By Jo Nova
New AI Data Centers need so much energy, so fast, they’re are going off-grid
Such is the blistering race to get ahead in the global AI battle, that the industry is not waiting for the bureaucrats to build new power plants anymore, they are doing it themselves. And the leading edge of data engineers are not choosing the clean green wind or solar power of the future — they’re building gas plants. The sun and wind are free, but the battery back up, high voltage lines, long approvals, and unreliable supply cost the Earth.
What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants
Dylan Baddour, Arcelia Martin, Ars Technica
The plant would be big enough to power a major city, with 1,200 megawatts of planned generation capacity fueled by West Texas shale gas. It will only supply the new data center, and possibly other large data centers recently proposed, down the road.
The project is one of many others like it proposed in Texas, where a frantic race to boot up energy-hungry data centers has led many developers to plan their own gas-fired power plants rather than wait for connection to the state’s public grid.
It was Energy Transfer’s first-ever contract to supply gas for a data center, but it is unlikely to be its last. In a press release, the company said it was “in discussions with a number of data center developers and expects this to be the first of many agreements.”
Behold the modern gold-rush — look at the number of applications to build power (of all sorts) and connect it to the grid in Texas:
There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.
Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, claims people don’t care about renewables now, they just want power:
The reliance on gas power for data centers is a departure from previous thought, said Larry Fink, founder of global investment firm BlackRock, speaking to a crowd of industry executives at an oil and gas conference in Houston in March.
About four years ago, if someone said they were building a data center, they said it must be powered by renewables, he recounted. Two years ago, it was a preference.
“Today?” Fink said. “They care about power.”
To get some idea on the seismic transition that is really underway, ponder that one of the new start ups wants 5,000MW of energy for a new data center covering 2,600 acres, and it is going in to a small town in Texas of less than a thousand people. That’s a massive 5GW for a town of 940 people.
There are still a few projects with renewable ambition. One project team that requires just 120MW said it will use just wind power and one large plant says they hope to run a 5GW data center on “private wind, solar and hydrogen” but they will start with gas at first.
We, here in Australia, are not even in the race.