Appendix D. Energy & Plant Architecture

Jason St George. "Appendix D. Energy & Plant Architecture" in Next Generation Stores of Value: Privacy, Proofs, Compute. Version v2.0. /v/2.0/read/appendix/d-energy-plant/

Energy & Plant Architecture

Plant architecture for verifiable work

Objective: deliver verifiable, dispatchable, and composable power to proving and inference clusters so that proof units and verified FLOPs remain cheap to check and neutral to route.

Electrical topology (MV $\to$ LV):

• Medium-voltage interconnect with dual utility feeds where available; 2N or N+1 step-down to rack power.

• UPS/BESS for ride-through and proof-preserving shutdowns.

• Power-quality SLOs (voltage/frequency/THD) bound worst-case verifier latency inflation.

Thermal topology:

• Air to liquid (direct-to-chip/immersion) as default for high-density provers.

• Heat-reuse loops to district heating, greenhouses, or absorption chillers to improve ERE.

• Publish PUE and ERE: if we monetize heat, ERE $< 1.0$ is both possible and economically material.

Network & provenance:

• Redundant backhaul with clock discipline (PTP/Stratum) so receipts carry tight timing jitter bounds.

• Facility attestation path: meters and controllers sign energy/thermal telemetry.

Control plane:

• Workload-aware orchestration couples grid signals $\to$ job scheduler.

• Interruptible Bronze proofs pause first; Gold proofs ride through with BESS and on-site firming.

Energy procurement & grid posture:

• Portfolio, not a point bet: long-dated PPAs, nodal index exposure, behind-the-meter firming, and BESS.

• Co-location with stranded or curtailed energy (hydro spill, wind/solar curtailment, flare-gas).

• Demand response as a feature: treat prover/inference farms as dispatchable loads.

• Carbon & provenance: bind certificates into FER format so “kgCO$_2$e per proof” is auditable.

SLA tiers that map power quality to receipts:

• Bronze (interruptible): Shed priority 1. Eligible for demand-response; refunds/penalties via SLA escrow if p95 VerifyPrice breached. Typical use: PoL audits, non-urgent prover workloads.

• Silver (curtailable with notice): Shed priority 2 with N+1 firming; curtailment windows posted ahead of time. Typical use: batch MatMul-PoUW, rollup proving backlogs.

• Gold (firm): 2N electrical path or N+1 + BESS ride-through; zero curtailment except force majeure. Typical use: settlement-critical proofs, receipt ledger finalization.

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