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Solar power growth is currently exponential - with the potential for a terawatt to be deployed annually in just a few years - “No single energy tech ever in history has grown as massively steeply" (pv-magazine-usa.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The problem would be the other six months of the year. Most data centers need to be running consistently to make a decent return on investment, and there isn’t much cooling benefit over the coast of any other lake or ocean.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, that would be the trick, I guess. I assume there's some use of electricity that would make financial sense here. Crypto mining is hopefully going the way of the dinosaurs, but there's other forms of number crunching, as well as manufacturing. If any equipment is light and valuable enough to relocate in the off-season, it'll be chips.

After 2045 Antarctica proper might be an option to pick up the slack; until then you'd be stuck with the subantarctic area or you'd have to compete with year-round centers, which is dicier. The obvious biggest benefit is that the land is pretty much free; you can have as much energy as you can have panels, and there's an initial pool of many thousands of people that would settle just for the adventure.