They don’t have room for another building the size of the data center to store batteries in and thousands of acres of land for solar panels (wild ass guesses on battery building footprint and solar field footprint)
Critical loads require generators, batteries don’t cut it. Data centers want the most reliable backup power they can with the longest runtime. Battery storage density is not high enough to back up a 500MW+ data center for any length of time without a comical amount of batteries.
When the NEC allows critical, equipment, and life safety branch at hospitals to be backed up with batteries and solar panels, battery storage will be at a point where battery backup of data centers is feasible. Right now it isn’t.
They have(in just this one example) - 35 turbines at 16MW each - that's half a gigawatt of power. Having the kind of battery storage that could provide this amount of power for more than a few minutes is.....well, not impossible, but extremely expensive, especially for something that will just sit there unused(hopefully). Gas generators are comparatively very cheap, easily available, and if fuel is being fed into the system can operate for days on end.
And you'd need an insane amount of solar panels to actually recharge those batteries in any kind of reasonable time too, so you expose yourself to a massive risk if you had two out of power events within say 12 hours. So you'd probably build all of those batteries and solar panels but you'd still need to have emergency generators ready to go anyway.
Why don't they use Tesla solar panels and batteries?
They don’t have room for another building the size of the data center to store batteries in and thousands of acres of land for solar panels (wild ass guesses on battery building footprint and solar field footprint)
Critical loads require generators, batteries don’t cut it. Data centers want the most reliable backup power they can with the longest runtime. Battery storage density is not high enough to back up a 500MW+ data center for any length of time without a comical amount of batteries.
When the NEC allows critical, equipment, and life safety branch at hospitals to be backed up with batteries and solar panels, battery storage will be at a point where battery backup of data centers is feasible. Right now it isn’t.
They have(in just this one example) - 35 turbines at 16MW each - that's half a gigawatt of power. Having the kind of battery storage that could provide this amount of power for more than a few minutes is.....well, not impossible, but extremely expensive, especially for something that will just sit there unused(hopefully). Gas generators are comparatively very cheap, easily available, and if fuel is being fed into the system can operate for days on end.
And you'd need an insane amount of solar panels to actually recharge those batteries in any kind of reasonable time too, so you expose yourself to a massive risk if you had two out of power events within say 12 hours. So you'd probably build all of those batteries and solar panels but you'd still need to have emergency generators ready to go anyway.