Essay by Eric Worrall
Microsoft appears to have quietly accepted the reality that renewables cannot deliver the reliable and affordable energy their data centers need.
Principal Program Manager Nuclear Technology
Multiple Locations, United States
Date posted Sep 25, 2023
Job number 1627555
Work site Up to 100% work from home
Travel 0-25 %
Role type Individual Contributor
Profession Program Management
Discipline Technical Program Management
Employment type Full-Time
Overview
“The next major wave of computing is being born, as the Microsoft Cloud turns the world’s most advanced AI models into a new computing platform,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We are committed to helping our customers use our platforms and tools to do more with less today and innovate for the future in the new era of AI.”
We’re looking for a Principal Program Manager, Nuclear Technology, who will be responsible for maturing and implementing a global Small Modular Reactor (SMR) and microreactor energy strategy.
This senior position is tasked with leading the technical assessment for the integration of SMR and microreactors to power the datacenters that the Microsoft Cloud and AI reside on. They will maintain a clear and adaptable roadmap for the technology’sintegration, diligently select and manage technology partners and solutions, and constantly evaluate the business implications of progress and implementation.
…
Read more: https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1627555/Principal-Program-Manager-Nuclear-Technology
Before you rush to brush up your CV, the job mentions they are no longer accepting applications.
Microsoft also inked a deal in June with Constellation Energy to supply nuclear power to one of their data centres.
Microsoft tried the renewable route, but it obviously isn’t working out.
Back in 2015 Bill Gates announced a $1 billion investment in clean energy. But by 2018 he had cooled somewhat on renewables over concerns battery technology wasn’t up to the job of firming intermittent energy sources, though he still seems to be slinging lots of cash at exotic energy projects, such as organic solar cell development.
As far as I’m aware Bill Gates and Microsoft have not made an official comment on why they need a nuclear programme. Which seems rather a shame, because a strong statement from someone as well known as Bill Gates could potentially help save the world from squandering trillions of dollars on useless renewables.
Gates ha been pro-nuke for a while -> ted talk.
Yes, but IMO he could do more to come clean about the utter failure of renewables to deliver what he needs, given his support for renewables back when helped kick off the current mess.
utter failure? where?
try again
They are failing in my region heck I just got informational flyer from Benton PUD where they state in it that renewables are not reliable power suppliers, but they have to include them which is now causing an increase in electricity prices because the drooling eyerolling moron leftist governor of Washington is a climate crisis worshipper who is completely sold on the belief that ruinables is going to save the world!
Hallelujah!!!
Germany, the UK, Denmark, for starters.
yes, many on the AGW side are anti coal/ pro nuke: Gates and Hansen being the most famous.
sadly most skeptics are Anti Everything, They wanna Keep the horse and Buggy.
Says the south end of the north headed horse.
No a lot of “skeptics” can do the math and see solar and wind just isn’t going to provide enough energy to support a reasonably affluent way of life. Plain and simple. But then again the best math most AGW “scientists” can do is fudge the historical temperature records.
Steven Mosher: Professional straw-man beater. If he only had a brain…
Gates does his best to be a “champion” of renewables and nuclear to thwart the bad press that would likely be a media or green political issue from the carbon footprint of his software, data centers, etc…
Bezos has done the same with amazon. They have some sort of algorithm that optimizes where good experiments and good press result in maximum future profits.
The left wing greenerati are renowned historical anti nuclear campaigners – now they despise gas, oil & coal too – I demand all certified green hysterics are banned from any fossil fuel or derivative usage, let’s see how it goes
“no longer accepting applications.”
Always there is a catch 🙂
Found in the comments at JoNova:
Ontario prepares to go big on nuclear, with demand for electricity poised to soar
Demand for electricity across Canada is forecast to double in the next 25 years, and all the signs from Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government indicate that nuclear energy will supply the biggest portion of the province’s additional power needs.
Yes, they said the quiet part out loud.
Canada has has superlative benefit from nuclear power for more than 3 decades.
The have even budgeted $miilions for support of SMRs.
And yet, the current Canadian government ministers talk out of both sides of their mouths with incessant spruiking of wind & solar.
Look at what people actually do, not what they tell needed audiences (ie the media) what they think they want to hear.
The squandering is in full swing and trillions have already gone into that money pit. It is a big ship to turn.
Microsoft are planning to do what every sensible household and business should do in the face of rampant insanity – make your own electricity. I have been making my own for over a decade now and it has paid off handsomely; somewhat benefitting from the government organised theft from those too poor to own a roof in Australia. That is the reason I am still connected to the grid.
The more household and businesses that abandon the grid, the faster the grid collapses and then the redesign can actually begin.
Good luck running aircon from rooftop solar. In the Aussie subtropics rooftop solar can power the fridges and freezers and lights – barely – but it cannot help with serious energy expenditure.
Aussie hot weather doesn’t stop when the sun goes down !
Stated without a moments thought. Anyone who thinks the sun does not affect temperature must have really been hitting the CO2 cool aid.
One of the simplest things any Aussie householder can do is to pressurise the roof cavity once the internal temperature exceeds a comfortable level and is higher than the ambient air temperature. There is usually enough leakage to ensure good air flow with just a single fan.
I have measured the roof cavity at 50C at midnight in Melbourne without pressurising when the ambient temperature is low 20s. Exchanging the hot air for cooler air will dramatically reduce the heat load. The sun drops below the horizon around 9pm. So battery still getting charge from west facing panels.
Are you saying 26C is “hot” ?
On a really hot day the temperature can remain above that, well into the evening.
What I was saying, is that you can’t use air-con powered by solar, once there is no sun.
I am pointing that temperature over land drops off when the sun goes down. If you do not realise that then you are a true believer that CO2 is the only control knob.
The solar gets stored in a battery for later use. I have been doing that for more than a decade and the same battery is still doing its job.
These days people are installing larger solar systems and batteries are gaining wider use.
The grid can never make lower cost power using wind and solar than what an individual can. The days of low cost coal fired power in Australia is a distant memory.
Surely nobody would consider adding a battery to a solar system from a financial viewpoint, as you would never pay the system off during the battery’s short lifetime. I obtain sufficient savings from my solar system to pay off the system in 7-8 years. I realise that I can still be hit with power outages, but so far these have been so rare and of short durations that I can ignore them.
Rick,
if you stay off grid that is fine. However the increase in personal roof top solar capacity by those still grid connected makes it more difficult for the grid operator to keep it stable and increases the unit cost of electricity to the consumer.
Coal would still be a lot cheaper if no more grid connected renewables were allowed. It will take a decade or more for this to start to be felt as older renewable generators come to end of life.
I do expect that it will have to get worse before what I think must happen will happen.
Reid, nice to see someone with as brain commenting, scarce commodity.
This is ideal application for solar. It is the reason why the size of rooftop systems in Australia is now averaging 10kW per attached.
Brisbane gets daily sunlight equivalent to 6 full sunshine hours from November through March. So a 10kW system will produce up around 60kWh per day. And it will get more when needed the most to operate the air conditioning and pool pump.
Take a few minutes to observe the roofs in your neighbourhood.
https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-27.3973975,153.0366498,304m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
Queensland has a solid duck curve with lunchtime demand down to half of peak demand. Not quite South Australia yet but getting there. Perth has the most serious issue with the duck and are controlling substation voltage to force rooftop out of supply. That just promotes more household batteries.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-30/australian-household-battery-uptake-surges-to-record-high/102160138
Grid prices are guaranteed to rise in Australia. If you believe otherwise, you are delusional. Despite all the DOWNWARD PRESSURE ON ELECTRICITY PRICES they just go one way UP!!.
Perth, with its abundant sunshine, will always have a problem with home solar impacting grid stability in Spring and Autumn. I believe that it won’t be long before home solar systems are prevented from exporting power to the grid. That’s ok, as the export value now is almost nil.
swamp cooler son
Swamp cooler works great in my area and easy to do Maintenace on it.
Rick,
exactly how do you envisage the ‘redesign’ of a grid? After all it is a collection of connections between source and sink? What can you change?
Story tip
https://stopthesethings.com/2023/09/27/alternating-ocean-currents-offshore-wind-turbines-the-new-climate-drivers/
Nuclear power is the way forward for mankind – we need a coal & gas transition to it, thankfully most of the world outside the silly western globalist sphere are doing just that – it is natures fuel after all
I absolutely agree that nuclear–i.e., fission-based nuclear–is the way forward. But, IMO fossil fuel will continue to be the mainstay for quite a while, with fission nuclear gradually growing. Forget about fusion nuclear anytime soon. Yes, fusion has “broken even” of late, but it’s still a long long way, if ever, from being a household item.
I don’t know where you are posting from Bill, but here in the UK we couldn’t continue with fossil fuel even if we wanted to. Prices are eye watering and the nations we import it from do not love us.
The government pretends we will build more renewables but our only hope is nuclear.
My apology, Leo. I should have been clear that my opinion was from a US perspective.
Leo,
that is a poor reflection of our energy policy (or lack of one?). Had fracking continued when it began who knows what the situatuion may be?
If we look at grid demand in say ten years with evs and heat pumps, how many nuclear stations would we need? I don’t know how France built so many when they did but I very much doubt that we could build the capacity we need by 2050 or even further? Small modular seems incredibly slow?
We will have to rely on fossil fuel, it’s a pity they blew up operation coal plants.
We could build modern new plants and open mines but that is a monumental , perhaps impossible task but gives much more security if it were to happen.?
Leo, we could continue with fossil fuel for centuries if the Government would let us use it. The fuel is called coal.
Fusion “braking even” just means the laser light going in equals the fusion energy being produced, but producing the laser light is only about 20% efficient, so it has a long way to go before the whole system can produce excess power.
Worth reading, by Willis Eschenbach:
Bright Green Impossibilities • Watts Up With That?
Or is it rather that Gates has maneuvered a clear opportunity to dominating the market, and is even yet directing the company to support his “non-profit” avarice? Worked good with “vaccines.”
Start signing contracts today, get first power output in 2045 – if the NRC hasn’t figured out how to completely outlaw nuclear energy by then.
EPA + NRC insists on ALARA based on LNT radiation risk – a fiction much sillier than climate alarmism – for the express purpose of oppressing nuclear energy.
Look it up and decide for yourself. They belong in prison.
One of the features of grid scale batteries is their lack of environmental hurdles. A battery can be installed on an existing substation site in a matter of six months from award of contract.
Wind and solar farms have enjoyed reasonably easy environmental hurdles in Australia but the power lines to connect them are now causing grief. There is also growing resistance to offshore wind farms.
The odds of getting a coal or nuclear fuelled power station built in Australia in the next 30 years would be so close to zero that it would not be worth evaluating.
People who think that there will be a light-bulb moment with the net-zero insanity are living in a different world to the one I am observing. The only thing that will change direction to something sensible is for the existing grid to collapse either financially, physically or both.
There are no grid scale batteries
Correct, only distribution level connections exist
And yet the blob are happy to roll 5G out – the new apple i12 phone has been banned in France because of radiation levels
Ontario has almost 40% of Canada’s population and is the most committed to nuclear. So most of the new stuff will be in Ontario. Chalk River, Ontario research facility in invented the small thorium/breeder reactor in 1949, closing it in 1997!. They also demonstrated that it could be fed nuclear waste from existing U²³⁵ plants.
The CANDU reactor uses yellow cake non-enriched. This feed is largely U²³⁸, but it captures surplus neutrons from the 5% U²³⁵ fusion causing U²³⁸ to participate in the fusion reaction. Because of not needing fuel upgrading and having the synergy of the contribution of U²³⁸, fueling costs in recent years have been under CDN 3cents/kWh!
Also, unlike the rest of the world, they produce reactor units like Henry Ford produced cars. This way, the tech has already been vetted and has a 65 year record of reliability and pretty much accident free (a nuclear accident is when someone spills a cup of coffee or gets his toe turnover by a forklift).
They have a planned obsolescence of 40 years with an upgrade after 25 years. Plants are modular. The world’s largest plant up until a few years ago was the Bruce Point reactor made of seven modules. Need to expand? Add a module! Before the WEF and their vassal ‘Heads’ of state kicked off their planned offing of 6 or 7billion people by destroying economies, industry, agriculture, health, etc., a module cost CDN 300 million and took 3 years to build with no cost overruns or delays. Oh, and they don’t need shutdowns for refueling.
There is a lot of chauvinism and corruption in the global market.
The Candu uses unenriched uranium so only about .7% not 5%. The reactor traps the neutrons so well with the heavy water that they convert some of the U238->U239->P239 which fissionable.
Downside is the reactor tends to be bigger than its enriched cousins, and so much U was found in the 70s and 80s that it’s not that big a plus to breed your own.
Thorium reactors essentially breed their own fuel too, but thorium is a waste from rare earths mining/refining so basically there is a large stockpile already.
Molten salt reactors (whether fueled with U or Th) should be developed – 2x as efficient and easy for online reprocessing and refining.
Np one gives a shit about efficiency. The world is awash with dirt cheap uranium and thorium. What matters is reactor build cost, time to market and political risk.
CANDU is established and well proven so its ideal ,SMRS are mostly established tech scaled down to beat stupid regulations and reduce time to build, cost and time to market.
No one is going to spend money on molten salt with a twenty year development and regulatory acceptance cycle.
Candu makes a lot of sense.
Even Gates understands computers cannot run 24X7 without reliable energy.
You sure about that? . . .maybe that was true before he passed the age of 65?
AI depends on dependable, affordable electrical supplies, that rules out intermittent renewables
Anyone else wonder what happens when the MS nuclear facility goes blue screen of death?
It gets the three fingered salute and restarts. But relax. Even Gates wouldnt be stupid enough to run a nuke on Windows. It will be Linux of course
This may in fact be the way in which nuclear power advances: connection to an unstable grid powered on occasion by renewables is going to cost way more than installing your own mini-reactor for large consumers of electric power.
It is a way of bypassing government ‘renewable obligations’ ,
Which seems rather a shame, because a strong statement from someone as well known as Bill Gates could potentially help save the world from squandering trillions of dollars on useless renewables.
Trillions????
ya know when AL Gore says the oceans are Boiling we all laugh. Hyperbole rarely works.
How much would it cost to power the whole world with solar?
about $978 billion
If we make a conservative assumption that solar costs $41 per MWh (towards the high end of Lazard’s current cost range for utility-scale solar power globally) and installed it in the hot desert, powering the world with solar energy would cost us about $978 billion.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
Bloomberg green-energy research team estimates $200 Trillion to reach net zero by 2050.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain#xj4y7vzkg
How much of that goes into personal off shore bank accounts?
You do realize that levelized cost is not installed cost, right? It’s average cost over the lifetime of the installation. So, just ballparking here, if the solar installation has an expected lifetime of 50 years, the actual cost over that time will be about 50 trillion. I didn’t get deep enough into your link to tell if that cost included energy storage and the required distribution grid to deliver all that power but your $978B looks to be a couple of orders of magnitude off.
Back in 2015 Bill Gates announced a $1 billion investment in clean energy. But by 2018 he had cooled somewhat on renewables over concerns battery technology wasn’t up to the job of firming intermittent energy sources,
Well that’s because the brains trust have been fibbing to us about transitioning to renewables-
‘There was nothing that could be done’: Tesla lithium battery fire emits hazardous fumes (msn.com)
The more you transition the more exponentially costly it gets and the more life threatening with their lithium battery panacea.
I asked Bing Chat, “What is Bill Gates’ connection with nuclear energy …
And don’t overlook the Microsoft contract with Helion for a fusion power plant.