MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Rolls-Royce launches hydrogen-ready modular power plants to back u

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Rolls-Royce launches hydrogen-ready modular power plants to

Rolls-Royce has launched a new range of modular gas engine power plants designed to strengthen energy security and support Germany’s Power Plant Strategy.

The preconfigured, turnkey systems can be deployed within 12 to 18 months and deliver anywhere from five to several hundred megawatts, depending on demand.

Built for flexible, decentralized power generation, the plants are designed to support renewable energy as the transition accelerates. Importantly, the gas engines are hydrogen-ready, allowing future operation with low-carbon fuels.

“With our modular gas engine power plants, we are implementing the German Government’s Power Plant Strategy quickly and economically,” said Tobias Ostermaier, President Stationary Power Solutions at Rolls-Royce Power Systems, in a statement.

Bridging power gaps

Modular gas engine power plants play a critical role in stabilising modern energy systems by compensating for fluctuations in wind and solar generation.

According to Rolls-Royce, during periods of low wind and limited sunlight, these plants can bridge supply gaps lasting from several hours to multiple weeks, ensuring reliable power availability. In certain use cases, they also serve as interim solutions, delivering continuous electricity until a grid connection or an alternative power source—such as nuclear—comes online. Once that transition occurs, the same gensets can seamlessly shift into backup mode.

Rather than relying on a small number of large, centralised facilities, this approach uses multiple smaller units that can be started or stopped individually to match demand. This flexible operation allows each unit to run at optimal efficiency, reducing costs and emissions. The environmental benefits are further enhanced when renewable fuels such as biomethane and biogas are used.

The United Kingdom offers a clear example of this model in practice. Since 2014, its capacity market has supported the transition from coal to renewable and gas-based generation. Rolls-Royce has played a key role in this shift, with around 500 high-efficiency MTU gas generators now helping to stabilize the British power grid.

“Our partner network ensures speed and local value creation. Utilities and data centers around the world rely on our solutions – more than 17 gigawatts of installed capacity speak for themselves,” added Ostermaier, in a statement.

Future-ready power plants

Rolls-Royce’s Modular Engine Power Plants (MEPP) deliver flexible power generation from 5 MW to 150 MW using standardised mtu engine-generator modules.

Each MEPP is a fully integrated power station, combining power units, electrical systems, grid connection, and central control into a single, coordinated solution. This modular approach enables rapid deployment of reliable capacity in regions where grid expansion is slow and renewable energy variability is increasing.

Complementing MEPPs, Rolls-Royce offers a broad range of gas engine generator sets designed for continuous operation, backup power, or flexible dispatch. These systems can be installed as standalone units, containerised solutions, hybrid systems or integrated into larger power plants.

With high electrical efficiency and total efficiencies exceeding 80 percent in combined heat and power configurations, gas gensets deliver low emissions, long maintenance intervals and reduced lifecycle costs.

For zero-interruption power, the mtu Kinetic PowerPack provides a dynamic UPS solution using a high-speed flywheel instead of chemical batteries, ensuring instant response during grid failures. Rolls-Royce also supplies grid-scale battery storage through the mtu EnergyPack QX, enabling advanced grid services and renewable integration.

To further cut emissions, modular carbon capture gas power plants capture CO₂ from exhaust gases for reuse or permanent storage. Together with emergency power market solutions and the Rolls-Royce SMR nuclear programme, these technologies support secure, affordable, and low-carbon energy systems.

“True resilience comes from decentralization, not centralization. An energy system based on many distributed, modular generation units is less susceptible to large-scale disruptions and bottlenecks. Modular gas engine power plants offer exactly this structure,” said Michael Stipa, Senior Vice President at Rolls-Royce, in a statement.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-na

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure.

TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

"As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."

The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors.

Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants

Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds.

"When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents."

The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers.

These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000.

"The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes."

Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch

What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town."

The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout.

This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not.

"The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity."

How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue

Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month.

Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive."

The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works.

"We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came."

From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion

Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects.

Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month.

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com