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Energy Rant

This is a satirical and at times humorous but critical commentary on energy efficiency issues of the day.

“Keep up the good work! I like the variety of topics; never boring. It's like a Box of Energy Chocolates.... you never know what you're gonna get!”

Mike MernickSenior Vice President, ICF
Jeff Ihnen
By In Energy Rant

Are You Serious About the Climate Apocalypse?

Washington Post headline last week: “World is on brink of catastrophic warming, U.N. climate change report says.” Wolf! Wolf! People…
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Nov 19
Love107

Electricity Price Drivers

By Energy Rant No Comments
The race is on to decarbonize the grid, and those states that are forcing it too quickly are seeing soaring electricity prices. This is fabulous for our industry because energy efficiency and load management have become much more cost-effective. But are higher prices good for customers, industry, and local economies? Probably not. Last week, I attended the Peak Load Management Alliance’s 50th Conference in Brooklyn. In sessions on decarbonization and electrification, practitioners described how the cost-effectiveness of heating with cold-climate heat pumps is already a challenge. Not only are there no savings, but electricity costs are increasing rapidly and are…
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Nov 12
Love107

The Future of Automobile Decarbonization

By Energy Rant No Comments
Two weeks ago, I described the chasm before mass-market electric vehicle adoption. The chasm, as shown in Figure 1 and depicted in the EV Rant as a moat, is the gap between enthusiastic nerds and mainstream curmudgeons. I'm often among the mainstream curmudgeons, but not always. I could be considered an early adopter of smart thermostats and cold-climate heat pumps purchased 11 and 7 years ago, respectively. Figure 1 Market Adoption Curve For automobiles, I have gone out of my way for years, decades even, to find ones with manual transmissions – why? Energy efficiency, for one. There is less…
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Oct 28
Love106

The Energy Transition’s Reverse Chasm

By Energy Rant No Comments
In September, I wrote a series of five Rants on data centers, a concise and comprehensive collection that might just be the Data Center Digest you never knew you needed!   Chip and server power density, cooling, and projected GW load growth. Data center facilities from modular to 200 GW-plus hyperscale. Efficiency ratings and power usage effectiveness scales. Data center HVAC (minus the H because that's not required) options. Future power shortages and power supply complications. The anticipated load growth is due to artificial intelligence, which most professionals believe will explode—and so does Wall Street. Table 1 lists the current…
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Oct 22
Love105

Herding Chickens Through Modern Energyscapes

By Energy Rant No Comments
A recent study, Stacked Energyscapes, led by professors at Loyola Marymount University and Penn State University, caught my eye. The paper describes webs of complexities associated with transitions from fossil-fuel-powered economies to clean-energy economies. I burrowed into this paper as a glutton for third, fourth, and fifth-order (and beyond) downstream chain reactions and the universal picture. The Inflation Reduction Act was deployed in part to provide a 10% tax break bonus for clean energy development in communities that have been negatively impacted by decreases or closures of fossil fuel extraction. However, developers in many locations, such as the enormous Permian…
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Oct 15
Love105

Bipartisanship: Clobbering Corporate Climate Initiatives

By Energy Rant No Comments
New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing JBS USA Foods, the country's largest beef producer, for misleading the public with its net-zero greenhouse gas emissions plan by 2040. Not to be left behind, Attorneys General from Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Tennessee are firing warning shots across the bows of companies like Target, Tyson Foods, and grocery store parent company Ahold Delhaize. Headline: Democrats and Republicans align against corporate climate change plans, particularly net-zero targets. What? Why are those companies targeted while there are all kinds of Hail Mary moonshots fired by governments (local, state, and federal) and other corporations?…
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Oct 07
Love104

Data Centers Search for Electricity – Anywhere by Any Means

By Energy Rant No Comments
In the first post in this data center series, I introduced the staggering power density of neural computing systems used for artificial intelligence. At the macro level, in Northern Virginia alone, Dominion Energy projects data center load growth to increase from 3.3 GW today to 50 GW based on requested and projected load additions. Last week, in the fourth post, I described electric loads at the facility level, which reach well north of 200 MW. Only three to five hyperscale data centers, each with the power requirements of an aircraft carrier, can take all the power from a 1,000 MW…
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Sep 30
Love102

Creepy Comparisons of Naval Nuclear Propulsion and Data Centers

By Energy Rant No Comments
I couldn't pass this up to break from data centers for a second. One day last week, I read in the morning from the American Energy Society, "California Governor Gavin Newsom is trying to get control of wild gasoline spikes." In the afternoon, I read a headline from Hart Energy, "California Sues Exxon Over GlobalPlastic Pollution." It's like beating a dog to motivate him to roll over. Aircraft Carriers and Data Centers I had the good fortune to tour a data center under construction a few weeks ago in Northern Virginia. It was a three-story, one-million-square-foot facility. The only way…
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Sep 23
Love102

Schooling and Improving Pewee – Not for Birds

By Energy Rant No Comments
In our first data center post two weeks ago, we covered the core of data centers, including racks, servers, and the exploding computer capacity and heat generation of evermore powerful computing chips. In last week’s second post, we covered the types of data centers, from distributed edge data centers to enormous hyperscale data centers. In this week’s third data center post, we dive into the broad metrics and opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of data centers. Power Usage Effectiveness First, I’ll introduce or reintroduce the power usage effectiveness of data centers, or PUE, as follows. In general, levels of…
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Sep 17
Love101

Micro to Hyperscale, Data Centers as a Service, and Everything in Between

By Energy Rant No Comments
Last week, I was on a webinar when the following chart emerged as a forecast for decarbonization. I quickly thought of two things. First, an example from The Wall Street Journal, “Government often uses ‘catalytic tools’ such as regulation, tax incentives, grants, and loan guarantees to prompt innovation outside of government.” In other words, private equity and venture capitalists are not daft enough to shovel billions into hydrogen development. Only the government will do that. Hydrogen via electrolysis by renewable electricity supply can be done, but not cost-effectively. It will cost multiples of the price per million Btu of natural…
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Sep 10
Love101

Mini, Macro, and Mega Looks At the Modern Data Center Industry

By Energy Rant No Comments
Every day, there is a headline about the explosion of data center growth and associated electric loads that will rapidly deplete reserve capacity on the electric grid. The Energy Rant featured several posts to describe the magnitude of the issue and concern among regulators, utilities, and government officials, most recently from the Mid-America Regulatory Conference and Syncing Power Generation with Soaring Loads. Since load management and reliable and affordable electricity are near and dear to me and because Michaels has been successfully engaging with developers of monster data centers, I pounced on the opportunity to attend the inaugural Data Center…
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All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

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