Proenergy Repurposes Jet Engines to Power Data Centers

Kinda funny behaviour from the electric cars will save us guy.

My city's power company itself has multiple peaking power generators in shipping containers, that it runs because there's isn't enough supply.

Compared to full-size natural gas powerplants they're extremely awful, but they're a necessity when we otherwise wouldn't have reliable power. If it wasn't for NINBYism, we'd have plenty of hydro and nuclear power to meet all of our needs, but with NINBYism the only option is to build smaller, which is also dirtier and less efficient, but avoids the NIMBY blockades.

it is

the reason it sells it that some non small part of the investor marked expects there is a "explosion" in compute needs, cause by AI adoption

which will lead to an explosion of electrical need

except there is limited world wide production capacity for gas power plants and other power plants, and some (e.g. nuclear) are very slow to build

and Trump put a lot of extra artificial hurdles for expanding anything "renewable"

so basically if that happen we most likely will have

- exploding electrical bills, and if no intervention is done for private homes, too.

- air pollution (and other environmental pollution) which doesn't just give people asthma implicitly will kill them (like them ding years earlier, but also potentially through damage from asthma attacks etc.)[1]

- price explosion of any electric components which share production lines with GPU servers (which isn't just GPUs, but also RAM, CPUs, etc.), the predicted price increase of RAM by ~30% is partially due to people anticipating this and already buying capacities :/

Naturally there needs to be a sinner to put the blame one so expect claims that electric price increases are fully at fault of Wind Farms and similar :/

Oh also if the AI bubble goes pop it sadly will not just be all fine, because we now have a double bubble of the core AI bubble and the "speculative new data center investment" bubble. The first will majorly hit the top of SAP100 and with it a lot of founds and similar which try to be "stable"/"reliable" etc. The other is more fulled by private equity and it's (for me) very unclear what is linked to it. One way or another things look pretty bad.

[1]: If anyone is wondering if there will be interventions from the state weather it's the OP politico article or long term promulgated and reported issues with fracking causing mutated fishes and major increases in cancer down stream, or the long history with toxic wast dumping in the US the answer is, most likely, no. And that sadly isn't even Trump specific.

Modern aero derivative power turbines are capable of operating at below 15 ppm NOx when properly fitted for use. It's not as if they aren't making any attempt at all with regard to emissions. They've been working on this stuff since the 90s. They're on 2nd and 3rd generation combustor technology now.

That said, a parking lot full of these things could eventually crank up the ambient NOx levels. The real problem is low stack height. The exhaust being close to the ground creates a hot spot that would have otherwise dispersed into a much larger volume of air. One generator running by itself is probably not an issue in any arrangement. 20 is a medium sized power plant.

We need to greatly expand electrical generation anyway if EVs are going to replace ICEVs in transportation.

The PE6000 is closer to a GE LM6000 rather than an LM2500. https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/products/gas-turbines/lm...

The LM6000 and its variants have been in operation since probably the 1980s. I can ask around at work. I used to develop the code for the LM6000.

You're spot on that people use them for peaking, but it's a big mix. Peaking, mid-merit, and sometimes base load. There are low emissions versions as well, that keep NOx to a handful of ppm without using extra water.

It does say they replace the power turbine part with one designed to extract shaft horsepower. Given that the hot end is the difficult and expensive part that probably has loads of useful life left long after it's aged out of being usable in an aircraft, sticking a new power turbine on isn't the worst idea you could have.

Of course "jet" aircraft are mostly using the engine to produce shaft power to run a ducted fan anyway.

These things are engineering marvels as fuel-burning engines go. From what I know, there is actually not that much that can be done to make gas turbines more efficient if weight is no object. Fuel weight and cost are very important for commercial turbofans, and engine manufacturers have been doing a huge amount of R&D in efficiency and are using some very advanced manufacturing techniques for certain parts. Turbine inlet temperatures are well into the white-hot range. A mechanical engineer described it to me as "A hundred degrees hotter and they'd melt and spill their internals out the back" - that is with exotic metals and active cooling. The main problem with these turbines is that they are somewhat old and will probably run at less than maximum power for longevity reasons. Turbines are terrible at less than full power efficiency. They also won't have a steam turbine added to use the exhaust heat like with stationary engines.

According to this article, the best current commercial turbofans can reach over 50% thermodynamic efficiency. I remember thinking that 50% seem like an unreachable holy grail when first reading about thermodynamic efficiency of common engines. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/23490/chapter/6#36

You don’t understand!

The line must go up.

You could, but an AI datacenter is awfully expensive, and every minute down costs a ton in unused capital so generally they'll do anything in their power to guarantee maximum utilization at all times