I want these guys to succeed because they're a mile from my hangar at KAPA, but I guess key questions and points are: Industry is already using single crystal blades and superalloys, so the diagram labeling those is eye candy. No hot-day derate is great, but buyers still care about fuel burn so what does that look like? Power markets care about availability, maintenance cost and TBO in long duration operation. e.g. TBO for a King Air turboprop engine is around 3600 hours. (Sorry I happen to know that space better than others) That's 150 days of continuous operation. Overhaul cost for a P&W engine is around $850K, so a supersonic? I'm thinking a million per engine? And then there's the supply chain manufacturability risk.
It's a nice announcement. Here's a video that's been going around the pilot community on how, what Boom is calling "legacy" engines are made. You'll notice they're already using superalloys and single crystal blades and are running at temps that the metal should melt, but are using neat tricks to overcome that. And these engines are flying all around the world today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM
You can't build-fast-and-break-stuff with physics at this level. The rules are non-negotiable and you're taking the engineering right to the edge of what is possible and then pushing it a little further to differentiate your product. I think the GE, Rolls and Pratt are watching this and wondering how Boom is going to solve all the problems they've spent decades solving, and then still have time and budget to take it to the next level.
Wow, thanks a lot for a deep and insightful comment like this. I've learn quite a lot just by following your links. This is one of the reasons why I love HN and keep participating after all these years.
I spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate.
There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.
The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.
Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.
I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
> elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon ... hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
their current goal might already be "failing" (as in, lack of real demand for hypersonic travel). Investment getting hard to obtain means they're looking for more/broader investment from other investors. Thus, the hopping on of the AI bandwagon.
That's what I was thinking, if they have an engine design, I can imagine (uninformed armchair opinion) it's easier to build a power generator than a plane around it.
Another red-flag to me is the diagram labeling "proprietary superalloys". This implies more than one new metal composition, which by definition is unproven? So a new metal, in a new engine, in a new airplane.
Add to that the "titanium" lable. Nothing is pure titanium. It is all alloys, most of which are "proprietary". Inconsistant technical terminology within a diagram is a huge red flag imho.
>> Legacy turbines need huge quantities of water for cooling to avoid thermal derate in hot environments
Yup. Turbine-powered helicopters famously haul big tanks of water around when flying in hot environments. Heat is a problem, not a game changer.
> I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
IDK, the first sign to me that Boom weren't likely to succeed was when Rolls Royce parted ways on engine development (1). Were the engines not technically feasible? Not economically feasible? Didn't believe in Boom's business model? We don't know Rolls Royce's thinking, but it's a vote of no confidence.
Taking it in house seemed like a last resort - designing "a new engine in a new airframe" is a known risk. A homebrew engine can't be benefit.
They don't even have the engine: Re-purposing the hypothetical jet engines as hypothetical LLM power plants seems like a nosedive, really.
I'd assume it was because Boom wanted more collaboration and offered less margins than the current customers of DoD super secret planes. Why work harder, longer hours on someone else's idea for less money?
Yeah 100% on the same page. I wrote a detailed comment here but I left out my intuition around supersonic being less efficient. Thanks for weighing in. TBO is a huge factor and the post relies on the readers naivete around that and other factors. But mainly replying because I agree that it's an ugly look to hop onto the bandwagon like this. Especially in aerospace.
I also notice they don't mention the noise profile of these plants. Putting a stationary engine like that will make an insane amount of noise, and even enclosed will change the soundscape for miles around, affecting everything from human well-being to animals' ability to communicate. Not cool.
But maybe they aren't really thinking about that because it is nowhere near being done.
Gas turbine power generation is already a thing. For example 20% of UK grid power right now comes from "combined cycle gas turbines" - which are a very efficient way to turn natural gas into electricity. They've solved the noise issue for those plants.
Um, noise mitigation is still an issue at existing gas plants (e.g., [0-3]) and often only partially dealt with by local regulations, and this group are claiming their engine is substantially different, supersonic vs subsonic, and crossing that threshold usually involves large noise generation effects.
The deeper BS is that there is no engine. People remember the XB-1 demonstrator flying and assume that Boom is farther along than they really are. The XB-1 had off-the-shelf GE engines.
As far as I am aware even China hasn't mass produced commercial jet engines yet so the idea that Boom have one that works and can be mass produced seems highly unlikely. We'll see though I would be interested in London to New York in 3.5h, but I'm guessing the flights will be for the richest people only.
> the idea that Boom have one that works and can be mass produced seems highly unlikely.
Booms claim is they're developing and will some day real soon have "one that works" and then it can be produced at a low-enough cost in sufficient quantity.
Rich people seem to spend a lot of times in helicopters and private planes, which is dramatically more dangerous than commercial air travel.
I could off the top of my head name a few rich people that died from it. Hell, the titan submersible, while a very different animal, is a pretty clear indicator that vast wealth doesn't preclude a willingness to risk one's life in highly experimental "travel"
And they want comfort. A 5-hour flight sleeping on a flat bed is a thousand times better than an economy seat on a 3-hour flight. Part of concorde's problem was the rising expectations of first class travel in the 90s. It was never going to be compatable with today's huge first class seats.
Maybe not the richest of people, but there's a significant amount of people who got their wealth due to their love/acceptance of risk. Climbing Everest is not cheap, is still very risky, and I presume it is more expensive than a cross-Atlantic trip on these jets.
Sure, but the main risk they'd be accepting here is that of spending an inordinate amount of time hanging around in an airport terminal waiting for a broken engine to be fixed.
It'd be hard to spin that as being anything like as heroic as the risk of being killed or maimed whilst climbing Everest!
> Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate
What could be contributing to this is recently Vertasium did a whole video on how jet engines operate at temperatures above their components melting point.
And how the cold air at altitude is what keeps it from melting.
You're telling us that data centers are more sensitive to downtime than airplanes??? That makes no sense.
All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs. It's not that crazy to assume that we can design a better and more efficient turbine today with all of the help of modern technology.
Planes are quite sensitive to engine failure during flight. Data centers don’t tend to fly for three hours then sit idle for an hour, then sit idle overnight. They need to be up 24/7. When you’re talking 40 or 50 megawatts, you’re not going to necessarily buy triple or quadruple capacity. So it’d better be reliable without a lot of downtime for checks and maintenance.
> All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs.
Not even remotely correct. The concept started in the 70s, and designs have been continuously improved, using the latest modelling techniques, for the last 50 years. Modern turbines are some of the most optimized machines humanity has ever produced.
It’s interesting that this implies that building natural gas pipelines to data centers is easy, at least easier than building out substations and transmission lines. Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
In Texas a lot of natural gas is wasted/burned away as it is not profitable to collect and transport it from all oil fields. These days quite a few places put small turbines to generate electricity to do cryptocurrency mining.
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.
I have also heard about deployment of inference (LLMs etc) instead of crypto at these gas turbines. If you already have internet there, why not I guess.
a 16" natural gas pipeline moving 200 MMscf/d at pressures >1000 psi (relatively standard numbers, 16" can go up to ~600 MMscf/d) has a power transport capability of 2.5 GW (thermal). burn that in 60% efficient combined cycle turbines and you get 1 GW of electricity. that's a lot easier than building 1 GW of electric transmission lines.
1GW at 500kV three-phase AC is 1154 amps; 1 billion divided by 500,000 divided by sqrt(3).
You could handle that with one set of 1272kcmil aluminum conductors, or two sets of 300kcmil conductors, based off of this wire submittal: https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf
The voltage drop will be higher than HVDC, but AC transformers are probably an order of magnitude cheaper than HVDC switchgear. That’s the main issue with HVDC, interrupting HVDC current is very difficult since there’s no zero point like with an AC sine wave. High voltage AC breakers use SF-6 to extinguish the arc at the zero point, which happens 120 times per second at 60 hz (100 times per second for 50 hz)
>Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.
Ultimately AI comes from space :) Just wait until Starship starts flying - with its projected $/kg launch costs the placement of solar + GPUs in space would be the cheapest option (10-20kg is 1 GPU, 5 m2 solar and 2 m2 radiator (at 70C radiating away 1.5 KW) - total launch cost would be around paltry $1-2K) .
you see my numbers in my comment. I don't see any numbers in your comment (please don't give any links to the articles whose authors don't understand black body radiation formula and thus reference ISS cooling in datacenter discussion :)
I'd really like to see the math on this one. It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there? It's not just counter-intuitive, it's bonkers.
you need to look at numbers instead of intuition - intuition naturally gets us wrong when we deal with unfamiliar things like space.
A ready 10 ton house will cost $500K-1M to place in a well developed area - the cost of land itself, communications, permits, also delays and unpredictability of process, etc. Add to that yearly taxes. Add tremendous electricity costs in case of the datacenter. And all those costs have and will be growing.
Launching 10 tons on Starship - sub-$1M and that cost will drop down to about $100K-200K.
> It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there?
In Texas the electric grid is regulated by ERCOT and gas pipelines are regulated (by accident of history) by the Texas Railroad Commission. ERCOT has a big network of producers who put energy into the grid, local companies like CenterPoint Energy who distribute it to customer sites, then retail electric companies sell the power and pay a line usage fee to the line owner (which tends to be a fixed monthly cost to the customer, listed separately on the bill from other fees or usage bills). The TRC deals with companies that own their own pipelines and bill the end customer directly.
A lot of the natural gas in the US is in Texas, and a lot of it is flared while pumping out crude. Putting data centers on turbines near the extraction fields out in the Permian Basin makes sense for power. You can build short pipelines or hook into the ones already there.
They want to build them near the oil fields in texas. As of now most of those fields already run without much if any power infra in place on top of that they would be right by the natural gas generation.
Add that the manpower and expertise of running generators is abundant there and it's a prettt solid idea if they can actually make it.
WA state has the advantage of cheap electricity due to hydro projects, and before they were able to ship off their surplus to CA, they did a lot of aluminum production here to take advantage of it. I can see natural gas working similar, but I’ve also heard data centers want to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power in western states.
Transmission loss in gas pipes is probably lower than electric transmission?
Underground probably easier than above ground.
Lastly I think they are building data centers near natural gas fields...
I wouldn't expect so, because it's not just fugitive emissions we're talking about, but that you need to run a lot of big compressors to run pipelines. But often that cost isn't really counted because they just burn more gas to power them.
It's amortized for sure, gas is relatively dense in energy and can be transported long distance with minimal loss, unlike electricity. High voltage DC power lines are used in some places for long distance transport, but that's nowhere near the continent-spanning oil and gas pipes.
> If America wants to build at the speed AI requires, vertical integration isn’t optional. We’re standing up our own foundry and our own large scale CNC machining capability.
Yet China, the industrial superpower, doesn't work like that. Nothing is vertically integrated and instead a massive amount of suppliers are part of a gigantic and flexible supply-chain.
The fact that CCP's China able to have a working market of independent industrial actors, whereas Venture Capital-funded America can only works with corporation-scale central planning is an interesting paradox that I would like to have an in depth explanation for.
It's a neat picture of US vs China's mindset and societies - vertical integration is individualism (we'll do it alone) and exceptionalism (we are better than other companies at foundrying / machining). Versus central planning where things like manufacturing are part of a national plan.
Both have their place, but China is winning and has been for years now. They took over worldwide manufacturing because they were cheaper at it, first due to lower wages, but now due to their supply chains, resources, etc.
Gas turbines have a role in energy production worldwide. If this means they can run more efficiently, then there's a place for it. If the intent is to run 24/7 then it should replace existing Gas 24/7 service deployment, not add new, unless there is a reason wind+solar+storage and a (smaller? different configuration) gas peaker cannot do the job.
If this works as a rapid start gas peaker, it could help in the shift off coal and diesel. It depends on the CO/CO2 burden.
There are already quite a few rapid start gas peakers not only being produced but in-service. Nothing about Boom's stands out as being significantly different.
thats kind-of what I thought. GE sell a lot, so maybe this introduces some supply chain diversity and has a different maintenance burden and duty cycle. Thats about it.
It could be a good, relatively portable gas peaker. Though I would have thought batteries might be a better step for peak load management?
This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load?
Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here..
I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently.
If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere?
What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours.
There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
My father, who used to be a power plant mechanic, and before that a ship mechanic , helped install converted old aeroplane turbines from decommissioned US bomber planes in the 70s(we are Swedes) for use as power plants.
I think the turbine was used as a spare power generator to start the actual gas turbine, in case the plant itself lost power, if that makes sense.
This seems like marketing nonsense to me... Carnot efficiency of a gas turbine is a function of the temperature the CT blade can sustain and the ambient temperature. (1-Tc/Th). So unless they've somehow had a massive breakthrough in material science they'll be as limited as all other gas turbine OEMs.
Air blast chillers are common in this power category so water usage isn't very high.
More importantly gas turbine power figures are quoted at an ISO 15C. So if you require 42MW at 40C ambient you'll buy an overrated engine to maintain your output. They've written this as a gotcha that their engine is more powerful than a less powerful engine. Well yeah...
I though at least with this AGI datacenter push we'd see a renaissance in nuclear investments, with timelines getting more aggressive and plants actually getting built. Also getting some tangible progress in fusion would've been nice as well.
Oh come on, what is this crap? Absolutely no thermal efficiency numbers or anything else you could use to validate any claims. Especially if you are claiming that an aero-derived turbine is somehow going to be better than a purpose-built unit.
The "supersonic engines are better because they are designed to operate at hotter temperatures" argument is particularly insane: turbine efficiency is driven by turbine inlet temperature (already 3000ish C), not ambient temperature.
I suppose it's only right that VCs are going to get scammed by LLM slop.
Unfortunately there's too much distraction regarding the AI side of the discussion, to actually look at the generation tech itself.
For all their discussion of high temperature operation, it seems the only advantage at the end of the day is to eliminate water consumption in cooling. I question if that's really so valuable?
I also don't think it's necessarily true? A jet engine (which many many power turbines can run off of) can obviously run without cooling water on a hot day just fine.
There may be some use cases, this makes it comparable to an emergency generator (no water or steam involved)... but that very much limits its uses, and it's marketed as if it should be part of the main power grid.
They wanted to build a spaceship (project Orion), but first had to come up with something they could sell immediately, hence they designed the commercially very succesfull Triga reactor.
Well, even Blake knows that Overture is highly unlikely to survive as a product. Best of luck to him with this pivot. I really wish him success. He has spent more than a decade of his life on this project.
I'm curious how the planes are going. Looking it up it seems th XB-1 prototype did mach 1.1 but then they retired it which seems odd as it's design was for mach 2.2 and a 1000 mile range. If they could say to investors we said 2.2 and look, it really happened than might be a better sell?
The top speed is interesting because they are claiming to go fast with relatively little power due to superior aerodynamics which would be more convincing if they demonstrated it.
Yeah, if (BIG if) they actually generate demand for it, mass producing power generators will be easier to do than mass producing planes. Starlink was SpaceX's way to generate their own demand - they have a vision of scaling up rocket launchers, but without Starlink there wouldn't be enough demand for it. Likewise I can imagine there won't be much demand for hypersonic airplanes, not enough to run a business. At least the Concorde was only one of several models that the manufacturers produced, so it wasn't their only product.
I can see some issues there. Spacex was in a unique position to do starlink as about the only cheap launch provider whereas there are many existing gas turbine producers. Also the gas turbine thing is a bit of a temporary fix to get power for the AI bubble. Longer term they'll probably use more environmentally friendly solutions?
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Now deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators.
The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow.
Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra.
When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
You can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.
Hence Islanded i.e. skip grid because US incompetence is inability to hook up grid with multiyear lead times due to skilled labour shortage. The entire point is to skip the grid or rather, due to US constraints, hook up to grid not really an option to meet rollout timelines.
The final analysis is still pending, afaik. In any case maintaining grid stability is a good problem to have and likely much easier to solve than generation. Worst case, you spin some flywheels to get inertia.
I was going to mention China, but you already did; if the US really wants to scale up electricity generation and do it fast, they can get China involved. China's doing it everywhere else in the world already, and (tin foil hat on) it's why they will overtake US as the biggest and most influential super power.
Burning more fossil fuels in noisy, polluting ways is not a good tradeoff considering most “AI” itself is questionably a net positive, and certainly not worth the current levels of investment.
Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.
Managed to talk about china's energy buildout _without_ mention of renewables?
I think this pivot is 100% designed to get government money:
- natrual gas turbine
- china is scary
- something something it's a race
- china energy is good because no regulations, totally not because they are lapping the world on renewable buildout
Perhaps not in a 100% world, though I'll give you the point that they are useful now.
In a 100% renewable world we would not be extracting or refining oil. Natural gas (used by these turbines) is a byproduct of oil drilling. Were we not burning the oil, the natural gas might be too expensive alone.
Also, in a 100% renewable world we would (by definition) have enough generation all the time - (covered by batteries and good baseload sources) that turbine power was no longer required to cover peak loads.
It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
Somebody calculated that a home in UK needs 1 Megawatt-Hour battery to backup solar energy during the winter. I suspect in 10 years that may cost below 25K, a small fraction of the property cost.
But is it really 1 MWh of _electricity_, or could you replace a good chunk of that with a huge tank of boiling water? In the winter, about half of my electricity consumption goes to my heat pump, to produce 45-50C water for heating and tap water. But if we could increase the reservoir temperature to 95C (or even go superheated to 160C at 6 bar), then it could supply the 45-50C flow temperature much longer without needing to recharge.
That's probably assuming a solar system sized to cover typical summer energy usage. You can simply over-provision solar until you have wasted capacity in summer and little to no storage requirement in winter. Then it's just a tradeoff between battery and solar costs to find the best price point.
Also this calculation probably assumes no baseload power imported from the grid, where means such as wind and tidal power work year-round and help offset the need for batteries.
That is right (if rather exaggerated, and I will note that it was you who originally picked the figure of two percent), and in practice, we accept a certain risk that we will not always have all the capacity we want, even though (or because) we cannot precisely predict how big or often these events will be. There is no particular reason to think this specific case is any different.
Why can't we predict how big or how often those events would be? We have clear understandings of the distribution of probabilities for all kinds of weather scenarios - see for example 1-50/100/1000 year flood/droughts.
I'm not saying we cannot do it, just that we cannot always get it right, and there is plenty of empirical evidence for that.
The second point is that the distribution has a long tail, especially when we consider the possibility of multiple independent incidents overlapping in time, to the point where it becomes infeasible to suppose that we could be prepared to continue operating as if nothing had happened in all conceivable scenarios, regardless of how accurately we could predict their likelihood.
I do not understand your argument We also cannot get right predicting the failures of fossil fuel generation. Sometimes multiple plants have outages that coincide and we have blackouts. Shit happens, and will continue to happen. Meanwhile we can make statistically rational plans.
We have coal fired plants in Australia with <90% uptime (often unscheduled), but somehow they're considered baseload rather than intermittent.
And I cannot figure out why you are saying this, as nothing I have said previously either contradicts what you say here, or is contradicted by it. If you could say what you think I am saying in my posts in this thread, we can sort it out.
EDIT: I see the problem starts with the first sentence of your first post here: “Why can't we predict how big or how often those events would be?” - which is completely beside the point in my response to rgmerk, who wrote “It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.” My response to this and the follow-up is this: a) if we are talking about two percent, we can overbuild the renewable capacity, and b) if we are considering all eventualities, there inevitably comes a point where we say that we are not going to prepare for uninterrupted service in this event.
No you didn't; you pointed out why it is not, in itself, a significant issue in the first place (which rgmerk tacitly seems to recognize in his first response, through pivoting away from the 2% claim.) My position on this has been that if the issue really is over ~2%, there is a simple solution.
I'll state it plainly: to get to the same level of reliability as the existing grid with just wind, solar, and batteries requires unacceptable amounts of overprovisioning of these at high latitude (or unacceptably high transmission cost).
Fortunately, use of different long duration storage (not batteries) can solve the problem more economically.
"Creative" re/misinterpretation is becoming quite a thing here - what I actually did was agree that rgmerk had a more defensible position after he pivoted away from his original ~2% claim to a more reasonable one.
I'll state it plainly: rgmerk's subsequent pivot in his stated claims does not retroactively make my response to his original claim wrong! (Not even if the subsequent claim more accurately reflects what he really meant to say.) I am having trouble figuring out why anyone would think otherwise.
We can and do, and there are detailed plans based on those weather scenarios (eg for the Australian east coast grid; there is AEMO’s Integrated System Plan).
Things in the US are a bit more of a mixed bag, for better or worse, but there have been studies done that suggest that you can get very high renewables levels cost effectively, but not to 100% without new technology (eg “clean firm” power like geothermal, new nuclear being something other than a clusterfumble, long-term storage like iron-air batteries, etc etc etc).
The best technologies there are (IMO) e-fuels and extremely low capex thermal.
There are interesting engineering problems for sources that are intended to operate very infrequently and at very low capacity factor, as might be needed for covering Dunkleflauten. E-fuels burned with liquid oxygen (and water to reduce temperature) in rocket-like combustors might be better than conventional gas turbines for that.
It's mostly something I thought about myself. The prompting idea was how to massively reduce the capex of a turbine system, even if that increases the marginal cost per kWh when the system is in use, and also the observation of th incredibly high power density of rockets (they're the highest power density heat engines humanity makes). So, get rid of the compressor stage of the turbine, be open cycle so there's no need to condense steam back to water, and operate at higher pressure (at least an order of magnitude higher than combustion turbines) so the entire thing can be smaller.
You'd have to pay for storage of water and LOX (and making the LOX) so this wouldn't make sense to prolonged usage. On the plus side, using pure LOX means no NOx formation, so you also lose the catalytic NOx destruction system a stationary gas turbine would need to treat its exhaust.
I vaguely recall some people in Germany were looking at something like this but I don't remember any details.
The problem is the last two percent isn't evenly distributed in time, but rather occurs rarely, but in large chunks. On average it's 2%, but not at each point in time.
Also, if solar ends up much cheaper than wind there's going to be need for seasonal energy storage, which could be considerably more than 2% at high latitude. Batteries are unsuitable for this.
Particularly with the development of fracking, natural gas production is no longer a just a byproduct of oil production, and can be (and is) pursued independently. Nevertheless, I agree that we developing renewables should be our priority.
If China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
China's energy buildout is still mostly coal. Go look at the last 20 years how much energy they've added for coal vs solar. Dont fall for the "solar has increased by 500%" trap.
They are replacing old coal plants with more efficient cleaner designers. National security wise they still have lots of coal to work with, while most renewable energy is generated in the west where ongoing grid upgrades are needed to use it where people live (in the east).
The newer plants not only more efficient going from 30-35% of peak efficiency to something like 45%, they can also operate efficiently over wider range of power output and are faster to turn on/off.
This is very helpful to deal with variability with renewable output.
Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.
Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]
No fundamental reason not to power them with renewables, either off-grid or with a small capacity grid connection. The argument that they need to run at full load 24x7 sounds more like a business requirement than a technical one. LLMs in particular with their stateless nature seem like an ideal candidate for global distribution.
The capital cost of the AI hardware is high and it depreciates quickly, being worthless in 5 years (or less). To make a profit, it needs to be run 24/7.
It’s sort of like how airlines like to fly their airplanes as much as possible.
Because coal use was increasing before this year, but the increase was very small this year. So, continued rapid installation of solar/wind/storage will likely lead to a decline in coal use next year.
What, you think continued rapid decrease in cost of solar and storage will somehow make this not happen?
"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America."
I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
This article makes me wonder what's become of the RR/Snecma_Olympus_593 of concorde fame (beyond being museum showpieces). Could they have been repurposed?
I'm very glad Boom has to pivot to AI data centers: this means their main objective (building a supersonic plane) is in trouble, and they'll go broke soon.
Since the beginning they've been lying with green buzzwords or even "USD 100 in 4 hours to anywhere in the world". The reality is that the plane would be used by business and rich travelers burning more fuel just to save a couple of hours. Flying slower if always going to be cheaper and more efficient (unless they are working on a new technology, but they aren't). They even have the audacity to applaud themselves with the phrase "the first completely private supersonic plane", with a picture of their demonstrator beside a supersonic chase plane from the 60s.
I don’t think business and rich people will use it either. The Concorde worked because you were in a black hole while you crossed the Atlantic, unable to work and unplugged from what was going on. So saving 5 hours was extremely valuable. Now, we have laptops and in-flight wifi, so you don’t miss much on the plane like you used to. Combine that with ultra luxury first class cabins that make the flight extremely comfortable, and saving some time while having to sacrifice all the amenities that come with a good first/business class cabin on a full sized airplane just doesn’t make sense.
Even private planes just don’t feel like they would make sense. Most private jets are used for regional and transcon, and the time savings would be much less significant at those distances. I feel like most wealthy individuals would rather upgrade to a larger, more comfortable, and/or longer-range jet than to sacrifice comfort, size, and range for supersonic. Only the truly ultra-wealthy seem like they might pick up a few, but that is such a vanishingly small market.
Dubious or non-existent performance numbers, self-aggrandizing references to being in close contact with other, more famous/infamous CEOs/people, and the bluster of urgency as a smokescreen to hide the lack of anything concrete throughout- this Blake Scholl is following the Elon Musk playbook to a "T".
Burn more fossil fuel to generate more slop. Wonderful!
Also, I somehow doubt that an upstart aerospace company can make more efficient gas turbines than companies with ~sixty years of experience in this space (Siemens, Westinghouse, GE, Mitsubishi).
A quick search indicates that at least Mitsubishi have a 41MW gas turbine generator, with some configurations producing 120MW.
So it AI companies want to power their datacenters with gas turbines, they can just place an order right now. I'd guess it's probably not something they want to deal with, better to offload the risk/cost to the exciting power companies.
But would the responses be any different back then? Energy innovations like battery tech were also looked at critically back then. There's even a template doing the rounds with a checklist for supposedly revolutionary battery tech.
Using a turbine to generate electricity isn't innovative or brave, it's been done, the technology has been around for over a hundred years, but it's not widely used because there's better ways to generate electricity.
There are multiple manufacturers currently making gas turbines that are exactly this size. They’ve been making them for at least 50 years.
This is not brave or innovative, it’s a cash grab during a bubble. You can call a Siemens or GE sales rep and place an order right now for the exact same thing.
Siemens power-generating turbines are designed for -50C/+50C temperature envelope. All jet engines lose efficiency at higher ambient temperature due to thermodynamics, no matter how good their HP turbine blade tech.
They're jet engines - very loud. They're acting like this is new tech or something innovative - it's not. Google "RB211 industrial gas turbine" and watch a vid of one being fired up - they're used to pump oil in pipelines around the world, and power oil rigs, etc - been around for decades.
What is strange about it? Normal power plants have 2-3 gigawatts. Gas turbine having 300MW is probably just below average. What am I missing? Is it some US thing where G scale is not 10^9?
This is all I can think of and it depresses me how exciting the video is about turning more materials into emissions. I get I have no power over these people building this, but I just wish they didn't make it. I don't want the world to keep building more amazing ways to burn things I or my neighbors will eventually have to breathe in.
But you have to consider that they could use this energy to generate AI videos about renewable energy and environmentalism, which will educate the next generation of kids. So on a long enough timescale, this could actually decrease the overall pollution! It's basically Effective Altruism applied to energy.
We're using plane engines to generate electricity and my residential bill is almost $0.20/kWh because we invested in chat bots instead of the infrastructure the chat bots need.
Natural gas turbines are pretty common (power plants, large on site/mobile generators) and the efficiency levels of these are the same as what you'd see in similar use cases. Turbines don't really care what they're doing (within reason), these just happen to share a lot of parts with a plane engine.
The cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed.
For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live.
In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
These guys are acting as though this is some new concept, whilst they've just rebranded it in a shiny silver package. Aero derived gas turbines like the RR RB211 are everywhere, already packaged like this, powering oil rigs and pipelines everywhere - I worked on them years ago.
Looking forward to coal companies jumping on the bandwagon if they haven't already - "Introducing CoalGen 3.0 - our new cloud connected, AI powering, next gen coal power station."
Every passing day it feels more and more like we're living in some Wall-E like, capitalist dystopia where everything has just lost all purpose and capitalism has just gone into runaway mode, having fine tuned everything for maximum profit, instead of us producing things we and the planet actually need.
This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet. Lots of pretty 3d renders and a wall of (what appears to be AI written) corpo-speak proposing some crazy technology that will revolutionize x.
It looks cool -- don't get me wrong -- but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
Did I miss something or does the article not even say how much gas they need as an input to generate the 42MW? I see they deride conventional turbines for needing cooling, but the reason they do is to increase the temp differential between hot and cold end of the turbine because some clever fellow named Carnot figured out that the amount of energy you can extract depends on this. Instead it seems that they just full-tilt run a supersonic turbine and blow the hot exhaust with all its energy into the air. So what’s the efficiency of this?
Indeed. My understanding of modern powerstation gas turbines is that they all basically run _at_ the Carnot efficiency eta = (1-T_cold / T_hot) and that rather than chasing marginal gains in how close to that theoretical limit you actually are the biggest differentiators are on maintenance intervals and reliability, which collectively have quite a large effect on eta...
> how much gas they need as an input to generate the 42MW
If you don't have a pipeline, the lower bound is something like 10 LNG tanker trucks per day for each turbine at 42MW. Natural gas is incredibly efficient to transport in liquid form so you could theoretically get away with this for a little while.
The question I’m asking is slightly tangent to how to feed the required gas. It’s “How many MW of gas do I need to feed in to get one MW of electricity.” And they’re pointedly avoiding any statement about this.
To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
> To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
Not "insane", just "lots". Everything in a nation of mere single-digit millions is "lots", let alone the whole world. The quantity isn't far off what's needed anyway to electrify road transport.
But also, the other option besides batteries, for people who want specifically PV to supply power at night to specifically high latitude locations with long winter nights, is to have a long power line going to somewhere less silly to put the PV:
Many such power lines already exist, upgrading them was already necessary even without any questions about the sources putting tension on the lines because they're just so old now, the only question is the *delta* in cost between what would have been needed with no changes in supply and demand vs. what is needed given those have both changed.
And before anyone says "what about grid losses?", right now, China (and only China, and yes I have checked) makes enough aluminium they could put a girdle around the earth with 1 Ω resistance the long way around using a bit less than 5% of their recent production in about 20 years.
The rest of us would need to massively increase our aluminium production to get close to that; it's not immediately obvious why we couldn't given they did.
From ERCOT's stats- wind is complimentary. But, I can't find any hard data on intraday/hourly power usage for AI it seems reasonable to assume that night time use will be lower though.
And so it doesn't have to be looked up: Wind seems to peak at dawn/dusk when solar is not delivery much power, solar peaks in line with air-conditioning load, and there's a miniscule amount of grid scale battery to hold up the grid during a short gap between solar and wind. The batteries are recharged with solar. At least that was the pattern this summer- I need to check now that it's winter.
You get 42MW inside the footprint of what looks like 2 truck trailers, that you can park in the parking lot next to the electrical transformers. Virtually no permitting or installation required.
Decent for large scale backup perhaps? Or remote plants (almost always mining in the middle of nowhere). Remote plants have fuel logistics already.
Another fit might be somewhere like singapore which is very space poor but very trade connected. But they're currently building a ocean power cable to Australia where they will tap a massive solar farm or existing grid.
It probably fits some use cases better than any alternatives, but for powering cities and suburbia I think renewables still make heaps of sense when space is available somewhere that can join the grid.
Yes yes, we will surround entire turbine in piezoelectric substrate and extract energy from vibrations. It is solved problem. Then we use energy to distill fuel from CO2 in air, making it carbon neutral. Resulting fuel we will put in turbine. Zero loss generator. Can build it in cave with scraps.
Possibly, but I suspect mobile turbines (aircraft) are unquietened (noisy) by design because they don’t really need to be quiet at 35000ft.
Presumably a static turbine is minimizing noisy thrust in exchange for torque while also exhausting through an expansion chamber surrounded by deflective earthworks or some other shielding. (Although the one in the article is indeed all outside in the open.)
actually they've down much quieter in the past 40 years. e.g. the 787 dreamliner has wavy bits on the exit of the nozzle that reduce efficiency by 1% in exchange for quieter operation because making the engine quieter reduces the amount and weight of noise insulation in the cabin
Oh of course, I didn’t mean to say that they weren’t as quiet as they need to be, only that there ought to be some obvious noise reduction opportunities once the requirement to be airborne is gone, and once the machine is being used for torque instead of thrust.
No, they’ve been intentionally designing them to be quieter for decades because they are in hearing distance for quite a lot of miles during takeoff and landing. I suspect you can better insulate one on land though since you’re less constrained on size and weight.
> perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem [..] but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
I like the part where when considering a complex topic, "it became clear" to the guy after a few conversations. Confidence inspiring, no doubt innovative, we should probably not be asking impertinent questions! No idea if the tech is sound but I immediately get scam vibes just from how quickly it leaped into name-dropping Musk and Altman.
> This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
I think at this point LinkedIn culture is fairly globalized. Though America may be to blame for getting it there, largely via Deloitte & co originally. It's originally the language of managerialism.
Pah! Solar and batteries?! Have you been living under a rock for the last 12 months? Any startup that dares to suggest solutions based on solar and batteries (not to mention windmills) is sure to attract the ire of the Trump administration, so they'd better keep quiet and hope he doesn't notice them!
Actually, renewables seem to be such a no-no that the Boom blog even avoids mentioning them in the sentence "Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace — coal, gas, nuclear, everything" - even though China added overwhelmingly more renewable capacity last year than anything else: according to https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/..., solar increased by 43% from Feb. 2024 to Feb. 2025, wind increased by 17.6%, hydro by 3.5%, while thermal and nuclear increased by 3.9% and 6.9% respectively.
AI data centers still consume a lot less than most other things on the grid. In percentages it's less than 1%. Much less. It might get to a percent in a few years. The energy demand growth from other sources is much more significant. Things like industrial heating, domestic heating and other domestic usage, transport (car and truck charging), etc. are growing much more aggressively than even the most aggressive growth scenarios for AI.
Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate.
Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years).
In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays.
A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics.
Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.
> Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
> Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen.
The US (or at least, fossil fuel interests in the US which seem to have a lot of influence over the current administration) seem determined to become an "energy superpower" by exporting oil and gas. In particular, seems they'd very much like Europe to switch from Russian gas to US LNG. We'll see how that goes. Personally, I find it hard to see how LNG from the other side of the world will remain competitive with ever-reducing costs of solar, wind, and batteries.
But as a business staggery for Boom Supersonic, it kind of seems like a good idea. They get a (hopefully short term) revenue stream, and a whole bunch of "real world" testing on their engine core.
It's about as good an idea as firing up a bunch more coal power stations.
The grid, at least in the UK, has a bunch of these industrial gas turbines for coping with peak demand, etc and being able to quickly add more power to the grid.
Not exactly something you want running in huge numbers for a long time or you may as well wave your climate emissions targets goodbye.
Today I learned a thing! It makes sense that subsonic engines and supersonic engines would be different in retrospect but upon reading the headline I thought for sure it was going to be some kind of weird "jump on the AI hype train" article.
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
Normally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.
Yeah, its totally inefficient - according to Wikipedia a simple cycle gas turbine can be up to 43% efficient - with a combined cycle (you boil water with the first stage jet engine exhaust and then run a steam turbine off that) it can get up to 64%.
So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use.
Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
They already have well over double the US solar output (US solar output is about 750 Twh according to this source, while China's is a bit over 2000 Twh) and their YoY solar increase is about 4x the US (600 Twh increase in China vs 150 Twh increase in the US)
They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.
My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
In the last year of that graph 2023-2024, the increase in solar was greater than any other source, including coal, it's 15x greater than nuclear.
And unless people are shoveling coal directly into the data centres this electricity generating gas turbine is intended to be used for the electricity generation mix is more appropriate to conapre:
Why are they looking at the most recent year when discussing the changing trend of exponential differential growth to point out it has now surpassed others, instead of the prior years where that differential was slower and the other was still growing faster?
No because they are highlighting a single year where solar was exceptionally high and when you look at a 5 year period it tells a completely different story. If you look at future investment there is still 60 trillion being spent on new coal and while thats smaller than the future investment in solar you need to account for the fact that there current power is already 60% coal.
Even if we give China the most charity and take their 2025 results at face vault(even though they NEED to be independently verified) China is at best average when it comes % of gridpower that is renewable. Off the top of my head I think they are like 27-30% renewable. But its actually worse because they are the biggest polluter by a mile. Bigger the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
The chain is about the statement "China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything" being disputed by the solar capacity being added. Whats being highlighted is that while solar is increasing its still a small % compared to the other types being added. If they add 800TWh of solar and 1000TWh of coal and 500TWh of other stuff they arent adding mostly solar like you keep claiming. We are not looking at % increases we are looking at actual increases relative to the total energy supply.
The 3 electricity sources mentioned in that quote combined together added less new generation in China than solar alone last year. Wind beat them all individually too.
Well good, those are the correct numbers focus on because:
Solar capacity and say nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil capacity
Are different beasts.
When solar advocates bang on about adding X gigawatts of capacity, they’re being dishonest. What they really mean is they added X/4, because, obviously, it’s sunny only about 25% of the time throughout a year.
Adding batteries doesn’t change that. Still have to over build.
So let’s focus on the numbers that reflect actual production, so we can have an honest conversation.
Nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil, even biomass have capacity factors typically about 80%, often about 90%.
Wind and solar are never going up ro those capacity factors, even with batteries (including pumped hydro).
In the graph I'm looking at, with no extrapolating, solar energy is a tiny sliver of coal. If I extrapolate, crossing of the lines looks like something in the far future.
We're all too busy filling out forms to manufacture anything in the West. They don't have to declare their conflict minerals contents (which seem impossible to verify), or even try to measure the PFAS in their products (good luck figuring out the PFAS contents of complex products like electronics).
More like we've spent decades offshoring every step of the manufacturing pipeline - from material processing to manufacturing tooling and all the skills and expertise in between - and now it's reached a state where even if you wanted to spin up manufacturing on the same scale locally, you need those decades again to bring every part of the economy back to support it.
That's true, but the GP still has a point. Manufacturing is easier in countries with less regulation about it. Yet we have to ask ourselves, how do we want to live?
I mean, we have those regulations because nobody wants to live in Lahore, Pakistan.
Are you arguing that USA can no longer build parking lots due to environmental concerns? If so, that would indeed be remarkable since parking lots seem to be the facility that almost every US town has been able to build more than enough of.
Great, that's what we need. More fossil fuel powered, CO² emitting, supersonic turbines polluting our environment. Unless I see a sea of solar powered carbon capturing machines,somewhere in the Saharan desert, churning the CO² back to natural gas to power these turbines, I hate this.
I think you're missing the point. Once we've bruteforced the computer god into being he will absolve us of all the sins of destroying the place we live and magically create for us a utopia of so much free energy that we won't have to worry about having an atmosphere.
We will create computer god and ask it how to save our environment and climate and it will look at all the data we have fed it over the years and say "You've known the answer for decades, you just didn't like it. Not building me would have been a good start."
I wonder how these elites (you are one, if you can reach San Altman by text) are so detached from reality, that they think that bragging about a gas powered turbine, in this day and age, in the given environment, for something as ludicrous as predictive text generation is a such a flex!
I didn't read it that way because Boom went through YC while Sam was president of YC. The connection makes a lot of sense, and dates back to pre-OpenAI days.
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
So many cults of personality these days between Musk, Trump, Altman, Neuman (WeWork guy)...
Maybe it started with Jobs, maybe it's always been a thing in other spaces (politics, religion...) and is now coming to business and these uber wealthy individuals who put their pants on two legs at a time
It also seemed to be like that 100-150 years ago, with all the big-name robber barons, oil/steel/rail tycoons and inventor-industrialists like Edison or Ford.
There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.
To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
It's also such a stupid question to ask. No one doubts AI needs fuckton of power. Not the fanboys or the haters or even the don't-cares.
What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
Just vomited in my mouth a little bit. A supersonic aerospace company doing a half-assed pivot into fossil fuel electricity generation to, what, try to simultaneously capitalize on AI CAPEX while also soliciting government handouts?
Please don't post snarky, shallow dismissals on HN. You may not owe aerospace startups any better, but you owe the community better if you want to participate here.
What are you trying to say? That no company that makes money from the market can also try to get government funding, even for a different part of their business? Or is this only supersonic aerospace companies, not conventional aerospace? Or only if it's fossil fuel. What a bizarre list of conditions to make you vomit. You can't possibly have thought of that in advance. I suspect you don't know what you're saying at all.
I’m not going to bother formulating a serious response to such an incredibly insane attempt at shoving words and positions into my mouth to fit your own preconceived narrative.
I tried my best to understand your position but the more details I included from your statement, the more ridiculous it became. You should just say what you mean instead of that.
all this for predictive text, not even robotics. Not protein folding, not simulations of the early universe. Not even some embodied AI learning from a simulated environment.
This feels cynical and ugly, and I am pretty disgusted by the way things are going in this space. I don't see any reason to trust Boom based on their history, and I am sick and tired of the "solution" to bad ideas being more bad ideas. We need renewables and grid infrastructure, not yet more fossil fuels.
Additionally,
1) Aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades. "Oh but we have supersonic engines" does not change the fundamental equation
2) They're proposing burning more fossil fuels dug up from the ground to feed a beast that in my opinion is destroying the entire world economy, and certainly harming freedom
3) Where are they even getting the fuel? Magic? Someone has to build the pipelines, and someone has to supply the fuel.
Whoa - no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how strongly a topic makes you feel, you can't post like this to Hacker News. It's vastly against the site guidelines.
Yes, Boom is a YC startup, and the GP comment was unacceptable and the sort of thing we ban accounts for. Both are the case, and that doesn't change depending on who a comment is talking about.
> announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine
Is global warming solved? Last time I checked, I was to throw away my repairable ICE vehicle for an expensive unrepairable disposable vehicle in order to save the planet. Just curious how a 42-megawatt gas turbine is helping the planet.
A 2 GW DC only needs 48 of those things. About 11.5M tons of CO₂ per year. It’s always on full blast so everything must be calculated 100%.
A new Civic going 8,000 miles a years at will produce 2.4 tons. So yeah one new DC is 4,700 cars. Which you’re supposed to replace with electric cars that will be fed with a non-existent power source, which means apparently even more gas turbine power plants.
Most assumptions about renewables don’t account for continuous 24/7 loads. Stuff like storage doesn’t help with that. I have noticed very little talk about AI DCs varying their loads to match renewable generation from solar/wind.
This sounds like the “t-shirt printers” of the 90s. While everyone was busy trying to invent the future, boring old manufacturing got ignored.
Turns out printing t-shirts isn’t that different from printing silicon. Now Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.
Boom’s founder, Blake, comes from a e-commerce background. What a legend for this innovation.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.
I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.
Nobody competes with China on lots of things because of government subsidies both direct and indirect (like devaluing currency). We could do those too if we had to.
I agree that the problem is regulatory. But I don't think that it's easily waved away. Chinese solar and is a huge benefit to humankind, but also they have a commanding lead on it. And possibly in BEVs too.
They do, because the government decided to have a commanding lead on it and threw money at it. Which I wish we had done. Until 2020 we didn’t place much value on domestic manufacturing.
> A federal judge on Monday struck down President Trump’s halt on approvals of all wind power projects on federal lands and waters, dealing a significant legal setback to the administration’s campaign against wind farms.
I understand that turbines are very handy in power generation but we don't use gyroscopic power storage because the inertia gets scary at high RPMs. Turbines lake the momentum but make up for it by being entirely made of knives. You lose an engine mount or throw a blade and you're deep in the shit.
I don’t understand your point about UPS 2976. You make it sound as if people there were hurt by the engine parts hitting them. But in actuality it is the airplane crashing into them which killed those unfortunate.
Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
The plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel.
The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.
Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
I’m aware of the facts you say. But they have nothing to do with terrestial operations. If the same thing happened to an engine sitting next to a data center the worst thing which could happen is it knocks the neighbouring engines out too. And if you are worried about that you can add more armouring between the engines. Which you can do because they don’t need to fly. Heck you can put a row of hesco barriers between engines in a terrestial application. But either way the data center is not going to suddenly fall on a fuel recycling plant.
(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)
I want these guys to succeed because they're a mile from my hangar at KAPA, but I guess key questions and points are: Industry is already using single crystal blades and superalloys, so the diagram labeling those is eye candy. No hot-day derate is great, but buyers still care about fuel burn so what does that look like? Power markets care about availability, maintenance cost and TBO in long duration operation. e.g. TBO for a King Air turboprop engine is around 3600 hours. (Sorry I happen to know that space better than others) That's 150 days of continuous operation. Overhaul cost for a P&W engine is around $850K, so a supersonic? I'm thinking a million per engine? And then there's the supply chain manufacturability risk.
It's a nice announcement. Here's a video that's been going around the pilot community on how, what Boom is calling "legacy" engines are made. You'll notice they're already using superalloys and single crystal blades and are running at temps that the metal should melt, but are using neat tricks to overcome that. And these engines are flying all around the world today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM
You can't build-fast-and-break-stuff with physics at this level. The rules are non-negotiable and you're taking the engineering right to the edge of what is possible and then pushing it a little further to differentiate your product. I think the GE, Rolls and Pratt are watching this and wondering how Boom is going to solve all the problems they've spent decades solving, and then still have time and budget to take it to the next level.
Edit: Superalloys in existing engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=fxzFXoSICX8dtsg5&t=1027 Single crystal blades in existing engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=XpnAgVH1QmLiX0g0&t=1650
Wow, thanks a lot for a deep and insightful comment like this. I've learn quite a lot just by following your links. This is one of the reasons why I love HN and keep participating after all these years.
Thanks, that's very kind.
Those single crystal turbine blades and all the associated trickery are truly amazing.
I spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate.
There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.
The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.
Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.
I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
> elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon ... hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
their current goal might already be "failing" (as in, lack of real demand for hypersonic travel). Investment getting hard to obtain means they're looking for more/broader investment from other investors. Thus, the hopping on of the AI bandwagon.
It doesn't paint a pretty picture tbh.
That's what I was thinking, if they have an engine design, I can imagine (uninformed armchair opinion) it's easier to build a power generator than a plane around it.
They have an engine design possibly. Not a proven one, since what they don't have is working engines of that design.
Another red-flag to me is the diagram labeling "proprietary superalloys". This implies more than one new metal composition, which by definition is unproven? So a new metal, in a new engine, in a new airplane.
It's exactly what existing manufacturers are doing. What they're calling "legacy".
Here, watch this which goes into detail on existing superalloy tech used in todays engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=coIv6w0N2BZ4EOTK&t=1027 and
And here's how single crystal blades are already being used in today's engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=XpnAgVH1QmLiX0g0&t=1650
Add to that the "titanium" lable. Nothing is pure titanium. It is all alloys, most of which are "proprietary". Inconsistant technical terminology within a diagram is a huge red flag imho.
>> Legacy turbines need huge quantities of water for cooling to avoid thermal derate in hot environments
Yup. Turbine-powered helicopters famously haul big tanks of water around when flying in hot environments. Heat is a problem, not a game changer.
> I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
IDK, the first sign to me that Boom weren't likely to succeed was when Rolls Royce parted ways on engine development (1). Were the engines not technically feasible? Not economically feasible? Didn't believe in Boom's business model? We don't know Rolls Royce's thinking, but it's a vote of no confidence.
Taking it in house seemed like a last resort - designing "a new engine in a new airframe" is a known risk. A homebrew engine can't be benefit.
They don't even have the engine: Re-purposing the hypothetical jet engines as hypothetical LLM power plants seems like a nosedive, really.
https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...
I'd assume it was because Boom wanted more collaboration and offered less margins than the current customers of DoD super secret planes. Why work harder, longer hours on someone else's idea for less money?
Possible, but I would not assume anything. It's also possible that what they need to make the aircraft work just isn't practical.
Yeah 100% on the same page. I wrote a detailed comment here but I left out my intuition around supersonic being less efficient. Thanks for weighing in. TBO is a huge factor and the post relies on the readers naivete around that and other factors. But mainly replying because I agree that it's an ugly look to hop onto the bandwagon like this. Especially in aerospace.
I also notice they don't mention the noise profile of these plants. Putting a stationary engine like that will make an insane amount of noise, and even enclosed will change the soundscape for miles around, affecting everything from human well-being to animals' ability to communicate. Not cool.
But maybe they aren't really thinking about that because it is nowhere near being done.
Gas turbine power generation is already a thing. For example 20% of UK grid power right now comes from "combined cycle gas turbines" - which are a very efficient way to turn natural gas into electricity. They've solved the noise issue for those plants.
Um, noise mitigation is still an issue at existing gas plants (e.g., [0-3]) and often only partially dealt with by local regulations, and this group are claiming their engine is substantially different, supersonic vs subsonic, and crossing that threshold usually involves large noise generation effects.
[0] https://aercoustics.com/blog/noise-vibration-gas-turbine-cog...
[1] https://www.powermag.com/major-noise-sources-and-mitigation-...
[2] https://www.turbomachinerymag.com/view/noise-levels-at-energ...
[3] https://turbinelogic.com/enc/cog-gt-units/regulatory-safety-...
Put it on springs and bury it deep?
The deeper BS is that there is no engine. People remember the XB-1 demonstrator flying and assume that Boom is farther along than they really are. The XB-1 had off-the-shelf GE engines.
As far as I am aware even China hasn't mass produced commercial jet engines yet so the idea that Boom have one that works and can be mass produced seems highly unlikely. We'll see though I would be interested in London to New York in 3.5h, but I'm guessing the flights will be for the richest people only.
> the idea that Boom have one that works and can be mass produced seems highly unlikely.
Booms claim is they're developing and will some day real soon have "one that works" and then it can be produced at a low-enough cost in sufficient quantity.
Yes, it's dubious.
Presumably the richest people also don't want to risk their lives flying on some sketchy aircraft, just to shave a few hours off their journey.
Rich people seem to spend a lot of times in helicopters and private planes, which is dramatically more dangerous than commercial air travel.
I could off the top of my head name a few rich people that died from it. Hell, the titan submersible, while a very different animal, is a pretty clear indicator that vast wealth doesn't preclude a willingness to risk one's life in highly experimental "travel"
If I can have a lie flat bed, a decent chair and wifi, I'll take 20 hour flight. Wifi and beds change the equation.
And they want comfort. A 5-hour flight sleeping on a flat bed is a thousand times better than an economy seat on a 3-hour flight. Part of concorde's problem was the rising expectations of first class travel in the 90s. It was never going to be compatable with today's huge first class seats.
Maybe not the richest of people, but there's a significant amount of people who got their wealth due to their love/acceptance of risk. Climbing Everest is not cheap, is still very risky, and I presume it is more expensive than a cross-Atlantic trip on these jets.
Sure, but the main risk they'd be accepting here is that of spending an inordinate amount of time hanging around in an airport terminal waiting for a broken engine to be fixed.
It'd be hard to spin that as being anything like as heroic as the risk of being killed or maimed whilst climbing Everest!
> their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime
Presumably they deploy multiple engines so they can stagger maintenance and not have a single point of failure.
> Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate
What could be contributing to this is recently Vertasium did a whole video on how jet engines operate at temperatures above their components melting point.
And how the cold air at altitude is what keeps it from melting.
https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM
It’s perfect way to test out reliability kinks without actually flying tho.
You're telling us that data centers are more sensitive to downtime than airplanes??? That makes no sense.
All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs. It's not that crazy to assume that we can design a better and more efficient turbine today with all of the help of modern technology.
Planes are quite sensitive to engine failure during flight. Data centers don’t tend to fly for three hours then sit idle for an hour, then sit idle overnight. They need to be up 24/7. When you’re talking 40 or 50 megawatts, you’re not going to necessarily buy triple or quadruple capacity. So it’d better be reliable without a lot of downtime for checks and maintenance.
> All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs.
Not even remotely correct. The concept started in the 70s, and designs have been continuously improved, using the latest modelling techniques, for the last 50 years. Modern turbines are some of the most optimized machines humanity has ever produced.
No, that's not what he's telling us. Read it again
It’s interesting that this implies that building natural gas pipelines to data centers is easy, at least easier than building out substations and transmission lines. Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
In Texas a lot of natural gas is wasted/burned away as it is not profitable to collect and transport it from all oil fields. These days quite a few places put small turbines to generate electricity to do cryptocurrency mining.
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.
That is the most William Gibson thing I've read today, at least. Wow.
I have also heard about deployment of inference (LLMs etc) instead of crypto at these gas turbines. If you already have internet there, why not I guess.
a 16" natural gas pipeline moving 200 MMscf/d at pressures >1000 psi (relatively standard numbers, 16" can go up to ~600 MMscf/d) has a power transport capability of 2.5 GW (thermal). burn that in 60% efficient combined cycle turbines and you get 1 GW of electricity. that's a lot easier than building 1 GW of electric transmission lines.
You can do 1GW with a single 525kV hvdc bundle (maybe 300mm across).
The market seems to be settling on a 5 cable setup and 2GW power transmission (Tenet & other European TSOs have a 2GW Platform build out…).
1GW at 500kV three-phase AC is 1154 amps; 1 billion divided by 500,000 divided by sqrt(3).
You could handle that with one set of 1272kcmil aluminum conductors, or two sets of 300kcmil conductors, based off of this wire submittal: https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf
The voltage drop will be higher than HVDC, but AC transformers are probably an order of magnitude cheaper than HVDC switchgear. That’s the main issue with HVDC, interrupting HVDC current is very difficult since there’s no zero point like with an AC sine wave. High voltage AC breakers use SF-6 to extinguish the arc at the zero point, which happens 120 times per second at 60 hz (100 times per second for 50 hz)
>Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.
So AI comes on a truck, not through a series of tubes. Got it! :)
Ultimately AI comes from space :) Just wait until Starship starts flying - with its projected $/kg launch costs the placement of solar + GPUs in space would be the cheapest option (10-20kg is 1 GPU, 5 m2 solar and 2 m2 radiator (at 70C radiating away 1.5 KW) - total launch cost would be around paltry $1-2K) .
Are people seriously still on this “datacenter in space” thing? It has been beaten down with hard facts endlessly the past few months.
you see my numbers in my comment. I don't see any numbers in your comment (please don't give any links to the articles whose authors don't understand black body radiation formula and thus reference ISS cooling in datacenter discussion :)
Facts don't matter when Elon's feelings are at stake
I'd really like to see the math on this one. It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there? It's not just counter-intuitive, it's bonkers.
>It's not just counter-intuitive, it's bonkers.
you need to look at numbers instead of intuition - intuition naturally gets us wrong when we deal with unfamiliar things like space.
A ready 10 ton house will cost $500K-1M to place in a well developed area - the cost of land itself, communications, permits, also delays and unpredictability of process, etc. Add to that yearly taxes. Add tremendous electricity costs in case of the datacenter. And all those costs have and will be growing.
Launching 10 tons on Starship - sub-$1M and that cost will drop down to about $100K-200K.
> It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there?
exactly. Space is cheap and plentiful :)
> Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
It's not necessarily easier to do one or the other. It's about which one is faster.
In Texas the electric grid is regulated by ERCOT and gas pipelines are regulated (by accident of history) by the Texas Railroad Commission. ERCOT has a big network of producers who put energy into the grid, local companies like CenterPoint Energy who distribute it to customer sites, then retail electric companies sell the power and pay a line usage fee to the line owner (which tends to be a fixed monthly cost to the customer, listed separately on the bill from other fees or usage bills). The TRC deals with companies that own their own pipelines and bill the end customer directly.
A lot of the natural gas in the US is in Texas, and a lot of it is flared while pumping out crude. Putting data centers on turbines near the extraction fields out in the Permian Basin makes sense for power. You can build short pipelines or hook into the ones already there.
They want to build them near the oil fields in texas. As of now most of those fields already run without much if any power infra in place on top of that they would be right by the natural gas generation.
Add that the manpower and expertise of running generators is abundant there and it's a prettt solid idea if they can actually make it.
WA state has the advantage of cheap electricity due to hydro projects, and before they were able to ship off their surplus to CA, they did a lot of aluminum production here to take advantage of it. I can see natural gas working similar, but I’ve also heard data centers want to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power in western states.
Transmission loss in gas pipes is probably lower than electric transmission? Underground probably easier than above ground. Lastly I think they are building data centers near natural gas fields...
I wouldn't expect so, because it's not just fugitive emissions we're talking about, but that you need to run a lot of big compressors to run pipelines. But often that cost isn't really counted because they just burn more gas to power them.
It's amortized for sure, gas is relatively dense in energy and can be transported long distance with minimal loss, unlike electricity. High voltage DC power lines are used in some places for long distance transport, but that's nowhere near the continent-spanning oil and gas pipes.
I'm guessing it's not just the overhead lines, but you need the actual power plants somewhere.
We have an abundance of natural gas and a shortage of electricity.
I found this paragraph very interesting:
> If America wants to build at the speed AI requires, vertical integration isn’t optional. We’re standing up our own foundry and our own large scale CNC machining capability.
Yet China, the industrial superpower, doesn't work like that. Nothing is vertically integrated and instead a massive amount of suppliers are part of a gigantic and flexible supply-chain.
The fact that CCP's China able to have a working market of independent industrial actors, whereas Venture Capital-funded America can only works with corporation-scale central planning is an interesting paradox that I would like to have an in depth explanation for.
It's a neat picture of US vs China's mindset and societies - vertical integration is individualism (we'll do it alone) and exceptionalism (we are better than other companies at foundrying / machining). Versus central planning where things like manufacturing are part of a national plan.
Both have their place, but China is winning and has been for years now. They took over worldwide manufacturing because they were cheaper at it, first due to lower wages, but now due to their supply chains, resources, etc.
Gas turbines have a role in energy production worldwide. If this means they can run more efficiently, then there's a place for it. If the intent is to run 24/7 then it should replace existing Gas 24/7 service deployment, not add new, unless there is a reason wind+solar+storage and a (smaller? different configuration) gas peaker cannot do the job.
If this works as a rapid start gas peaker, it could help in the shift off coal and diesel. It depends on the CO/CO2 burden.
There are already quite a few rapid start gas peakers not only being produced but in-service. Nothing about Boom's stands out as being significantly different.
thats kind-of what I thought. GE sell a lot, so maybe this introduces some supply chain diversity and has a different maintenance burden and duty cycle. Thats about it.
It could be a good, relatively portable gas peaker. Though I would have thought batteries might be a better step for peak load management?
This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load?
Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here.. I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently.
If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere?
What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours.
There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
My father, who used to be a power plant mechanic, and before that a ship mechanic , helped install converted old aeroplane turbines from decommissioned US bomber planes in the 70s(we are Swedes) for use as power plants.
I think the turbine was used as a spare power generator to start the actual gas turbine, in case the plant itself lost power, if that makes sense.
This seems like marketing nonsense to me... Carnot efficiency of a gas turbine is a function of the temperature the CT blade can sustain and the ambient temperature. (1-Tc/Th). So unless they've somehow had a massive breakthrough in material science they'll be as limited as all other gas turbine OEMs.
Air blast chillers are common in this power category so water usage isn't very high.
More importantly gas turbine power figures are quoted at an ISO 15C. So if you require 42MW at 40C ambient you'll buy an overrated engine to maintain your output. They've written this as a gotcha that their engine is more powerful than a less powerful engine. Well yeah...
This to me is the strongest proof that we are in a bubble so far.
I though at least with this AGI datacenter push we'd see a renaissance in nuclear investments, with timelines getting more aggressive and plants actually getting built. Also getting some tangible progress in fusion would've been nice as well.
Turns out its all gas turbines.
Oh come on, what is this crap? Absolutely no thermal efficiency numbers or anything else you could use to validate any claims. Especially if you are claiming that an aero-derived turbine is somehow going to be better than a purpose-built unit.
The "supersonic engines are better because they are designed to operate at hotter temperatures" argument is particularly insane: turbine efficiency is driven by turbine inlet temperature (already 3000ish C), not ambient temperature.
I suppose it's only right that VCs are going to get scammed by LLM slop.
Unfortunately there's too much distraction regarding the AI side of the discussion, to actually look at the generation tech itself.
For all their discussion of high temperature operation, it seems the only advantage at the end of the day is to eliminate water consumption in cooling. I question if that's really so valuable?
I also don't think it's necessarily true? A jet engine (which many many power turbines can run off of) can obviously run without cooling water on a hot day just fine.
There may be some use cases, this makes it comparable to an emergency generator (no water or steam involved)... but that very much limits its uses, and it's marketed as if it should be part of the main power grid.
Reminds me of General Atomics.
They wanted to build a spaceship (project Orion), but first had to come up with something they could sell immediately, hence they designed the commercially very succesfull Triga reactor.
Well, even Blake knows that Overture is highly unlikely to survive as a product. Best of luck to him with this pivot. I really wish him success. He has spent more than a decade of his life on this project.
I'm curious how the planes are going. Looking it up it seems th XB-1 prototype did mach 1.1 but then they retired it which seems odd as it's design was for mach 2.2 and a 1000 mile range. If they could say to investors we said 2.2 and look, it really happened than might be a better sell?
The top speed is interesting because they are claiming to go fast with relatively little power due to superior aerodynamics which would be more convincing if they demonstrated it.
> Superpower is sort of like our Starlink moment
Great analogy if it pays off.
I'd wonder how it competes with nuclear for scale and existing gas turbines for cost and efficiency.
Yeah, if (BIG if) they actually generate demand for it, mass producing power generators will be easier to do than mass producing planes. Starlink was SpaceX's way to generate their own demand - they have a vision of scaling up rocket launchers, but without Starlink there wouldn't be enough demand for it. Likewise I can imagine there won't be much demand for hypersonic airplanes, not enough to run a business. At least the Concorde was only one of several models that the manufacturers produced, so it wasn't their only product.
I can see some issues there. Spacex was in a unique position to do starlink as about the only cheap launch provider whereas there are many existing gas turbine producers. Also the gas turbine thing is a bit of a temporary fix to get power for the AI bubble. Longer term they'll probably use more environmentally friendly solutions?
Why would they switch to something more expensive long term?
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Now deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators.
The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow.
Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra.
When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
You can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.
Hence Islanded i.e. skip grid because US incompetence is inability to hook up grid with multiyear lead times due to skilled labour shortage. The entire point is to skip the grid or rather, due to US constraints, hook up to grid not really an option to meet rollout timelines.
The final analysis is still pending, afaik. In any case maintaining grid stability is a good problem to have and likely much easier to solve than generation. Worst case, you spin some flywheels to get inertia.
I was going to mention China, but you already did; if the US really wants to scale up electricity generation and do it fast, they can get China involved. China's doing it everywhere else in the world already, and (tin foil hat on) it's why they will overtake US as the biggest and most influential super power.
Burning more fossil fuels in noisy, polluting ways is not a good tradeoff considering most “AI” itself is questionably a net positive, and certainly not worth the current levels of investment.
Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.
Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.
Does it make anyone a little sad that we could have actual abundance with solar and wind and nuclear?
Also, this is only commercially viable because this regime has rendered the EPA functionally powerless.
Not really. Makes me hopeful. The constraint right now to renewables in America is connecting them to the grid. The lead times are still in the years.
I am hopeful that these constraints breed innovation and new solutions to the space.
Managed to talk about china's energy buildout _without_ mention of renewables? I think this pivot is 100% designed to get government money: - natrual gas turbine - china is scary - something something it's a race - china energy is good because no regulations, totally not because they are lapping the world on renewable buildout
China alone this year has added 221GW of Solar Energy, which is about 2x the rest of the world combined.
it's a nice pivot though - turbines are just turbines.
Turbines are useful even in a 100% renewable powered world.
Perhaps not in a 100% world, though I'll give you the point that they are useful now.
In a 100% renewable world we would not be extracting or refining oil. Natural gas (used by these turbines) is a byproduct of oil drilling. Were we not burning the oil, the natural gas might be too expensive alone.
Also, in a 100% renewable world we would (by definition) have enough generation all the time - (covered by batteries and good baseload sources) that turbine power was no longer required to cover peak loads.
It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
Somebody calculated that a home in UK needs 1 Megawatt-Hour battery to backup solar energy during the winter. I suspect in 10 years that may cost below 25K, a small fraction of the property cost.
But is it really 1 MWh of _electricity_, or could you replace a good chunk of that with a huge tank of boiling water? In the winter, about half of my electricity consumption goes to my heat pump, to produce 45-50C water for heating and tap water. But if we could increase the reservoir temperature to 95C (or even go superheated to 160C at 6 bar), then it could supply the 45-50C flow temperature much longer without needing to recharge.
In cold places district heating solutions with seasonal storage, like this one, make a lot of sense:
https://www.vantaanenergia.fi/en/about-us/projects/varanto-t...
That's probably assuming a solar system sized to cover typical summer energy usage. You can simply over-provision solar until you have wasted capacity in summer and little to no storage requirement in winter. Then it's just a tradeoff between battery and solar costs to find the best price point.
Also this calculation probably assumes no baseload power imported from the grid, where means such as wind and tidal power work year-round and help offset the need for batteries.
The UK is very far north and very windy. I suggest a smaller battery and a wind turbine.
There is a time- honored, straightforward way to deal with the last two percent problem, which is to overbuild by a couple of percent or so.
That’s not how the maths works unfortunately.
Basically, you end up having to overbuild to crazy levels, or build insane amounts of battery storage, which only gets used a few days a year.
That is right (if rather exaggerated, and I will note that it was you who originally picked the figure of two percent), and in practice, we accept a certain risk that we will not always have all the capacity we want, even though (or because) we cannot precisely predict how big or often these events will be. There is no particular reason to think this specific case is any different.
Why can't we predict how big or how often those events would be? We have clear understandings of the distribution of probabilities for all kinds of weather scenarios - see for example 1-50/100/1000 year flood/droughts.
I'm not saying we cannot do it, just that we cannot always get it right, and there is plenty of empirical evidence for that.
The second point is that the distribution has a long tail, especially when we consider the possibility of multiple independent incidents overlapping in time, to the point where it becomes infeasible to suppose that we could be prepared to continue operating as if nothing had happened in all conceivable scenarios, regardless of how accurately we could predict their likelihood.
I do not understand your argument We also cannot get right predicting the failures of fossil fuel generation. Sometimes multiple plants have outages that coincide and we have blackouts. Shit happens, and will continue to happen. Meanwhile we can make statistically rational plans.
We have coal fired plants in Australia with <90% uptime (often unscheduled), but somehow they're considered baseload rather than intermittent.
And I cannot figure out why you are saying this, as nothing I have said previously either contradicts what you say here, or is contradicted by it. If you could say what you think I am saying in my posts in this thread, we can sort it out.
EDIT: I see the problem starts with the first sentence of your first post here: “Why can't we predict how big or how often those events would be?” - which is completely beside the point in my response to rgmerk, who wrote “It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.” My response to this and the follow-up is this: a) if we are talking about two percent, we can overbuild the renewable capacity, and b) if we are considering all eventualities, there inevitably comes a point where we say that we are not going to prepare for uninterrupted service in this event.
> a) if we are talking about two percent, we can overbuild the renewable capacity,
We've pointed out why this is a poor argument.
No you didn't; you pointed out why it is not, in itself, a significant issue in the first place (which rgmerk tacitly seems to recognize in his first response, through pivoting away from the 2% claim.) My position on this has been that if the issue really is over ~2%, there is a simple solution.
You even admitted it was a poor argument.
I'll state it plainly: to get to the same level of reliability as the existing grid with just wind, solar, and batteries requires unacceptable amounts of overprovisioning of these at high latitude (or unacceptably high transmission cost).
Fortunately, use of different long duration storage (not batteries) can solve the problem more economically.
> You even admitted it was a poor argument.
"Creative" re/misinterpretation is becoming quite a thing here - what I actually did was agree that rgmerk had a more defensible position after he pivoted away from his original ~2% claim to a more reasonable one.
I'll state it plainly: rgmerk's subsequent pivot in his stated claims does not retroactively make my response to his original claim wrong! (Not even if the subsequent claim more accurately reflects what he really meant to say.) I am having trouble figuring out why anyone would think otherwise.
We can and do, and there are detailed plans based on those weather scenarios (eg for the Australian east coast grid; there is AEMO’s Integrated System Plan).
Things in the US are a bit more of a mixed bag, for better or worse, but there have been studies done that suggest that you can get very high renewables levels cost effectively, but not to 100% without new technology (eg “clean firm” power like geothermal, new nuclear being something other than a clusterfumble, long-term storage like iron-air batteries, etc etc etc).
The best technologies there are (IMO) e-fuels and extremely low capex thermal.
There are interesting engineering problems for sources that are intended to operate very infrequently and at very low capacity factor, as might be needed for covering Dunkleflauten. E-fuels burned with liquid oxygen (and water to reduce temperature) in rocket-like combustors might be better than conventional gas turbines for that.
Curious - any references for those “rocket turbine” motors, particularly for this application? I’ve not seen that idea before.
It's mostly something I thought about myself. The prompting idea was how to massively reduce the capex of a turbine system, even if that increases the marginal cost per kWh when the system is in use, and also the observation of th incredibly high power density of rockets (they're the highest power density heat engines humanity makes). So, get rid of the compressor stage of the turbine, be open cycle so there's no need to condense steam back to water, and operate at higher pressure (at least an order of magnitude higher than combustion turbines) so the entire thing can be smaller.
You'd have to pay for storage of water and LOX (and making the LOX) so this wouldn't make sense to prolonged usage. On the plus side, using pure LOX means no NOx formation, so you also lose the catalytic NOx destruction system a stationary gas turbine would need to treat its exhaust.
I vaguely recall some people in Germany were looking at something like this but I don't remember any details.
The problem is the last two percent isn't evenly distributed in time, but rather occurs rarely, but in large chunks. On average it's 2%, but not at each point in time.
Also, if solar ends up much cheaper than wind there's going to be need for seasonal energy storage, which could be considerably more than 2% at high latitude. Batteries are unsuitable for this.
Or very long term thermal storage, as from standardthermal.com
This would also need some sort of turbine to convert back to electrical energy.
Particularly with the development of fracking, natural gas production is no longer a just a byproduct of oil production, and can be (and is) pursued independently. Nevertheless, I agree that we developing renewables should be our priority.
If China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
China's energy buildout is still mostly coal. Go look at the last 20 years how much energy they've added for coal vs solar. Dont fall for the "solar has increased by 500%" trap.
You’re absolutely correct.
China didn’t start adding much in the way of solar prior to about 2020, whereas they added lots of coal generation in the past 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
They are replacing old coal plants with more efficient cleaner designers. National security wise they still have lots of coal to work with, while most renewable energy is generated in the west where ongoing grid upgrades are needed to use it where people live (in the east).
The newer plants not only more efficient going from 30-35% of peak efficiency to something like 45%, they can also operate efficiently over wider range of power output and are faster to turn on/off.
This is very helpful to deal with variability with renewable output.
Coal consumption has peaked there. Solar is growing explosively.
Yes and:
Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.
Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]
https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable
Which begs the question of why AI DCs can’t be powered with their own solar they build out themselves.
No fundamental reason not to power them with renewables, either off-grid or with a small capacity grid connection. The argument that they need to run at full load 24x7 sounds more like a business requirement than a technical one. LLMs in particular with their stateless nature seem like an ideal candidate for global distribution.
The capital cost of the AI hardware is high and it depreciates quickly, being worthless in 5 years (or less). To make a profit, it needs to be run 24/7.
It’s sort of like how airlines like to fly their airplanes as much as possible.
Dont you think its a bit naive to be saying something peaked when it hasnt even been a year?
The economics are pretty strikingly in favour of renewables and batteries, and one thing China does not have is cheap natural gas.
In the past 5 years do you think China has added more solar or more coal power?
Why would that matter? PV and storage costs change very rapidly, so going even five years into the past would be very misleading.
If they can change rapidly how can you confidently assert the peak was this year?
Because coal use was increasing before this year, but the increase was very small this year. So, continued rapid installation of solar/wind/storage will likely lead to a decline in coal use next year.
What, you think continued rapid decrease in cost of solar and storage will somehow make this not happen?
Selling shovels
"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America."
I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
This article makes me wonder what's become of the RR/Snecma_Olympus_593 of concorde fame (beyond being museum showpieces). Could they have been repurposed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
I'm very glad Boom has to pivot to AI data centers: this means their main objective (building a supersonic plane) is in trouble, and they'll go broke soon.
Since the beginning they've been lying with green buzzwords or even "USD 100 in 4 hours to anywhere in the world". The reality is that the plane would be used by business and rich travelers burning more fuel just to save a couple of hours. Flying slower if always going to be cheaper and more efficient (unless they are working on a new technology, but they aren't). They even have the audacity to applaud themselves with the phrase "the first completely private supersonic plane", with a picture of their demonstrator beside a supersonic chase plane from the 60s.
I don’t think business and rich people will use it either. The Concorde worked because you were in a black hole while you crossed the Atlantic, unable to work and unplugged from what was going on. So saving 5 hours was extremely valuable. Now, we have laptops and in-flight wifi, so you don’t miss much on the plane like you used to. Combine that with ultra luxury first class cabins that make the flight extremely comfortable, and saving some time while having to sacrifice all the amenities that come with a good first/business class cabin on a full sized airplane just doesn’t make sense.
Even private planes just don’t feel like they would make sense. Most private jets are used for regional and transcon, and the time savings would be much less significant at those distances. I feel like most wealthy individuals would rather upgrade to a larger, more comfortable, and/or longer-range jet than to sacrifice comfort, size, and range for supersonic. Only the truly ultra-wealthy seem like they might pick up a few, but that is such a vanishingly small market.
How long until Starlink allows luxury ocean liners come back? You can get a lot more space on a boat than a plane.
Dubious or non-existent performance numbers, self-aggrandizing references to being in close contact with other, more famous/infamous CEOs/people, and the bluster of urgency as a smokescreen to hide the lack of anything concrete throughout- this Blake Scholl is following the Elon Musk playbook to a "T".
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Burn more fossil fuel to generate more slop. Wonderful!
Also, I somehow doubt that an upstart aerospace company can make more efficient gas turbines than companies with ~sixty years of experience in this space (Siemens, Westinghouse, GE, Mitsubishi).
A quick search indicates that at least Mitsubishi have a 41MW gas turbine generator, with some configurations producing 120MW.
So it AI companies want to power their datacenters with gas turbines, they can just place an order right now. I'd guess it's probably not something they want to deal with, better to offload the risk/cost to the exciting power companies.
I miss the days when Hacker News would root for startups and brave innovators instead of the stogy old incumbents
But would the responses be any different back then? Energy innovations like battery tech were also looked at critically back then. There's even a template doing the rounds with a checklist for supposedly revolutionary battery tech.
Using a turbine to generate electricity isn't innovative or brave, it's been done, the technology has been around for over a hundred years, but it's not widely used because there's better ways to generate electricity.
There are multiple manufacturers currently making gas turbines that are exactly this size. They’ve been making them for at least 50 years.
This is not brave or innovative, it’s a cash grab during a bubble. You can call a Siemens or GE sales rep and place an order right now for the exact same thing.
I don't root for startups who will make the world a worse place.
It is at least 50% AI slop.
Siemens power-generating turbines are designed for -50C/+50C temperature envelope. All jet engines lose efficiency at higher ambient temperature due to thermodynamics, no matter how good their HP turbine blade tech.
How loud are these turbines? Where will they be used?
They're jet engines - very loud. They're acting like this is new tech or something innovative - it's not. Google "RB211 industrial gas turbine" and watch a vid of one being fired up - they're used to pump oil in pipelines around the world, and power oil rigs, etc - been around for decades.
I can't wait for the town hall meetings in areas where a datacenter is coming "you want us to live next to supersonic jets powering a datacenter?"
Already happening: https://www.memphisflyer.com/southaven-residents-raise-conce...
If there's a town hall meeting in the woods and there's no Republican representative there to hear it, did it make a sound?
> About three months later, we had a signed deal for 1.21 gigawatts and had started manufacturing the first turbine.
Great Scott!
I think we had the same though at the same time. Did you also hit your head on the toilet?
What is strange about it? Normal power plants have 2-3 gigawatts. Gas turbine having 300MW is probably just below average. What am I missing? Is it some US thing where G scale is not 10^9?
It's a joke about the movie Back To The Future and 1.21 Jiggawatts.
Ah now it makes sense.
They probably did that deliberately, like when Google IPO'd for $2,718,281,828.
That is clearly an intentional reference.
How much pollution would this generate?
This is all I can think of and it depresses me how exciting the video is about turning more materials into emissions. I get I have no power over these people building this, but I just wish they didn't make it. I don't want the world to keep building more amazing ways to burn things I or my neighbors will eventually have to breathe in.
Particularly when burnt to no purpose at all.
But you have to consider that they could use this energy to generate AI videos about renewable energy and environmentalism, which will educate the next generation of kids. So on a long enough timescale, this could actually decrease the overall pollution! It's basically Effective Altruism applied to energy.
We're using plane engines to generate electricity and my residential bill is almost $0.20/kWh because we invested in chat bots instead of the infrastructure the chat bots need.
Make it make sense.
Natural gas turbines are pretty common (power plants, large on site/mobile generators) and the efficiency levels of these are the same as what you'd see in similar use cases. Turbines don't really care what they're doing (within reason), these just happen to share a lot of parts with a plane engine.
The cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed.
For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live.
In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
Except the point of Boom’s post is to brag that they’re using plane engines.
Jealous sitting here in MA, where we pay $0.35/kWh and burn a ton of methane to get that.
That is some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
$0.35.... wow
Meanwhile in Seattle... 0.14$ per KW
https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...
(Oh wow off peak will be 0.08$?!)
I can rustle up some environmentalists and we can shutdown some more of the infrastructure. Shall I?
To quote one such government official:
> Sex is good but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn?
Hmm curious as to how loud it will make the data center.
Marketing hype bullshit.
These guys are acting as though this is some new concept, whilst they've just rebranded it in a shiny silver package. Aero derived gas turbines like the RR RB211 are everywhere, already packaged like this, powering oil rigs and pipelines everywhere - I worked on them years ago.
Looking forward to coal companies jumping on the bandwagon if they haven't already - "Introducing CoalGen 3.0 - our new cloud connected, AI powering, next gen coal power station."
Every passing day it feels more and more like we're living in some Wall-E like, capitalist dystopia where everything has just lost all purpose and capitalism has just gone into runaway mode, having fine tuned everything for maximum profit, instead of us producing things we and the planet actually need.
This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet. Lots of pretty 3d renders and a wall of (what appears to be AI written) corpo-speak proposing some crazy technology that will revolutionize x.
It looks cool -- don't get me wrong -- but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
Did I miss something or does the article not even say how much gas they need as an input to generate the 42MW? I see they deride conventional turbines for needing cooling, but the reason they do is to increase the temp differential between hot and cold end of the turbine because some clever fellow named Carnot figured out that the amount of energy you can extract depends on this. Instead it seems that they just full-tilt run a supersonic turbine and blow the hot exhaust with all its energy into the air. So what’s the efficiency of this?
Indeed. My understanding of modern powerstation gas turbines is that they all basically run _at_ the Carnot efficiency eta = (1-T_cold / T_hot) and that rather than chasing marginal gains in how close to that theoretical limit you actually are the biggest differentiators are on maintenance intervals and reliability, which collectively have quite a large effect on eta...
> how much gas they need as an input to generate the 42MW
If you don't have a pipeline, the lower bound is something like 10 LNG tanker trucks per day for each turbine at 42MW. Natural gas is incredibly efficient to transport in liquid form so you could theoretically get away with this for a little while.
The question I’m asking is slightly tangent to how to feed the required gas. It’s “How many MW of gas do I need to feed in to get one MW of electricity.” And they’re pointedly avoiding any statement about this.
> Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet
It's not even a novel solution, jet engines as stationary emergency 'power stations' goes back to at least the 1950s (e.g. search for TURBOLEKT here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Entwicklungsbau_Pirna).
To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
> To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
Not "insane", just "lots". Everything in a nation of mere single-digit millions is "lots", let alone the whole world. The quantity isn't far off what's needed anyway to electrify road transport.
But also, the other option besides batteries, for people who want specifically PV to supply power at night to specifically high latitude locations with long winter nights, is to have a long power line going to somewhere less silly to put the PV:
Many such power lines already exist, upgrading them was already necessary even without any questions about the sources putting tension on the lines because they're just so old now, the only question is the *delta* in cost between what would have been needed with no changes in supply and demand vs. what is needed given those have both changed.
And before anyone says "what about grid losses?", right now, China (and only China, and yes I have checked) makes enough aluminium they could put a girdle around the earth with 1 Ω resistance the long way around using a bit less than 5% of their recent production in about 20 years.
The rest of us would need to massively increase our aluminium production to get close to that; it's not immediately obvious why we couldn't given they did.
Wind is better than solar in many places and somewhat reduces the need for batteries
From ERCOT's stats- wind is complimentary. But, I can't find any hard data on intraday/hourly power usage for AI it seems reasonable to assume that night time use will be lower though.
And so it doesn't have to be looked up: Wind seems to peak at dawn/dusk when solar is not delivery much power, solar peaks in line with air-conditioning load, and there's a miniscule amount of grid scale battery to hold up the grid during a short gap between solar and wind. The batteries are recharged with solar. At least that was the pattern this summer- I need to check now that it's winter.
You can't run a turbine 24/7 either, they require maintenance windows.
Yes, you can run a turbine 24/7, just not 365 days a year.
For gas turbines, n+1 is probably good enough for up to n=10, then n+2 and so on.
If one breaks down or is undergoing maintenance you have a spare.
Solar can’t work like this. Even if you build 2n solar capacity, you still have a not insignificant fraction of each day with no power.
Meanwhile a gas turbine can be running continuously for week to months between service intervals.
Just add batteries? Ok, but that’s no longer solar, and comes with not insignificant additional costs and maintenance etc.
You get 42MW inside the footprint of what looks like 2 truck trailers, that you can park in the parking lot next to the electrical transformers. Virtually no permitting or installation required.
Yes...ish, I largely agree that the footprint is smaller per MW and quite a boon.
But 42MW energy doesn't come from nowhere, fuel needs to be considered. And there everyone has their own constraints.
The AI companies will likely care about $ and little else.
Engineers will point out that 42MW fuel takes up space and supply on an ongoing basis.
Other people will be worried about the externalities of burning 42MW of something vs solar panels and batteries etc.
You can't please all of the people.
Decent for large scale backup perhaps? Or remote plants (almost always mining in the middle of nowhere). Remote plants have fuel logistics already.
Another fit might be somewhere like singapore which is very space poor but very trade connected. But they're currently building a ocean power cable to Australia where they will tap a massive solar farm or existing grid.
It probably fits some use cases better than any alternatives, but for powering cities and suburbia I think renewables still make heaps of sense when space is available somewhere that can join the grid.
I think a 42MW turbine might run into some permitting issues regarding safe noise levels.
Yes yes, we will surround entire turbine in piezoelectric substrate and extract energy from vibrations. It is solved problem. Then we use energy to distill fuel from CO2 in air, making it carbon neutral. Resulting fuel we will put in turbine. Zero loss generator. Can build it in cave with scraps.
Look, you can't write stuff like that any more. It took me three minutes to figure out you where joking.
Possibly, but I suspect mobile turbines (aircraft) are unquietened (noisy) by design because they don’t really need to be quiet at 35000ft.
Presumably a static turbine is minimizing noisy thrust in exchange for torque while also exhausting through an expansion chamber surrounded by deflective earthworks or some other shielding. (Although the one in the article is indeed all outside in the open.)
actually they've down much quieter in the past 40 years. e.g. the 787 dreamliner has wavy bits on the exit of the nozzle that reduce efficiency by 1% in exchange for quieter operation because making the engine quieter reduces the amount and weight of noise insulation in the cabin
Oh of course, I didn’t mean to say that they weren’t as quiet as they need to be, only that there ought to be some obvious noise reduction opportunities once the requirement to be airborne is gone, and once the machine is being used for torque instead of thrust.
No, they’ve been intentionally designing them to be quieter for decades because they are in hearing distance for quite a lot of miles during takeoff and landing. I suspect you can better insulate one on land though since you’re less constrained on size and weight.
> Virtually no permitting or installation required.
I hope that isn’t correct.
Noise, emissions, fuel storage, heat. There are issues that would have me annoyed if that thing appeared next door.
How does the fuel get to it?
Building roads and running tankers is expensive. Ditto pipelines unless very close to suitable sources.
Especially when the moment these go online at any scale the price of natural gas starts getting jacked even further.
Not getting permits, and no permits required are two different things.
Unless you got cash, then it’s the same.
A site already needed backup generators.
Presumably there's some benefit there too.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/xai-removes-some-...
> perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem [..] but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
I like the part where when considering a complex topic, "it became clear" to the guy after a few conversations. Confidence inspiring, no doubt innovative, we should probably not be asking impertinent questions! No idea if the tech is sound but I immediately get scam vibes just from how quickly it leaped into name-dropping Musk and Altman.
> This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
I think at this point LinkedIn culture is fairly globalized. Though America may be to blame for getting it there, largely via Deloitte & co originally. It's originally the language of managerialism.
by the way, china achieved the trendline in that comparison graph by installing solar and batteries
Pah! Solar and batteries?! Have you been living under a rock for the last 12 months? Any startup that dares to suggest solutions based on solar and batteries (not to mention windmills) is sure to attract the ire of the Trump administration, so they'd better keep quiet and hope he doesn't notice them!
Actually, renewables seem to be such a no-no that the Boom blog even avoids mentioning them in the sentence "Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace — coal, gas, nuclear, everything" - even though China added overwhelmingly more renewable capacity last year than anything else: according to https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/..., solar increased by 43% from Feb. 2024 to Feb. 2025, wind increased by 17.6%, hydro by 3.5%, while thermal and nuclear increased by 3.9% and 6.9% respectively.
Never mention the Everything!
AI data centers still consume a lot less than most other things on the grid. In percentages it's less than 1%. Much less. It might get to a percent in a few years. The energy demand growth from other sources is much more significant. Things like industrial heating, domestic heating and other domestic usage, transport (car and truck charging), etc. are growing much more aggressively than even the most aggressive growth scenarios for AI.
Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate.
Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years).
In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays.
A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics.
Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.
> Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
Interesting reading on the topic: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...
> Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen.
The US (or at least, fossil fuel interests in the US which seem to have a lot of influence over the current administration) seem determined to become an "energy superpower" by exporting oil and gas. In particular, seems they'd very much like Europe to switch from Russian gas to US LNG. We'll see how that goes. Personally, I find it hard to see how LNG from the other side of the world will remain competitive with ever-reducing costs of solar, wind, and batteries.
I hate the product.
But as a business staggery for Boom Supersonic, it kind of seems like a good idea. They get a (hopefully short term) revenue stream, and a whole bunch of "real world" testing on their engine core.
It's about as good an idea as firing up a bunch more coal power stations.
The grid, at least in the UK, has a bunch of these industrial gas turbines for coping with peak demand, etc and being able to quickly add more power to the grid.
Not exactly something you want running in huge numbers for a long time or you may as well wave your climate emissions targets goodbye.
Honestly smells like they are trying to raise more capital by selling another potential revenue arm by leveraging on AI hype.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it probably that an early stage company like this can provide this at scale and have it work…
1.21 jigowatts? Great Scott! the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning
Today I learned a thing! It makes sense that subsonic engines and supersonic engines would be different in retrospect but upon reading the headline I thought for sure it was going to be some kind of weird "jump on the AI hype train" article.
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
Seriously? This couldn't be more "jumping on the AI hype train" if it tried.
Is it a coincidence it’s 42 megawatts and not 41 or 43?
Normally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.
This is designed for "fast" and "high power", but not for efficiency: it's not a combined cycle plant.
Yeah, its totally inefficient - according to Wikipedia a simple cycle gas turbine can be up to 43% efficient - with a combined cycle (you boil water with the first stage jet engine exhaust and then run a steam turbine off that) it can get up to 64%.
So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use.
Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
On the contrary, check out this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
They already have well over double the US solar output (US solar output is about 750 Twh according to this source, while China's is a bit over 2000 Twh) and their YoY solar increase is about 4x the US (600 Twh increase in China vs 150 Twh increase in the US)
They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.
My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
It may be huge someday, but now it is niche, and a tiny fraction of new capacity. Coal is king and not about to be dethroned.
In the last year of that graph 2023-2024, the increase in solar was greater than any other source, including coal, it's 15x greater than nuclear.
And unless people are shoveling coal directly into the data centres this electricity generating gas turbine is intended to be used for the electricity generation mix is more appropriate to conapre:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
why are you fixating on 1 single year? Look at the past 10 years or past 5 years and its the complete opposite.
Why are they looking at the most recent year when discussing the changing trend of exponential differential growth to point out it has now surpassed others, instead of the prior years where that differential was slower and the other was still growing faster?
I mean... Seems obvious, no?
No because they are highlighting a single year where solar was exceptionally high and when you look at a 5 year period it tells a completely different story. If you look at future investment there is still 60 trillion being spent on new coal and while thats smaller than the future investment in solar you need to account for the fact that there current power is already 60% coal.
Even if we give China the most charity and take their 2025 results at face vault(even though they NEED to be independently verified) China is at best average when it comes % of gridpower that is renewable. Off the top of my head I think they are like 27-30% renewable. But its actually worse because they are the biggest polluter by a mile. Bigger the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
It wasn't a "single year where solar was exceptionally high" because they generated more in 2025 by mid August than they did in the full year of 2024.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
The coal line was slightly under the previous year’s and is now overlapping i.e. no growth compared with last year (data up to October)
I dont think your link support the point you're trying to make. Unless you think a 200% increase in solar is better than a 50% increase in coal.
The link you've given shows more coal energy being added over the last 5 years than solar. Looking at end of 2020 to end of 2024.
So the solar deployment starts off unexceptional and gets more and more exceptional with every passing year?
At some point you have to accept this is not some anomaly and there is a pattern in the data that you are trying to to ignore.
The chain is about the statement "China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything" being disputed by the solar capacity being added. Whats being highlighted is that while solar is increasing its still a small % compared to the other types being added. If they add 800TWh of solar and 1000TWh of coal and 500TWh of other stuff they arent adding mostly solar like you keep claiming. We are not looking at % increases we are looking at actual increases relative to the total energy supply.
This is going in circles now.
The 3 electricity sources mentioned in that quote combined together added less new generation in China than solar alone last year. Wind beat them all individually too.
This year will be the same but even more so.
> Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas.
That graph shows production, not capacity, nor installed capacity in each year.
Well good, those are the correct numbers focus on because:
Solar capacity and say nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil capacity
Are different beasts.
When solar advocates bang on about adding X gigawatts of capacity, they’re being dishonest. What they really mean is they added X/4, because, obviously, it’s sunny only about 25% of the time throughout a year.
Adding batteries doesn’t change that. Still have to over build.
So let’s focus on the numbers that reflect actual production, so we can have an honest conversation.
Nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil, even biomass have capacity factors typically about 80%, often about 90%.
Wind and solar are never going up ro those capacity factors, even with batteries (including pumped hydro).
Capacity factors don’t matter, what matters are total system costs.
are we looking at the same graph? if you look at the past decade or so, the "solar" slice is clearly widening the fastest
In the graph I'm looking at, with no extrapolating, solar energy is a tiny sliver of coal. If I extrapolate, crossing of the lines looks like something in the far future.
So, if you ignore obvious trends, you can reach a conclusion you like.
Have you considered working for the IEA?
https://x.com/RARohde/status/1989447673108410835
Grifts really have become mainstream.
It's funny to portray "USA need more power for GPUs" and then contrast China getting the power to actual industry making actual stuff useful to people
With solar and wind.
We're all too busy filling out forms to manufacture anything in the West. They don't have to declare their conflict minerals contents (which seem impossible to verify), or even try to measure the PFAS in their products (good luck figuring out the PFAS contents of complex products like electronics).
More like we've spent decades offshoring every step of the manufacturing pipeline - from material processing to manufacturing tooling and all the skills and expertise in between - and now it's reached a state where even if you wanted to spin up manufacturing on the same scale locally, you need those decades again to bring every part of the economy back to support it.
That's true, but the GP still has a point. Manufacturing is easier in countries with less regulation about it. Yet we have to ask ourselves, how do we want to live?
I mean, we have those regulations because nobody wants to live in Lahore, Pakistan.
100%
Personal experience: In my town a public parking lot could not be built due to it possibly being "endangered moth" habitat.
There are places where you can still build things in the US, but they are more and more scarce.
Are you arguing that USA can no longer build parking lots due to environmental concerns? If so, that would indeed be remarkable since parking lots seem to be the facility that almost every US town has been able to build more than enough of.
You are the consumer, not the developer. As such, you have extreme survivorship bias.
Unless you're a developer/builder you have no concept of the projects KILLED by bureaucracy.
All you see is what was allowed to be built.
I’d like to see parking lots go extinct.
Me too. I can't wait for the day me and my entire family get our super powers and can just fly everywhere.
Hear me out... we could just stop building enormous AI data centers for money suck products with no actual net positive revenue.
Great, that's what we need. More fossil fuel powered, CO² emitting, supersonic turbines polluting our environment. Unless I see a sea of solar powered carbon capturing machines,somewhere in the Saharan desert, churning the CO² back to natural gas to power these turbines, I hate this.
Hey, but imagine all the nano banana images we can create!
I think you're missing the point. Once we've bruteforced the computer god into being he will absolve us of all the sins of destroying the place we live and magically create for us a utopia of so much free energy that we won't have to worry about having an atmosphere.
We will create computer god and ask it how to save our environment and climate and it will look at all the data we have fed it over the years and say "You've known the answer for decades, you just didn't like it. Not building me would have been a good start."
I wonder how these elites (you are one, if you can reach San Altman by text) are so detached from reality, that they think that bragging about a gas powered turbine, in this day and age, in the given environment, for something as ludicrous as predictive text generation is a such a flex!
> I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint.
Such a cheap flex right up-front, and with an em-dash to boot. I get it, it's powerful to boast about such a connection. It's just not very classy.
Here's how academics do it:
> Sam Altman confirmed power was indeed a major constraint [1].
> [1]: Personal communication.
Or even better:
> Power is a major constraint (Sam Altman, personal communication, December 9, 2025).
It's also a kind of ideological signpost.
I didn't read it that way because Boom went through YC while Sam was president of YC. The connection makes a lot of sense, and dates back to pre-OpenAI days.
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
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So many cults of personality these days between Musk, Trump, Altman, Neuman (WeWork guy)...
Maybe it started with Jobs, maybe it's always been a thing in other spaces (politics, religion...) and is now coming to business and these uber wealthy individuals who put their pants on two legs at a time
It also seemed to be like that 100-150 years ago, with all the big-name robber barons, oil/steel/rail tycoons and inventor-industrialists like Edison or Ford.
There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.
To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
It's also such a stupid question to ask. No one doubts AI needs fuckton of power. Not the fanboys or the haters or even the don't-cares.
What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
But if it wasn’t AI it would be something else. Remember when Bitcoin was consuming all the energy and destroying the environment?
I asked Florida man if there's a gator in the nearby lake, he said prolly
We’re looking at classy as a small dot in the rear view mirror with this current generation of elites.
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Just vomited in my mouth a little bit. A supersonic aerospace company doing a half-assed pivot into fossil fuel electricity generation to, what, try to simultaneously capitalize on AI CAPEX while also soliciting government handouts?
Come on, get serious.
Please don't post snarky, shallow dismissals on HN. You may not owe aerospace startups any better, but you owe the community better if you want to participate here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And it started by browsing X, as most things do, of course.
What are you trying to say? That no company that makes money from the market can also try to get government funding, even for a different part of their business? Or is this only supersonic aerospace companies, not conventional aerospace? Or only if it's fossil fuel. What a bizarre list of conditions to make you vomit. You can't possibly have thought of that in advance. I suspect you don't know what you're saying at all.
I’m not going to bother formulating a serious response to such an incredibly insane attempt at shoving words and positions into my mouth to fit your own preconceived narrative.
Be better.
I tried my best to understand your position but the more details I included from your statement, the more ridiculous it became. You should just say what you mean instead of that.
all this for predictive text, not even robotics. Not protein folding, not simulations of the early universe. Not even some embodied AI learning from a simulated environment.
This feels cynical and ugly, and I am pretty disgusted by the way things are going in this space. I don't see any reason to trust Boom based on their history, and I am sick and tired of the "solution" to bad ideas being more bad ideas. We need renewables and grid infrastructure, not yet more fossil fuels.
Additionally,
1) Aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades. "Oh but we have supersonic engines" does not change the fundamental equation
2) They're proposing burning more fossil fuels dug up from the ground to feed a beast that in my opinion is destroying the entire world economy, and certainly harming freedom
3) Where are they even getting the fuel? Magic? Someone has to build the pipelines, and someone has to supply the fuel.
Note: edited for civility
Whoa - no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how strongly a topic makes you feel, you can't post like this to Hacker News. It's vastly against the site guidelines.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836368 - and we've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682844). If you keep posting like this, we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you because your account also posts good things, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
>someone
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/boom-yc-w16-is-building-an-...
Yes, Boom is a YC startup, and the GP comment was unacceptable and the sort of thing we ban accounts for. Both are the case, and that doesn't change depending on who a comment is talking about.
Edited for civility. But the sentiment remains.
> It started, as many things do these days, by scrolling on X.
Thanks Blake. This is the sign I needed to cancel my Twitter subscription and hellban X from my LAN.
> announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine
Is global warming solved? Last time I checked, I was to throw away my repairable ICE vehicle for an expensive unrepairable disposable vehicle in order to save the planet. Just curious how a 42-megawatt gas turbine is helping the planet.
A 2 GW DC only needs 48 of those things. About 11.5M tons of CO₂ per year. It’s always on full blast so everything must be calculated 100%.
A new Civic going 8,000 miles a years at will produce 2.4 tons. So yeah one new DC is 4,700 cars. Which you’re supposed to replace with electric cars that will be fed with a non-existent power source, which means apparently even more gas turbine power plants.
Most assumptions about renewables don’t account for continuous 24/7 loads. Stuff like storage doesn’t help with that. I have noticed very little talk about AI DCs varying their loads to match renewable generation from solar/wind.
You missed the iron law of the universe, which is never get between a capitalist and the possibility of a bucket of money.
This sounds like the “t-shirt printers” of the 90s. While everyone was busy trying to invent the future, boring old manufacturing got ignored.
Turns out printing t-shirts isn’t that different from printing silicon. Now Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.
Boom’s founder, Blake, comes from a e-commerce background. What a legend for this innovation.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.
I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.
We’re ready for them with current technology, the problem is regulatory.
Who matches China's current scale and cost of producing solar panels? No-one is ready to compete.
We were talking about nuclear energy but…
Nobody competes with China on lots of things because of government subsidies both direct and indirect (like devaluing currency). We could do those too if we had to.
I agree that the problem is regulatory. But I don't think that it's easily waved away. Chinese solar and is a huge benefit to humankind, but also they have a commanding lead on it. And possibly in BEVs too.
They do, because the government decided to have a commanding lead on it and threw money at it. Which I wish we had done. Until 2020 we didn’t place much value on domestic manufacturing.
Some progress on that front:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wi...
> A federal judge on Monday struck down President Trump’s halt on approvals of all wind power projects on federal lands and waters, dealing a significant legal setback to the administration’s campaign against wind farms.
They're still scrubbing the scorch marks out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_2976 tragedy.
I understand that turbines are very handy in power generation but we don't use gyroscopic power storage because the inertia gets scary at high RPMs. Turbines lake the momentum but make up for it by being entirely made of knives. You lose an engine mount or throw a blade and you're deep in the shit.
I don’t understand your point about UPS 2976. You make it sound as if people there were hurt by the engine parts hitting them. But in actuality it is the airplane crashing into them which killed those unfortunate.
Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
The plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel.
The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.
Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
I’m aware of the facts you say. But they have nothing to do with terrestial operations. If the same thing happened to an engine sitting next to a data center the worst thing which could happen is it knocks the neighbouring engines out too. And if you are worried about that you can add more armouring between the engines. Which you can do because they don’t need to fly. Heck you can put a row of hesco barriers between engines in a terrestial application. But either way the data center is not going to suddenly fall on a fuel recycling plant.
We do use gyroscopic power storage, see e.g.
https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...
https://www.activepower.com/
...and probably others.
(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)