Diesel Generators

“Which is why we still have a 170 gigawatts of these things. A 170 gigawatts in the United States alone.”

“For example, to wit, there are more than 10,000 diesel generators in Northern Virginia alone.”

“So we're looking at, if you combine, ah, generator markets as well as the diesel fuel that is burned by the diesel generators, something like, ah, 30 to forty billion dollars a year, ah, globally.”

“Diesel generators are on the order of hardware alone, five to 800 dollars per kilowatt. Even the more expensive emissions controlled ones are about a thousand dollars per kilowatt.”

“Like, any kind of battery configuration with the same kind of duration, you're talking about more than 10 times the footprint, whether lithium ion or otherwise.”

“The power quality coming out of a diesel generator tends to be very dirty in terms of the voltage waveforms for your AC. And if you have spiky loads, it tends not to respond very well, so you have a lot of voltage sag or over voltage. So all that is very chall…”

“There's a pretty decent chance at a correlated risk that your gas pipeline is also at risk, and so that external dependency means that you have this common mode failure, which means that your natural gas systems can never Be as provably reliable as truly havin…”

“Per in terms of megawatts per acre, the power density, how much power you can pack in per acre, we are approximately a hundred megawatts per acre in our high density configuration, which is about four times higher than a diesel generator installation”

“Basically instant cold start, just like a battery, whereas a diesel generator often will take five to 10 seconds to get to Full power from a cold start”

“Our, you know, our missile defense sites are sitting there, like, being powered by diesel generators still, like, shouldn't we upgrade that?”

“My sense is that all those two-hour battery storage deals that we just mentioned at data centers, they still have gensets, likely diesel for those longer duration emergency events, and they're not at all mutually exclusive, and in fact, it may be that predomin…”

“I think for those kind of sites, it would be very difficult to Permit that scale of diesel generators in most markets.”

“If you have a lot of backup generation, you might fire up the backup generation. Often you're not allowed to because your diesel generator will violate its air permit if you use it regularly.”

“We operate almost three gigawatt of diesel generators today.”

“You might think that installing just a small gas generator, diesel generator might be the solution, but it's actually kind of stranded investment. Because, I mean, after, let's say the utility comes online and gives you the power of three or four years, you ha…”

“I'd spend it on micro-reactors, because that's where I think you can have the most impact around the world displacing diesel generators.”

“And if you look at what happens in a town over 20 years of span if you pick a diesel genset instead of a reactor there's something like 12, ah, deaths that are going to occur prematurely from the use of diesel.”

“Most data centers in the world today, those backup power generation devices are diesel generators, right? Increasingly, they're becoming natural gas generators, but for most data centers, they're diesel generators.”

“I think if you think about an economically viable way to provide commercial and industrial facilities with the type of resilience that most of them are looking for, you're using fossil gas or natural gas or freedom gas plus solar and storage or diesel or propa…”

“A diesel generator, which of course was fossil fuel, and it also emits a lot of not particularly healthful emissions from burning the diesel, but also is obviously a big emitter of CO₂, costs 10 times as much per kilowatt hour as solar.”

“In Nigeria, more people get power from a diesel generator than they do from the grid.”