VO: You are listening to Cool Air Hot Takes.
Charles Jelen: Welcome, welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes. This is a podcast about anything and everything from the building energy and HVAC space. We are your hosts. I'm Charlie Gellan, along with the one and only Mr. Dan Gentry. If you're new to the show, we're friends from middle school. Both found our way into the heating and cooling business.
We genuinely love this business. Mm-hmm. And it consumes. Most of our conversations in and outside of work, so we decided to start a podcast.
Dan Gentry: Every couple of weeks we get together to bring you HVAC headlines, getting you caught up with the latest HVAC news, an expert interview. And this week we have principal electrical engineer at Geronimo Power.
Jason. We're gonna be talking about power generation, current bottlenecks with bringing loads online and solutions on site near site, and utility power. We're bringing back a fan favorite segment called Hot or Not.
Charles Jelen: Hot
Dan Gentry: or Not. And of course you are stat of the day, but first it's time for some hot takes.
Charlie,
Charles Jelen: I got a hot take. My hot take is. If your specification does not include some type of storage option, either electrical or thermal, it's outdated. Okay. Every design should have something that is able to shift loads if we think of systems, not products, but systems. Mm-hmm. As 30, 40, 50 year. Design criteria.
I think there should be some form of storage, either on the electrical or the thermal side.
Dan Gentry: We're seeing that happen too. Like, uh,
Charles Jelen: it's, it's slow. Like this stuff isn't new. Batteries aren't new. No. Like thermal storage on the tank. Tank. The water side tanks are, are not new. Ice is not new.
Dan Gentry: No.
Charles Jelen: And people have been doing it, but I think that the optionality side, putting it in front of owners and explaining.
The future value of it. I mean, there's clearly value for it today, especially, we talked about it last time, the like stuff going on on PJM and on Ercot. Demand pricing is going up.
Dan Gentry: Yep.
Charles Jelen: Energy pricing in general is going up. It is a way to both get revenue now as well as I think it will be more valuable in the future.
And if you don't have that design, if the owners do not know what's available, I think you're, you're looking too short.
Dan Gentry: I think another part of it too is awareness. Like it's just a, an ice tank or just a tank.
Charles Jelen: You
Dan Gentry: love tanks. I love tanks. Yeah. This guy love tanks. I've before
Charles Jelen: it's a big tank
Dan Gentry: guy, but, uh, big tanks, but I think it's just being aware of it, you know, how do, what do the modes look like?
How do you sequence it, control it, comfort, that kind of stuff. So,
Charles Jelen: yep.
Dan Gentry: I like it.
Charles Jelen: What do you got?
Dan Gentry: So mine is back to the hydronic systems again, where I spend a lot of my time. It's just
Charles Jelen: going to the Well, you're just going to the, well,
Dan Gentry: you know, I love drinking out of the, well, and this one came up because I had a project on my desk that had like three or four different kinds of units, like modular, packaged, multi pipe, all on one big loop with one set of manifolded pumps.
And it's like, man, how are you gonna like. Control all this. I'm a big fan of dedicated pumps, decoupled systems. Especially when you're starting to build these more involved
Charles Jelen: dedicated primary pumps.
Dan Gentry: Pri Yes. Yes. Dedicated primary pumps. Okay. Um, when you're getting these more involved systems, and a lot of comments we hear is, well, we don't have enough room for pumps, so I'm going variable primary flow.
It's like. That's not a reason, just because you like, well, I can't find a space for a pump, so I'm gonna go with this pumping configuration. I don't like that. It's kinda a pet peeve mine. And on top of that, I would make the argument, you can always use just inline pumps that literally don't take up any space that's in the piping.
Yeah. Sometimes it can be supported by it. Maybe a hanger above or a little stand.
Charles Jelen: Yeah.
Dan Gentry: So it's like, I think there's better options sometimes.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. You're not. Doubling the space needed.
Dan Gentry: No.
Charles Jelen: For pumping. If anything, it's marginal.
Dan Gentry: Yeah.
Charles Jelen: Well, maybe not. How much do you think it adds to add primary pumps? And so for the listener out there, what we're talking about, primary pumps only pump water around the chiller plant.
And then those secondary pumps are what pumps all the way out into the building and through the air handlers. And so in a variable primary system, there's only one set of pumps that do all of that. In decoupled primary, secondary, there's two sets of pumps. One for just the chiller, one for the rest of it, and so you end up with more pumps in.
Primary, secondary.
Dan Gentry: Yep.
Charles Jelen: But they're smaller.
Dan Gentry: Yep. And I, well I think too, the footprint too, I mean, if you could be like dramatic, you know, if you got like 3000 ton chillers, it's gonna be a good size pump you're gonna need anyway. So that kind of is what it is. But you go even like a 300 GPM modular chiller.
Mm-hmm. I mean that's a pretty small pump. You got some options to move them pumps around and make a good, healthy system.
Charles Jelen: Alright, so at the end of the day your, your hot take was.
Dan Gentry: Quit using excuses to go variable. Primary flow, maybe.
Charles Jelen: All right, very good. I like it.
Dan Gentry: Up next, HVAC. Headlines,
Speaker: HVAC. Headlines your news today.
Charles Jelen: All right, listener, it's four 30 in Taipei. Here's your headlines. The US' first grid scale, sodium ion battery is now online, and this is from electric.
Dan Gentry: Hmm.
Charles Jelen: Danny boy, any, uh, do you, are you dabbling at all in, uh, sodium ion batteries?
Dan Gentry: Uh, you know, it's on my list, but I just, you're gonna have to educate me on this.
Charles Jelen: I'll walk you through it a little bit here. So, first of its kind in terms of grid scale, sodium ion battery. This specific one is three and a half megawatt hours. So. In terms of size and the amount of, uh, power that it delivers, pretty big, uh, it's serving a grid in Colorado right now, but the reason that this is important, and the reason that it caught my attention is this technology, sodium ion batteries is going up against lithium ion batteries, which we've used for many, many years.
We use it for all sorts of things. It is the primary technology used for grid scale. Building scale or building electric as well as data center UPS, energy storage. So we use it all over the place and a lot of it is going in right now. Sodium ion is potentially a better suited technology for us. When I say US, I mean the, the US or North America.
And I'll walk you through, what do we got? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 reasons or five categories why?
Dan Gentry: Alright. Buckle up.
Charles Jelen: Category number one, raw material abundance. So sodium is readily available. You can even get it from seawater. Mm-hmm. Lithium is limited to a few countries. Australia is a big one. There's a few countries in South America, but in terms of in the US we have very little of it.
If you look at the battery pack itself and you look at energy density, lithium is higher. If you think of like an average. Amount of energy density they measured in watt hours per kilogram. So energy per weight, let's say it's 2 25, sodium comes in at 1 25. So it's,
Dan Gentry: this means you need a larger pack,
Charles Jelen: right?
Yep. You need more of whatever material or whatever battery pack to get the same amount as lithium. And so that's primarily why lithium's been the dominant technology here, because it packs a bigger punch. You go down the next one. Cost sodium has a lower projected manufacturing battery cost due to the, primarily the materials.
Dan Gentry: Abundance
Charles Jelen: li Yeah. Lithium becomes really expensive and sodium is way, way cheaper. So the base materials and then if you start to look at, and I don't know, battery technology all that well, but like the anode and the cathode material, it becomes lower cost overall. Hmm. Safety. So there's the pack cost, like just the battery itself, but then there's also like the system cost associated with it.
And a big component of driving the cost stuff on the lithium side is there's this risk of thermal runaway. So you've heard of like meltdown of battery packs. There's a, a max ambient temperature limit that lithium runs at. So you need cooling systems, you need fans and, and heat exchangers to pull that heat away.
Sodium doesn't need that. It, it operates at a much higher and a much lower temperature. So like the system costs are actually lower.
Dan Gentry: Yeah, makes sense.
Charles Jelen: So if you talk about total cost of ownership, it's projected that with variability in supply chain or volatility in supply chain for things that we don't have abundant access to.
The projected cost of sodium ion batteries is lower than the projected cost for lithium ion batteries, for grid scale applications or data center applications. So that's why it's interesting. Um, first one's going in and, and we'll see how it goes.
Dan Gentry: So like, I mean, based on that, it looks like we should probably see more of those.
Charles Jelen: I I, I think so. Yeah. It's one of those things like if we're gonna start using more electric batteries and we're trying to onshore a lot of that production, it makes sense that we're gonna start to try to build things that we have easy access to the sub materials.
Dan Gentry: Well, and that's kind of one of the whole like bangs against all the stuff.
Batteries and renewables is the materials that go into 'em. And if we have an abundant. Easily to handle material.
Charles Jelen: Yep,
Dan Gentry: that's a good idea.
Charles Jelen: All right. Up next, we have the principal electrical engineer from Geronimo Power. Jason espa. Don't go anywhere.
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Charles Jelen: Alright, welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes Jason. Seth, how you doing today? Doing
Jason Espeseth: pretty well. How you guys doing?
Charles Jelen: Very good. I'm doing great. It is very nice out. Alright, so by way of a multiple choice question, by the way, this is a first for Cool Air Hot takes. We're gonna attempt to introduce you to our audience here.
So here's the question.
Jason Espeseth: Okay.
Charles Jelen: If you're at a bar and your buddy gets into a little scuffle
Jason Espeseth: Yeah.
Charles Jelen: A little confrontation.
Jason Espeseth: Yeah.
Charles Jelen: How would you help diffuse the situation? Option A, get in between your buddy and the other guy or gal option B. Grab your buddy and get him out of there. Option C, jump up and down as high as you can in order to distract everyone and diffuse the situation.
Jason Espeseth: I'm gonna go with option C on that one, Charlie.
Charles Jelen: All right. Very good. Sounds
Jason Espeseth: like a story. Well, it's loud in bars, and my buddy's not real big and intimidating size-wise, and the guy that was sizing him up was real big, and so we thought. Let's jump up and down. I don't know why, but it sounded like a great idea at the time.
So that's what I did.
Charles Jelen: Did did it work?
Jason Espeseth: Yeah, it did. They were like, he's crazy. Let's get away from him. Like, yeah.
Charles Jelen: So the listener out there, I know Jason's wife pretty well, and so I asked, gimme a little background and that was the first story she pulled out. And I was like, that's perfect, that's great. But what I think it highlights for the listener and our guest today is that we have a unique problem solver on our hands.
And I think that's what you're doing with Geronimo Power. So we're gonna get into that. But first name of the show is Cool Air Hot Takes. We asked all of our guests to come on with a hot take. Personal life, professional life, anything in between. What do you got for a hot take today?
Jason Espeseth: Yeah, I'm gonna go professional here.
And in the data center industry there has to be generation brought to the table. And I might be a little bit biased 'cause that's what we do, but there's not enough generation out there. And everyone wants to go big. Everyone wants to go now, but they have no means to do it. So I dunno if it's really a hot take.
But data centers should bring their own generation.
Charles Jelen: I like it. I'd call it a hot take. Especially if you would've said it two years ago, nobody would've believed you.
Jason Espeseth: Yeah.
Charles Jelen: Now it feels like it's, it's more the way that we're going. We had Sam Brown on from Server Farm a couple episodes ago. They're a, a data center developer, and he absolutely was kind of in, in lockstep with that.
So let's start a little bit back here. What is Germal power and what do you do for them?
Jason Espeseth: Ger Animal Power is a renewable developer kind of at heart, but fairly recently, I'd say in the last two years, we started getting into the data center industry trying to match renewable generation with data centers, and we've started also to get the natural gas side to firm up renewables.
To use it as a way to get that constant power. But think of it more like an energy campus. So the renewables can be helping, you know, wind and solar and batteries can help a ton. They can do a large portion of the needs of the data center, but at the same time, you need a little bit of gas capacity. So whether it's the system that has available gas capacity, or we bring our own gas capacity, it's trying to facilitate that.
So even though we're typically a renewable developer all throughout the country. Have multiple gigs in the ground. We're trying to, to now use the generation resources and the abilities we have to dictate how the data centers can be most effectively implemented around the country.
Charles Jelen: How much renewable energy can you legitimately bring into a data center campus?
Because I think of the projects that we're working on now, you know, a hundred megawatt plus up to gigawatt or even more, and I think about typical renewable in, in my mind is solar, is is wind, and, and having enough space for that on site seems daunting to go after that. So how are you guys going after the space?
Jason Espeseth: It doesn't necessarily mean to be on site. Renewable generation typically is cited, and then there's a gent tie, so you can have a 20 mile gent tie and not be a big deal. So locating generation in the right locations, windy solar can go most places, but wind is a key component of that. And we also don't even need the, uh, absolute best wind out there.
The technology nowadays is good enough that you can put it in the little less desirable places than it used to be. At the same time, you gotta get that to a data center location. So we're mostly targeting places that are a little bit outside of the typical major, major metro areas. You know that, that tier one data center?
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: It's a little bit further out, but still not saying that we're in the middle of nowhere kind of thing.
Charles Jelen: I've heard the term near site, so onsite being onsite, like physically, co-located, near site, is that what you're talking about? Like you can near site something where there's physic, is there still physical cables or is this more of like a virtual power purchase agreement where
Jason Espeseth: No,
Charles Jelen: there's just, there's.
Generation somewhere?
Jason Espeseth: No, not necessarily. It's not like A-V-P-P-A is not what we're targeting. It's more like a co-location, but the gent tie exists.
Charles Jelen: What is a gent tie?
Jason Espeseth: So a gent tie, think of it. Uh, you build a wind farm, you kind of collect it all one spot, and then you need to bring it to where you need to connect to the system.
So that connection from the collector at where all the wind connects to, to where the system interconnection is, is called a gen tie.
Charles Jelen: So in your model for renewable, powering a data center, how physically close are they?
Jason Espeseth: Yeah. I mean, you can go pretty far. You do drop reliability the further out you go, right, there's more exposure on the line.
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: But in general, you know, we're staying 20 miles or something like that. It's kind of the furthest we're going.
Charles Jelen: What's like a typical split that you see? Let's take a hundred megawatt data center, like how much renewable versus natural gas are you able to get to?
Jason Espeseth: Everything's a little case by case basis.
My team works on that. And uh, my colleague would say probably like 70% renewable.
Charles Jelen: Okay.
Jason Espeseth: Oh, wow. And you can do the rest with natural gas. So we can do a lot of it. It's just not every bit of it.
Dan Gentry: That's impressive. That's a, that's a really high number. I feel like a lot of people don't understand that. They just think, oh, they need all this power and it's dirty, or whatever.
But that's a significant piece.
Jason Espeseth: Yeah, I mean it's, it uses batteries a fair amount. We install a lot of batteries just to try to help smooth that out.
Charles Jelen: Do they firm it up so that you can actually use it for peak capacity?
Jason Espeseth: Absolutely.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. Okay.
Jason Espeseth: Yep.
Charles Jelen: In, in a normal application, is it kind of a threefold, like you've got your renewable component, you've got a near site or onsite natural gas component plus do you have a utility feed as well?
Jason Espeseth: Yeah, so we use a, the utility feed most of the time, and I'll get a case by case basis, but that utility feed is very helpful in a lot of different ways, but it helps from a like system stability standpoint.
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: And using that from a frequency connection. It just makes everything. Just easier.
Charles Jelen: When a client comes to you and you guys are working, what are the biggest challenges that you guys have to get over when you start to look at bringing multiple sources to the table versus them just going to the utility and essentially getting one plug.
Jason Espeseth: I mean, if you think about it from the standpoint of the utility, right? Let's just take a step back. If you take the utilities viewpoint, they're doing the same thing. They're getting multiple sources together to combine it to the system, and then they're, yeah,
Charles Jelen: good
Jason Espeseth: point. They have to get it to the customer.
Mm-hmm. So there's actually a lot more build out that needs to happen. Typically before it can actually get to the customer. So that connection, let's say you have to build it, maybe you do wind and maybe you do solar. A lot of states have renewable mandates, so large quantities need to be renewable and solar.
If you take that and then have to connect it to the customer, they're nowhere near each other typically. And now you have to build large transmission lines to get there. That takes time. It takes a lot of money. But mostly time. And
Charles Jelen: yeah,
Jason Espeseth: that time is a major hurdle. You know, it's speed to market in general in the data center industry, right?
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: So having to rely on a, on a large transmission buildup is not gonna help with that, that speed to market. So if you think about it from that standpoint, bringing generation that, that, that is planned already nearby. Has a line of sight that can help speed the connection up significantly. Hopefully I answered that question.
Charles Jelen: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Looking forward a little bit like what else is, is out there that you guys are starting to look at? You know, I think of fuel cells. I think small modular reactors are like everybody's favorite topic of conversation, at least at my house. Um, what are those like next generation things you guys are starting to play around with?
Jason Espeseth: Like you said, everyone's favorite. Small mod reactors are kind of the ideal choice for data center.
Charles Jelen: They
Jason Espeseth: can go anywhere.
Charles Jelen: Yeah.
Jason Espeseth: Get a little bit of water, you're good to go. But that technology's out there a little ways.
Charles Jelen: Yeah.
Jason Espeseth: Part of the beauty of the campus approach that we're talking about though, is that you can put a small mod reactor there in the near future or in the future when they become viable, and then it just ties into the rest of the campus.
Nothing changes for the end user.
Dan Gentry: That's a nice solution. Yeah.
Jason Espeseth: It doesn't mean it completely replaces it, but having it tied into the rest of the campus. So you have renewable generation and it basically takes out the natural gas, right? So you have renewable generation and batteries, and those two are really smooth and out any of the ripples, but the small module actors just sitting there and running.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. Gimme your ideal scenario. Let's say it's a one gigawatt AI campus. Okay. Let's say it's not Loudoun County, right? It's not like in a super dense, populated area, let's say it's, it's, it's a little further out and you've got a little bit of land, which is pretty common right now. Like a lot of the, yeah.
Larger data centers that are going in are not in the middle of a massive city or in the middle of a massive build out. What's the ideal solution?
Jason Espeseth: Boy, ideal solution. I still think that there's a really great, ideal solution with wind. Solar is great. Don't get me wrong. But you get a lot of extra capacity, a lot more, a lot more outta wind in general.
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: So I would say use wind, have a natural gas line nearby that is very large. Use those two and batteries. If it's a nice area for solar, great. But otherwise, ideally it would be wind, natural gas and battery.
Charles Jelen: What's the splits like? Is it 50% of the demand? Peak is from wind, 25% from battery and then another 25 from from the grid, or,
Jason Espeseth: I mean the, the hardest part with this whole thing is trying to say, well, where can the grid fall into here?
Right?
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: So I like to not rely on the grid in my ideal scenario.
Charles Jelen: Okay.
Jason Espeseth: But. It would not be an islanded solution, it would be relying on the grid for things like stability and, and frequency. But generation is minimize
Charles Jelen: it for speed and interconnection.
Jason Espeseth: Well, yeah, it would be minimizing everything from an interconnection standpoint, because that's super slow right now.
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: And, and also impact the customers, you know, the non-data center rate payers that are out there. You see that around the country already and it's kind of a hot topic and especially in the east, but Pennsylvania is very much aware of it and mm-hmm. Bringing that up so. We're trying not to have to utilize a system in the middle and just put it on site.
So ideally you would essentially make it a wash. The customer sees the end, end user pays all the bills, not the, you know, everyday, you know, Charlie and Dan.
Charles Jelen: That's nice. If you, you know, we, we ask this question a lot from the people that come on the show is if you had a magic wand, what's the one thing you would change in your industry?
Jason Espeseth: That's a heck of a question if everyone was willing to work together, all utilities, all data centers, all developers. This, that approach takes out the, the corporate nature of it, but it makes ions work a lot better, highly unrealistic.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think the average person has like a, an appreciation for the interconnection side of this.
Like what does that process actually look like? Is months, years, how much time? Oh yeah. How much effort, like I know every interconnection is different, but,
Jason Espeseth: so it depends on where you are. You know, Texas is mostly Ercot and Ercot is a little bit different. The speed to market's a little bit faster, but the saturation.
Is pretty high in the desirable areas.
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: So places like Dallas Fort Worth are just swamped with interconnections and you're not gonna get online for another five to 10 years. It's the reality that they're in just because of the sheer number that they have.
Charles Jelen: Yeah.
Jason Espeseth: But otherwise they're around the country.
You know, if you're in Northern Virginia, yeah, you're gonna be there for a while. But if you pick a little bit more realistic areas that are a little less tapped out already, it's still gonna take a couple of years though. It's not a, uh, an easy process. Uh, it's very involved. The difference in generation and load is significant.
You know, people think about generation, they just bring it online. It doesn't have to be there all the time. It's as available. But when you talk about a load, that load has to be online. So thinking about it from that standpoint, there's a lot of redundancy. There's a lot of reliability. There's standards that are associated with it that are much more robust than generation standards.
You know, the federal government has oversight into this, you know, FERC and nerc. Mm-hmm. Those are requiring generation to help serve this. You know, it needs to be there, but the load has to stay online. The only other way to do it is to have load to come online and then be willing to drop under certain conditions, and no data center is willing to do that.
Charles Jelen: Do you guys work with demand response providers on trying to manage some of that?
Jason Espeseth: I did in a former life in my previous job. But not the current one. I mean, it'll be part of it. Any data center's gonna be asked to do some portion of it. It's a matter of how much and how they respond to it. So if it's a major system event, the operator in the area might say, we need you to turn on backup generation or shift your power some other.
To some other location.
Charles Jelen: Yeah.
Jason Espeseth: And sometimes that's possible, you know, multiple campuses work together. You can shift, load. Think of it like load, you can shift that, load that traffic to a different one in a different state that might have availability at the time, or you turn on backup generation that, I mean, heck, you need to run it sometimes anyway just to make sure it runs.
Dan Gentry: Mm-hmm.
Jason Espeseth: Those few hours of the year when the system really needs it, you can turn it on and then the system sees a lot less impact. But there are some companies out there and I won't say names that are considering it for sure, from a, what can we do to help this actually work with the rest of the system?
Charles Jelen: All right, Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show today. That was a fun conversation.
Jason Espeseth: All right, thanks guys. Appreciate it.
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Dan Gentry: Alright, listener, welcome back. We are bringing back hot or not.
Charles Jelen: I do not. Here
Dan Gentry: we go. Yeah. Data center edition. We're gonna throw this over to our producer, Elena, who is gonna be kicking off Questions for us?
Producer Elena: Yes. Hi guys. Thank you for having me back. I think this is my second appearance.
Charles Jelen: Welcome back.
Welcome back. I think a lot of our listeners have been asking for you more. So here, here we go. Listener. This is what you wanted.
Dan Gentry: Hashtag hashtag. Where's Elena?
Charles Jelen: Exactly. I love it.
Producer Elena: Okay, well I'm honored. I'm honored to be back. So today we're gonna do another edition of Is It Hot? Or is it not? And here's how it's gonna work.
I'm gonna throw out a few trends or ideas in the data center space today, and you are gonna tell me whether you are hot or not on these. So hot being, yes, 100%. These are the future, and not being no way makes sense.
Charles Jelen: Makes sense? Mm-hmm. Let's do it.
Producer Elena: Okay, cool. And I should say, if you wanna catch the full video of this, make sure to search for Cool Air Hot Takes on YouTube and the full video will be on there.
The podcast is kind of getting like a little bit of like a highlights best bit. So if you want the full video, head to YouTube, that's where it'll be. So statement number one, microgrids are the future of data centers. Are you hot or not?
Charles Jelen: I think microgrids are the future of data centers. For a very short time.
I, I don't think it's gonna be long term. I think this bring your own power to data center trend is not necessarily going to be short-lived in terms of like people aren't going to do it. But I think the reason that we're doing it now is because we can't get power fast enough. I think in the future we are going to have enough power to power these.
I think data center developers would prefer to have. The utility grid onboard and use the utility grid. So I think in the short run, yes, long run, uh, not so hot, short. Long knot.
Dan Gentry: I'm gonna concur. 'cause I was gonna say it's obviously critical for the short term, but to your point Exactly. Once the power infrastructure is built out, and we've talked about other topics on the show, like distributed energy and interconnecting and all this kind of interesting stuff, there's gonna be different solutions moving into the future.
So yeah, it's hot for now and eventually it'll change.
Producer Elena: Okay. That's, uh, two very non-committal answers there.
Charles Jelen: Ah, it was very, I thought I was very committal.
Producer Elena: I would say. It sounds like you're maybe tepid lukewarm on the idea as an in-between.
Dan Gentry: It's a good short term solution.
Producer Elena: Okay. Hot. Hot on the short term solution.
Okay, I'll accept it. Trend number two, data centers are the new monuments of our time. Are we? Yes.
Dan Gentry: I like it.
Charles Jelen: Yes. This is a great question.
Producer Elena: I even, this is a
Charles Jelen: great question.
Dan Gentry: Who's going first? I, I'm excited. Are we hot or
Producer Elena: not? Oh,
Charles Jelen: well. So listener, this one came back from the Gel and Gentry family trip to St.
Louis this year. We're looking at the arch standing underneath it, you know, very, very cool structure. And Dan was like, man, we don't build anything like this anymore. Uh, and my response was like, man, I think we are, I just think we don't see them like this. They're not showy. They're, you know, data centers are the new monuments of our time.
So that's where this came from. So I'm hot on this. I think they are not necessarily like. It's the same. We're building them for the same reason. You know, I think we, we build monuments in the past, Mount Rushmore and the Arch and, and all these different things.
Dan Gentry: Empire State Building, these beautiful things we see.
And
Charles Jelen: tangible.
Dan Gentry: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Charles Jelen: It's like the massive amount of money and infrastructure and resource that's going into data centers is Monument Building esque.
Dan Gentry: It's monumental.
Charles Jelen: It's monumental. It's, it's, yes, it's monumental. It's good. Good catch. Um, so I would say, yeah.
Dan Gentry: I agree. I remember standing under the arch thinking about that.
In my opinion, why I think they are monuments is because like to appreciate the engineering that goes into these things. Yeah. The engineering for like the chip sets themselves. Yeah, and like the ai, like everything that went into like developing and designing, engineering, all that. It's an engineering, yeah.
Marvel I think, if you will. So it's not like, oh cool, let's go look at this pretty data center, but we can appreciate. All the efforts that went into it and all the technology that's in there, and then all of the output that we're getting from all this technology, all this AI modeling and all this stuff.
It's like it is monumental.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. Don't get me wrong, I would love more monuments though.
Dan Gentry: Uh, yeah. I mean, we
Charles Jelen: agree on this guy. We're
Dan Gentry: hot on monuments.
Charles Jelen: Yeah, hot on monuments in general. We need more monuments.
Dan Gentry: Yes. Bring 'em back.
Producer Elena: Okay, nice. So we're, we're hot on monuments, but we're also hot on data centers as monuments of our time.
So thank you guys for indulging me. Thank you. Thank you. And another edition of, are We Hot or Not On This? I'm curious to know if our listeners agree or disagree with any of those statements. So I would love it if anyone could send us an email@coolair.hot takes@train.com, or you can of course leave us a comment on whichever platform you're listening to this on.
And remember, you can watch an extended cut of this feature on YouTube. Just search for cool air, hot Takes, and you'll find us there. And I think I'm gonna do it up next. Start of the day.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. There you go.
Dan Gentry: Here comes Joe.
Charles Jelen: Start of the day. Start of the day. Start of the day.
All right, listeners, stat of the daytime. This is ranking the top 15 countries by primary energy consumption per capita. So who uses the most energy at a country level? So this is in giga joules for the year of 2024. That is the metric.
Dan Gentry: In my mind, I went straight to the Middle East 'cause it's hot and they need a lot of air conditioning and I'm assuming they consume a lot of power.
Charles Jelen: Okay.
Dan Gentry: So Saudi Arabia's gotta be high on that list. And then like, um, Qatar and uh, like. UAE and then there's probably some like outlier that I'm not sure of that that's on there, but I, I was gonna take a stab at those three. They gotta be the highest, I can't think of outside of that. I don't know, is it the United States or something like that that comes in after that, but that's, that's kind of where my mind was thinking.
And unless there's some cold place. That has a ton of heating and uses a ton of power. But I'm going with like going with Middle Eastern countries. It's gotta be towards the top. There's a lot of air conditioning there.
Charles Jelen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, lemme run through this. So top 10, we're gonna start at number 10.
Number 10, the us.
Dan Gentry: Oh, okay.
Charles Jelen: 10. All 265 Giga joules. Per capita. Number nine, Canada.
Dan Gentry: Ah, Canada.
Charles Jelen: 2 97. Oman, 3 0 2.
Dan Gentry: There we go. I'm getting close.
Charles Jelen: Saudi Arabia. There we go. 3 47. There you go. Trinidad and Tobago. 3 81 Kuwait. 3 83. There's a big jump in here, so remember us 2 65 at number 10, number five, Kuwait at 3 83, and then it jumps to the UAE at 4 96
Dan Gentry: oh UAES.
Look at me guessing.
Charles Jelen: All right. One place, one area of the world that you didn't go to right away was Singapore.
Dan Gentry: Oh, very. That's super, super, super dense.
Charles Jelen: Yeah, exactly.
Dan Gentry: Yeah. Okay. It's hot. Yeah.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. I don't know if I would've, I don't know if I would've come out with that one. I actually
Dan Gentry: did a bunch of chiller plant jobs over
Charles Jelen: there back in the day.
Yeah. Yeah. There are a ton while in manufacturing too. Six 50.
Dan Gentry: That's a
Charles Jelen: six 50. The US is at 2 65. Wow. Singapore, six 50 above that. You nailed this one. Qatar.
Dan Gentry: Yeah.
Charles Jelen: 7 68. Alright. But they all pale in comparison to number one. Iceland.
Dan Gentry: I, I did not see that coming. I mentioned a cold place, but I still don't know if I could fully explain that.
What the, what are they using all that? What? Why is that?
Charles Jelen: Well, I think one of the things that I'm seeing here is island nations are primarily a lot of these.
Dan Gentry: Mm.
Charles Jelen: So I think part of it is power production and how they get their power. Wow. So if they need, you know, liquified natural gas on ships to get there, to burn, like I think if all of that goes into it, that could be part of it.
That's my guess. That
Dan Gentry: was a good one.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. That's fun. Stay outta of the day.
Dan Gentry: Nice.
Charles Jelen: All right. Thanks for listening to this episode of Cool Air Hot Takes. Thank you so much to Jason from Geronimo Power for joining us today. Send us your questions. We want to hear your hot takes. Leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube. Leave us a review on Apple or drop us a message@coolair.hot takes@trane.com.
Dan Gentry: Remember, we could be sending you some merch for some of those hot takes. Keep 'em coming. Don't forget. You can leave us a rating wherever you listen. Of course, five stars, only folks, right? Until next time, stay cool and keep those. Takes hot.
