It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly.
Front and center is the data center that Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania.
The arrangement between the plant’s owners and AWS — called a “behind the meter” connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant’s capacity — to the data center. That’s enough to power more than a half-million homes.
I mean there is possibly an opportunity to use water from cooling data centers to feed back in to steam powered power generation (like nuclear or fossil fuel stations), or is that not how it works?
According to my cursory research, cooling loops run somewhere between 10 and 50 °C with the difference of inlet and outlet between 5 and 10 K.
Steam power generation uses the phase change of water, so you need above 100°C.
On the high end of the temperature range, you could possibly run some small district heating while the lower temperatures require active cooling.