There Is Not Enough Power

In almost every episode of Star Trek (the original series), Captain Kirk would have to call down to Scotty in the engine room and demand more power. Well, the hyperscaler datacenter companies are Captain Kirk, calling down to the electricity companies around the world. But like Scotty in at least one of the episodes, the reply is often, "I don't have the power, Captain."

Powering Datacenters

In my post Enterprise Datacenters Only Use 56% of Their Capacity, I related the story of how Google in Luxembourg and Meta in the Netherlands planned large datacenters but then "The two projects were paused after grassroots resistance from locals and environmental activists." Arguably, in this case, there was enough power but local politics was against the datacenters. But all over the world, electricity grids are close to their maximum capacity. "I don't have the power, Captain."

A colleague had lunch with someone who works for one of the big hyperscalers, and he told him that they want to build some number of new datacenters, but they cannot because the electricity companies won't give them enough power. So this is not just a theoretical issue. And it is not just datacenters. The Financial Times reports that:

Developers in West London face a potential ban on new housing projects until 2035 because the electricity grid has run out of capacity to support new homes

Obviously, the situation varies by country/state. In California, just a month ago, we were so close to the power limit for the state that electric vehicle (EV) owners were asked not to charge their vehicles (ironically, just a day or two after the state passed a mandate that all cars sold in the state from 2035 onwards would be electric). In the end, no rolling blackouts were necessary. But the implication is that the state does not have enough power for more datacenters. In fact, it is worse than that. The state doesn't have enough power for all the existing demand. According to the US Energy Information Association (EIA...did you know that was a thing?) California is the largest importer of power of any state at 25%. That's right, California only manages to generate 75% of its own needs. By contrast, Arizona exports 31% of its power, much of it to California.

Electricity Cannot Be Stored

I think one reason for this is that most people do not understand that electric power cannot be stored (in meaningful quantities). Electricity being generated and energy being consumed have to balance precisely. I wrote about this in more detail in my post How the Electricity Grid Works.

Politicians and the general public seem to think that if we build enough windmills and solar panels, then we will make a green transition (or Energiewende if you are German). But electric power is built up in three main layers. At the bottom is the base load. These are power stations like coal and nuclear powered that cannot be ramped up and down. They are either on or off and take days to ramp up or down. There are two implications of this. The most obvious is that this type of power station is not much use if the wind stops blowing. But moreover, even if wind and solar are delivering maximum amounts of power, the base load cannot be turned off to let the renewable power be used. The second layer are "peaker" power stations, almost all natural gas. These can be ramped up and down (or even turned off) depending on requirements at that very moment. And on the top are the renewables, solar and wind, which cannot be depended on. The wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't shine at night or even on cloudy days. So renewables can save some fuel, but we still need base load and peaker power stations if we are not to have blackouts when the wind and sun are not cooperating. If we are to generate more power, we need not just more windmills and solar, but more peaker power stations and even more base power. Luckily, California made the sensible decision not to shut down the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plan near San Luis Obispo.

Even Elon Musk, the world's biggest fan of batteries, says any energy transition will take several decades.

The best analogy of this that I know is that it is as if every electric car also needs an internal combustion engine (ICE) car alongside it for when the electric car cannot be used. Whenever you use the electric car, the ICE car doesn't use any gasoline. But it still sits there with fixed expenses, even though it is not being used. Renewable resources are the same. We still need all the pre-existing infrastructure of base load and peaker power stations. We save some fuel by using renewables, but those power stations just sit there being expensive fixed costs. Renewables are thus a complete (or partial) duplication of the entire grid at a high cost, which in California you can see by looking at your electricity bill today compared to a decade or two ago.

The other state which is spearheading a complete move to renewables is New York. They are banning natural gas and accept that an essential requirement for future grid reliability will be something they call DEFR. What is that? The New York Independent System Operator has a document that says the state will depend on technology:

...known as Dispatchable Emission-Free Resources (DEFRs), these technologies are not yet commercially available at the scale necessary to fill in reliability gaps of retiring fossil resources.

That's right, the New York transition to net-zero depends on a magic technology that has yet to be invented. In. the meantime, New York has shut down its Indian Point nuclear reactor, leading to a massive surge in fossil fuel use.

I'm not even going to address whether any of this is necessary. Despite dramatic headlines in the mainstream media, NASA reports that in the last eight years, temperatures have declined slightly. Technically, the Global Average Temperature Anomaly (GATA) has declined slightly. The big implication of this is not that the temperature is not rising—it has been inching up since the little ice age in about 1750 and will probably continue to do so. The big implication is that our climate models are useless, and the science is not understood since no models predicted this. In IC design, if our circuit models say the voltage will go up and when we measure it, we find it went down, then we throw out that model and develop one that works. In fact, the current GATA is only 0.2°C above the 1979-2000 average today. This is not a crisis. it is more like that scene in Austin Powers where a man gets run over by a road-roller moving at less than walking speed.

EDA to the Rescue

So what are our options for the future? How do we power our datacenters given the current constraints, both technical and political? There seem to be two options:

• Increase the efficiency of datacenters, so we get more compute power per unit of energy (say per megawatt-hour).
• Ramp up a portfolio of carbon-neutral power stations or nearly carbon-neutral. Probably a mixture of wind, solar, and new gas-powered power stations to back them up.
• Nuclear. Despite California nearly shutting down Diablo Canyon and New York actually shutting down Indian Point, I think nuclear is the only sensible option for long-term carbon-free power. But it is long-term. It probably takes at least ten years to build a new nuclear power station starting from a standing start. Like the adage about planting trees, the best time to start building a nuclear power station is ten years ago, and the second best time is now. There are lots of promising new nuclear technologies too, but we'll have to see which, if any, pan out.

The semiconductor, EDA, and CFD industries can't do anything about the last two bullets, but it can do a lot about the first. See my posts Thermal in Data Centers and Enterprise Datacenters Only Use 56% of Their Capacity.

Some key points:

• Moore's Law is like Schrödinger's Cat and may or may not be dead, depending if you look at technical progress or economics. But I think we can all agree that each process node consumes less power for the same functionality, whether or not it consumes more or less money. So just waiting is one way to reduce the power consumed by the big hot chips in the datacenters. But we can do better than that with tool suites like Cadence's Voltus and Celsius, not just identifying hot spots but reducing overall power.
• On the fluid dynamics side, we can get more equipment into fewer datacenters by optimizing for thermal, primarily analyzing air flow around servers, coolers, and the like. 

As is so often the case in EDA, optimizing power (which, in this case, means reducing it) relies on accurate modeling, building digital twins of both things like individual server boards, and also of entire datacenters. Innovation is largely limited by energy caps, so using EDA/semiconductor to build twice the chips for half the power allows for scaling at the datacenter level to continue. This is really important. According to various reports, 2022 is the first year that there is more revenue from HPC chips (basically datacenter) than mobile (basically smartphones).

Electric Cars

This post is already too long, but here are a couple of things about electric cars to consider.

When I moved to the San Francisco Mission District, one of my requirements was that my new condo had to have a parking garage. I didn't want to have to use on-street parking since (a) I knew from the experience of friends that I would get lots of parking tickets (b) I didn't want to spend ages each day searching for a parking place, and (c) cars in San Francisco are broken into with depressing regularity (for example, at my old condo both my daughter and my girlfriend had their rear-windows smashed so that thieves could steal their exercise gear). However, most buildings in the Mission are older and don't have parking garages. So if you are one of those people, how do you charge your car when it is parked on the street overnight?

Look at the last word in the previous paragraph. People like to charge their cars overnight since they are not using them for 8-12 hours, and off-peak electricity is cheap. But as more and more people want to charge their cars at night, that off-peak electricity will become on-peak, and so the price per kilowatt-hour will inevitably rise. Plus, although it is obvious, don't forget that solar doesn't work at night.

Learn More

See the Voltus Power Integrity Solution Product Page and the Celsius Thermal Solver product page.

See the Cadence Future Facilities website.

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