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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.

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Down. So they are self sufficient in winter and in summer they use excess energy to create green hydrogen.

No idea what you're talking about. My local utility lit up 100MW of solar over the last year alone. Everywhere I look is doing the same.

He's talking about the interconnection queue. You see the 100MW of solar they're wiring up, but not the hundreds of gigawatts in the queue.

I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.

> I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs

You'd be wrong. Projects get evaluated FIFO, and each has to do a grid impact study. Data centers are buying other generation projects to get a better position in line. This is all the result of bad regulation.

Sure you can. The datacentre builders just don't want the (fairly modest) extra expense to do so properly. Obviously some preparatory work is required before dumping a lot of extra capacity into the grid.

My state allowed the power utilities to charge a modest fee ($10,000 to $100,000, depending on project size) before a yet-to-be-built data centre could demand a large amount of electricity. The amount of planned data centres went down by an order of magnitude. The truth is that most of the data centre builders (not all) do not want to be responsible citizens and are simply extracting value and wealth from other people, including from the power utilities and grid operators.

There's a years long queue for every US grid.

The queue is no longer a year long here once they started charging those study fees.

In YOUR state. This is because projects are hopping around and looking for short lines with other considerations. However that doesn't change the fact that its too hard to bring generation onto the grind in the US.

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