Latest / Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
Why SoftBank paid me 17 yen to skip the air conditioning
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2022 Bits about Money essay “Markets in power,” prompted by a SoftBank push notification asking him to cut his air conditioner use between 5 and 8 PM, and updated for the era of AI data centers. He walks through why electricity has to be consumed almost the moment it is generated, how base load, intermediate, and peaker plants divide up a day’s demand, and how virtual power plants turn software and contracts into the economic equivalent of a peaker plant. The new commentary covers CoreWeave’s start as a GPU host for Ethereum miners, why ERCOT paid a…
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