicon, rolled into sheets 0.18 to 0.35 millimeters thick, with the crystalline grains forced into…
AEP sees contracted capacity surge to 63GW, 90% tied to data centers
9GW increase on previous quarter, raises capital plan to $78bn
The US imports 82% of its large power transformers. How it got there, and what it will take to rebuild the capability.
Why the rebuild depends on metallurgy, apprenticeship, and one mill in Pennsylvania.
Choosing the Most Cost-Effective Option for Nuclear Power
Interest in nuclear power has surged recently as policymakers realize that managing electric grids dominated by intermittent renewable sources is far more technically and economically challenging than initially anticipated.
The Trouble with Transformers
And the long slouch towards cyberpunk
Turbine Tuesday: The 60-Year Promise of Supercritical CO2
Why the 'world changing fluid' keeps ~almost~ working
New metal with triple copper’s heat conduction challenges fundamental physics
With performance three times better than copper’s, this new material could substantially improve heat management of electronics, data centers and energy systems
https://opengridworks.com/power-plants
In Edison’s Revenge, Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DC
Could switching to 800 V DC be the key to more efficient data centers?
What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind
The odds of being struck by lightning in America in a given year are one in 1.2 million. How does the experience reorient a person’s sense of chance, of fate?
The Datacenter Bible - From Layman to Expert in 100 Pages
The definitive 100+ page guide to the thermodynamics, scarcity, and heavy assets powering the AI revolution.
How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive
Bring Your Own Generation, Sayonara Electric Grid, Turbines vs. Recips. vs. Fuel Cells, Why Not Build More CCGTs?, Onsite Power TCO
The divergence of electricity and natural gas prices | FRED Blog
‘Strange metals’ point to a whole new way to understand electricity
Exotic materials with bizarre electron behavior could pave the road to revolutionary technologies
PoE basics and beyond: What every engineer should know
Here is a short primer that walks you through the basics of Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology.
Inside the Interconnection Queue
Electric power in the US is provided by the electrical grid, a huge network of power plants, transmission lines, and transformers that moves electric power from where it's generated to where it's consumed.
How Co-Ops Electrified America—Asterisk
In the 1930s, private utilities balked at the task of bringing electricity to rural America. A New Deal agency figured out how to do it more quickly and more cheaply than anyone expected.
The Wireless Grid: How Power Is Becoming Infrastructure - EE Times
Wireless Power Networks are transforming power from fixed and static into an ambient utility that’s omnipresent.
The beauty of batteries
Keeping the grid stable requires overbuilding generation, driving up costs. Batteries fix that.
Liquid cooling: The next evolution in data center thermal management
Immersion cooling on the horizon
The enduring puzzle of static electricity
Even though it lacks a complete explanation, the small-scale, everyday effect is being exploited for various applications.
How Batteries Are Making the Electrical Grid More Reliable
To operate reliably, the US electrical grid needs to balance supply and demand: to make sure, at any given moment, that the amount of electricity demanded by homes, businesses, and factories is equal to the amount being supplied by nuclear reactors, gas turbines, and other types…
Got juice? Future AI processors said to drink up to 15,360 watts of power — titanic requirements demand exotic immersion and embedded…
It is going to get hot.
We’ve unlocked a holy grail in clean energy. It’s only the beginning.
Do we have batteries that are advanced enough to store renewable energy? Yes, yes we do.
Big gas turbine manufacturers aren’t ready to bet on the AI boom
Demand for gas power-generation hardware is surging, but the few companies that make it are reluctant to scale up.
Data center energy consumption
Can We Build a Five Gigawatt Data Center?—Asterisk
By 2030, leading AI labs will need data centers so massive they will require the power equivalent of some of America’s largest cities. Will they be able to find it?
This Essential Element of the Power Grid Is in Critically Short Supply
A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects
How to Build an AI Data Center
This piece is the first in a new series from the Institute for Progress (IFP), called Compute in America: Building the Next Generation of AI Infrastructure at Home. In this series, we examine the challenges of accelerating the American AI data center buildout. Future pieces will…
How to EMP-Proof a Building
Oak Ridge researchers mimicked electromagnetic pulses to block them
Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town
A new industrial-scale 'sand battery' has been announced for Finland, which packs 1 MW of power and a capacity of up to 100 MWh of thermal energy for use during those cold polar winters. The new battery will be about 10 times bigger than a pilot plant that’s been running since…
The Holdouts in the Quest for a Better Power Grid
Farmers in Missouri are opposing the Grain Belt Express, a transmission line that will connect wind farms in Kansas with cities in the East.
Out of Gas
A seismic change is coming to American transportation.
Scientists Made An Artificial "Cloud" That Pulls Electricity From Air
A new prototype compatible with a wide range of materials could grab a continuous supply of renewable energy from the air.
This startup wants to make nuclear energy huge by making its reactors tiny—
“In one week [in March], we sold more nuclear power plant contracts than any company in all of history,” says @LastEnergy CEO Bret Kugelmass.
The Grid, Part III: The Dream of Deregulation
For most of the industry’s history, electric power in the US had largely been provided by vertically integrated utility companies that handled every part of the electricity supply: generating it, transmitting it, distributing it to customers, and managing the overall system…
Electricity Prices Worldwide » (April 2023) « ElectricRate
Think that electricity in the U.S. is expensive? You should know that there are countries that have it worse (and better). Who pays the most for electricity?
Get to Know Maxwell's Equations—You're Using Them Right Now
James Clerk Maxwell's equations are a big deal in physics, explaining the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism. Here's the gist of how they work.
Introduction to Vibration Energy Harvesting - Technical Articles
Learn more about vibration energy harvesting as a source of power for electronic systems.
Opposites Attract: A Review of Basic Magnetic Theories - Technical Articles
Electric machineries are based on the basic principles of electromechanical conversion, which use either the electrostatic or the electromagnetic principle. This technical article deals with the magnetic circuit theory for the conversion of one form of energy to another.
Power to the People
Planned outages have sparked the use of more in-home batteries and generators. Here’s how to keep the lights on.
This technology could fundamentally change our relationship to electricity
An “operating system” for power could double the efficiency of the grid.
Datacenter Anatomy Part 1: Electrical Systems
Meta Datacenter Scrapped, Vertiv, Schneider Electric, Eaton, Datacenter Bill Of Materials By Component, Transformers, Switchgear, Redundancy, UPS, ATS, OCP Busbar, Generator Sets, Substation