this is a wind farm but it has a dirty little secret you see this one behind me it's not even
turning and it turns out 30 to 40% of the power that this Farm could produce it doesn't because of
lack of demand during the day and this is a huge problem before trying to make money running one
of these so I flown out to Amarillo Texas to meet with a company that obsesses about this [Music]
problem and with the buildings you see believe they have the answer so what is
it and how does it work let's figure this out together I'm Ricky and this is two bit
da Vinci I want to thank Soluna for partnering with us to make this video inviting us out here to
talk about this because I honestly had no idea how big a problem this was imagine building a
wind farm spending millions of dollars in calculating how much money you'll make and
when you'll break even only to be wrong by 30 to 40% so how does saluna solve this problem
well before we get into that let's take a quick minute and talk about how power plants and the
grid actually work as an engineering Channel I often give high level overviews on things
because while the nuts and bolts of it can get pretty complicated electricity isn't like other
utilities water can be pumped to water towers or stored in reservoirs and pumped Under Pressure
so when you turn that faucet water flows it's the same with natural gas which can be stored
and pumped as needed unfortunately electricity is a lot more complicated when you turn on a switch
pretty pretty much in real time a power plant nearby needs to produce electricity that you
need at that moment so imagine how difficult it is to forecast when and how much energy is going
to be needed as much as we're turning away from fossil fuels it did have one key Advantage whether
it was coal or natural gas it could be stored and burned to produce energy on demand so predicting
demand was challenging but generation wasn't now imagine producing energy with Renewables where how
fast the wind blows or how much The Sun Shines can vary day by day or hour by hour now you not only
have to predict variable demand but you have to do it with variable generation now let's put on
our grid operator hat and try to figure out how to run a grid for a day you can see that demand
Rises around 7:00 when people start waking up and making their morning coffee the answer then is to
figure out how much base load power we need from things like nuclear power plants and then figure
out what peer plants we need to turn on and off to fill in the rest of the demand this is tough
as solar which looks like this or wind that looks like this as you can see they're both
wildly variable but the good news is there is a good Synergy between solar and wind and why
we should be building both but there's still the problem of when we have excess wind energy and no
customers that need it so saluna solution is to build data centers on wind farms to consume that
stranded or curtailed excess energy the way saluna helps the wind farm operators is by allowing the
wind farm when it can't sell the energy to the grid either because the grid price is too low
or the demand is too low we'll just consume it right away okay but why computers and how does
that solve this problem so I started looking at data centers and just how much energy they use and
this absolutely blew me away in 2021 the world consumed 25,000 tratt hours of electricity and
around 1% of that is empowering the internet and data centers that means the internet has
more emissions than the airline industry but that's looking back but we're standing today
smack dab in the middle of an AI Revolution and our computer demands the need for data centers
is about to explode we saw this AI Boom coming we didn't we didn't know what the killer application
was going to be generative AI like we thought it could be protein synthesis custom drugs who
knows right but uh generative AI took the World by storm I don't think people realize just how
much computers are going to dominate the energy use of the next 20 years these computers need to
eat way more energy than we can possibly imagine and 90% of the new compute that's growing right
now is non-real time in nature so why put them in real time data centers for every 101 Watts
that come onto the site 100 go to the computers only one watt is what I would call waste and
that's for all the cooling and the network gear which is unheard of now big companies like Tesla
will build their own custom data centers with custom hardware for their specific specific
tests but there are countless other use cases like did mentioned protein synthesis or building
models that'll predict weather around the world generative image AI or training large language
models I was just experimenting with a software that would take my videos and automatically dub
them in different languages and it actually works incredibly well it matches your tone and
everything but all that training means more and more compute power for us there's also rendering
our 3D scenes that you see in our videos are done on computers with Nvidia gpus and it
can take up to 2 minutes per frame 30 frames per second means 1 hour of compute time for 1 second
of final video and this is another excellent use case for cuna's computing solution now not every
Computing use case will work here like Netflix for example unless you only want to watch the new
liveaction one piece during times of excess wind production they're going to have to keep running
their servers 24/7 but this is a genius way to bring computing power for use cases like Bitcoin
mining AI training and 3D rendering things can be started and stopped at a way more competitive
price we're getting up there 44 is at 1.06 so it looks like we're making
progress it looks like we might have just curtail to be honest did you notice that just said on to
off we just curtailed I was sitting while you're watching I'm like why did it turn off here's what
happened grid demand is rising see that it's coming towards the peak as the grid demand went
up the price of the energy goes up when the price of the energy goes above a threshold that we set
the site curtails when the grid demand goes above a threshold that we set unless we're in the green
over here the site will curtail so in this case we were approaching the red we had passed the blue
which means okay pay very close attention what's happening and then the obviously the grid pricing
went above our threshold the red number here so the Blue Line you'll notice jumped above the 150
line and that's when the site said yep time to go off but we kind of knew it was coming because of
these leading indicators over here I can't believe it happened it couldn't have timed it any better
cuz I was literally watching this bragging about how we were hitting 91 and then I saw it toggled
off and my heart jumped I'm like what all right so we just saw an event where the power and energy
demand spiked and this entire operation came to a halt I didn't expect to see this actually
while we're out here but we literally just saw a demand event if you will and in that way the
farm operators were making money this entire time but as soon as it was so profitable to export all
the energy computers came to a halt and all the energy went out to the grid how awesome is that
now how exactly is grid demand and Supply managed well it's built at the stock market based on how
much demand there is the grid will start raising the price it's willing to buy electricity at when
this happens LM computers go on standby and all the wind farm generation gets exported to the grid
then when the demand drops or Supply increases they start dropping the price that they're
willing to pay per megawatt hour sometimes there can be so much excess energy that the grid prices
go negative meaning they'll charge the wind farm if they were to export energy during those times
it gets even more complicated than that sometimes even when when the price is negative a wind farm
might still export energy at a loss that way they qualify for renewable energy tax credits that just
depends on a lot of factors but it gets really complicated and it's all headache and confusion
that these Wind Farm companies have to deal with when a certain price is reached Selena's computers
kick back on and start buying this excess energy to perform computational tests this is a winwin
because now we don't waste clean energy Wind Farm operators actually make money even when
there isn't demand and we power computers that we would need anyway this is a two-point swing
because we can move some of the computer workload off the demand side and consume power that was
previously wasted here's the dirty secret behind pu pu doesn't include water loss and water cooling
and almost every data center in the world uses some form of evaporative cooling to cool all
these machines to get them down to temperature and they don't talk about that in PU I don't
mean closed loop like we would at home with like a water ball I'm talking about evaporative cooling
because it's super efficient way of removing a lot of heat water's amazing at it you know
I think that if people understood how much water like just being on the cloud takes we would be a
lot more appreciative of the resources we have like every tweet costs water every movie every
video I mean if it goes to the cloud you're using water right now and nobody talks about it the main
answer is they don't really have good answers why they don't have good answers to solve it yet
right except our architecture when calculating the Effective computing power per unit of energy spent
many data centers will sneak in cooling costs like running air conditioning to keep everything cool
even though that energy doesn't translate to any additional computing power but it gets much worse
some data centers to save electricity and not run air conditioning use evaporative coolers by
passing air over evaporative coolers fresh water is evaporated from liquid to Vapor absorbing a lot
of energy and cooling the incoming air but that also means consuming fresh water 24 hours a day to
keep a data center cool keeping computers cool is no joke and it's crucial for the long-term health
of any Electronics equipment so how does saluna tackle this they don't use air conditioning or
evaporative cooling just good oldfashioned fans and some clever engineering we designed this quad
kind of design because what it does is allow fresh air to always enter the intakes and any
no matter what direction the wind comes from It's Always pushing on an intake and then we made it
so the center is where the hot air comes out and there since it's protected by the four buildings
here there's enough protection from the prevailing wind that the hot air can rise like above out of
the screen here right no recirculation and the site has a 1.02 pu with no efficiency upgrades
yet we can get this site to 1.01 it just hasn't become a priority yet all this means more of every
watt they consume actually goes to productive computational workloads and not cooling or other
systems what have we learned that 30 to 40% of the power that wind farms produce is currently being
wasted because of not enough demand and that every YouTube video and Instagram photo consumes water
to share and store seriously I've been a software engineer for 10 years and I've never thought to
myself hm I wonder how much water this line of code is going to consume but here we are this is
the greatest part about my job I get to meet with cool companies and learn stuff I had no idea about
huge thanks to saluna for partnering with us to make this video and hopefully this gives you a bit
more context on why the grid is so complicated and why with the right bits of engineering
cleverness renewable energy can actually power the world and if you thought that was cool check
out this video next and until next week I'm Rick Tu Vinci thank you so much for watching