Appendix D. Energy & Plant Architecture

Jason St George. "Appendix D. Energy & Plant Architecture" in Next Generation Stores of Value: Privacy, Proofs, Compute. Version v3.2. /v/3.2/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.

What a lab would need to specify.

The architecture above is a pattern, not a plant. Nothing in this appendix carries a budget, and none should be read into it; the numbers belong to a site study, not a thesis. Before a reference facility can be costed, the following have to be fixed, and the investment addendum (§32: Kardashev Labs: Build and Measure) is where the first of them are:

• MW scale. The IT load the reference plant is designed for, stated as a range with the prover and verifier shares separated, since verification is threatened by hardware obtainability and proving by bulk power (§14: Layer 0: Verifiable Machines & Energy) and the two do not scale together.

• PUE and ERE targets. Design-point and worst-season figures for each, with the heat-reuse path that makes ERE $< 1.0$ achievable named or the target set above 1.0; both are FER fields (Appendix A: Formal Model of Verification Asymmetry & VerifyPrice) and the targets are what the receipts will be read against.

• BESS sizing. Energy (MWh) and power (MW) capacity, ride-through duration at Gold load, cycling assumptions, and whether the battery is sized for proof-preserving shutdown only or for firming as well.

• PPA tenor and structure. Contract length, fixed versus indexed pricing, curtailment terms, and the share of load covered by contract versus nodal exposure; the portfolio posture above becomes a set of instruments only once tenors are chosen.

• Mapping of SLA tiers to FER/FCR fields. For each of Bronze, Silver, and Gold: which outages entries count as curtailment against the tier, the interconnection class and backup-duration fields of the FCR (§14: Layer 0: Verifiable Machines & Energy) a facility must report to offer the tier, and the SLA-escrow rule that reads them, so that “Gold” is a field-level claim a receipt can falsify rather than a marketing label.

• Grid and jurisdiction. Balancing authority, interconnection queue position, and the curtailment or rationing posture of the host jurisdiction toward verification workloads, since the last is what Red Line 13 reads.

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