A Supersonic Engine Core Makes the Perfect Power Turbine
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The debate rages on around Boom Supersonic's claim that their supersonic engine tech can power AI's insatiable energy demands. Some commenters, like scblock, are scathing, pointing out that aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades and that Boom's supposed innovation is nothing new. Others, like msandford, are more open-minded, learning something new and appreciating the potential differences between subsonic and supersonic engines. As the discussion devolves into jokes and sarcasm, with some accusing the company of "jumping on the AI hype train," it's clear that opinions are sharply divided – and the conversation is sparking some lively takes on innovation, hype, and the future of energy production.
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1) Aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades. "Oh but we have supersonic engines" does not change the fundamental equation
2) They're proposing burning more shit dug up from the ground to feed a beast that is destroying the entire world economy
3) Where are they even getting the fuel? Magic? Someone has to build the pipelines, and someone has to supply the fuel.
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/boom-yc-w16-is-building-an-...
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
Such a cheap flex right up-front, and with an em-dash to boot. I get it, it's powerful to boast about such a connection. It's just not very classy.
What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
Maybe it started with Jobs, maybe it's always been a thing in other spaces (politics, religion...) and is now coming to business and these uber wealthy individuals who put their pants on two legs at a time
There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.
To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
> Sam Altman confirmed power was indeed a major constraint [1].
> [1]: Personal communication.
Or even better:
> Power is a major constraint (Sam Altman, personal communication, December 9, 2025).
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
China didn’t start adding much in the way of solar prior to about 2020, whereas they added lots of coal generation in the past 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
This is very helpful to deal with variability with renewable output.
What, you think continued rapid decrease in cost of solar and storage will somehow make this not happen?
It’s sort of like how airlines like to fly their airplanes as much as possible.
Clean electrification is inevitable
A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable [2025/11/21]
In a 100% renewable world we would not be extracting or refining oil. Natural gas (used by these turbines) is a byproduct of oil drilling. Were we not burning the oil, the natural gas might be too expensive alone.
Also, in a 100% renewable world we would (by definition) have enough generation all the time - (covered by batteries and good baseload sources) that turbine power was no longer required to cover peak loads.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
Basically, you end up having to overbuild to crazy levels, or build insane amounts of battery storage, which only gets used a few days a year.
Things in the US are a bit more of a mixed bag, for better or worse, but there have been studies done that suggest that you can get very high renewables levels cost effectively, but not to 100% without new technology (eg “clean firm” power like geothermal, new nuclear being something other than a clusterfumble, long-term storage like iron-air batteries, etc etc etc).
There are interesting engineering problems for sources that are intended to operate very infrequently and at very low capacity factor, as might be needed for covering Dunkleflauten. E-fuels burned with liquid oxygen (and water to reduce temperature) in rocket-like combustors might be better than conventional gas turbines for that.
The second point is that the distribution has a long tail, especially when we consider the possibility of multiple independent incidents overlapping in time, to the point where it becomes infeasible to suppose that we could be prepared to continue operating as if nothing had happened in all conceivable scenarios, regardless of how accurately we could predict their likelihood.
We have coal fired plants in Australia with <90% uptime (often unscheduled), but somehow they're considered baseload rather than intermittent.
Also, if solar ends up much cheaper than wind there's going to be need for seasonal energy storage, which could be considerably more than 2% at high latitude. Batteries are unsuitable for this.
https://www.vantaanenergia.fi/en/about-us/projects/varanto-t...
Also this calculation probably assumes no baseload power imported from the grid, where means such as wind and tidal power work year-round and help offset the need for batteries.
This would also need some sort of turbine to convert back to electrical energy.
it's a nice pivot though - turbines are just turbines.
Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use.
Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P
On the contrary, check out this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to oil, coal, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024.
Have you considered working for the IEA?
https://x.com/RARohde/status/1989447673108410835
Fundamental to the Law of Propaganda is the rule that you can prove anything if you ignore enough data or facts. Just ignore the things that don't fit your preferred conclusion and everything just works!
They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.
My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
And unless people are shoveling coal directly into the data centres this electricity generating gas turbine is intended to be used for the electricity generation mix is more appropriate:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
I mean... Seems obvious, no?
Even if we give China the most charity and take their 2025 results at face vault(even though they NEED to be independently verified) China is at best average when it comes % of gridpower that is renewable. Off the top of my head I think they are like 27-30% renewable. But its actually worse because they are the biggest polluter by a mile. Bigger the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
The link you've given shows more coal energy being added over the last 5 years than solar. Looking at end of 2020 to end of 2024.
At some point you have to accept this is not some anomaly and there is a pattern in the data that your are trying to to ignore.
That graph shows production, not capacity, nor installed capacity in each year.
Solar capacity and say nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil capacity
Are different beasts.
When solar advocates bang on about adding X gigawatts of capacity, they’re being dishonest. What they really mean is they added X/4, because, obviously, it’s sunny only about 25% of the time throughout a year.
Adding batteries doesn’t change that. Still have to over build.
So let’s focus on the numbers that reflect actual production, so we can have an honest conversation.
Nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil, even biomass have capacity factors typically about 80%, often about 90%.
Wind and solar are never going up ro those capacity factors, even with batteries (including pumped hydro).
They also plan to over supply demand by 100%. This means they can turn off all renewables and still have enough power to run their country.
This is what a well designed grid looks like. Not the green washed bullshit we get from McKenzie and co.
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.
Also, this is only commercially viable because this regime has rendered the EPA functionally powerless.
Come on, get serious.
Be better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not putting up with YC any longer. Delete my account.
Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate.
Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years).
In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays.
A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics.
Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.
Interesting reading on the topic: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...
> Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen.
The US (or at least, fossil fuel interests in the US which seem to have a lot of influence over the current administration) seem determined to become an "energy superpower" by exporting oil and gas. In particular, seems they'd very much like Europe to switch from Russian gas to US LNG. We'll see how that goes. Personally, I find it hard to see how LNG from the other side of the world will remain competitive with ever-reducing costs of solar, wind, and batteries.
I mean, we have those regulations because nobody wants to live in Lahore, Pakistan.
Personal experience: In my town a public parking lot could not be built due to it possibly being "endangered moth" habitat.
There are places where you can still build things in the US, but they are more and more scarce.
Unless you're a developer/builder you have no concept of the projects KILLED by bureaucracy.
All you see is what was allowed to be built.
I happen to sell electrical construction services and I hate stupid questions so my answer was this, stated more diplomatically: “It is impossible to guarantee the lack of PFAS in the products I sell you, particularly with electrical devices. Cable jackets may or may not contain PFAS and nobody is keeping track. Anyone claiming they can do this is lying, for every industry.”
I understand that turbines are very handy in power generation but we don't use gyroscopic power storage because the inertia gets scary at high RPMs. Turbines lake the momentum but make up for it by being entirely made of knives. You lose an engine mount or throw a blade and you're deep in the shit.
Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.
Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...
https://www.activepower.com/
...and probably others.
(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)
If this works as a rapid start gas peaker, it could help in the shift off coal and diesel. It depends on the CO/CO2 burden.
This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load?
Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here.. I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently.
If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere?
What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours.
There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
Great analogy if it pays off.
I'd wonder how it competes with nuclear for scale and existing gas turbines for cost and efficiency.
The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow.
Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
It's not necessarily easier to do one or the other. It's about which one is faster.
A lot of the natural gas in the US is in Texas, and a lot of it is flared while pumping out crude. Putting data centers on turbines near the extraction fields out in the Permian Basin makes sense for power. You can build short pipelines or hook into the ones already there.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is one large tanker per day. (sidenote - it all reminds how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter)
Add that the manpower and expertise of running generators is abundant there and it's a prettt solid idea if they can actually make it.
Hear me out, this is a crazy idea, but what if we built some really big gas turbines to generate electricity and then transmitted and distributed the power across a geographic region to multiple customers?
I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
Siemens power-generating turbines are designed for -50C/+50C temperature envelope. All jet engines lose efficiency at higher ambient temperature due to thermodynamics, no matter how good their HP turbine blade tech.
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