Honestly, if they made it a requirement that it has to be 100% clean energy, this could actually be a net positive, but of course they won't because it's Trump's admin and he's got a boner for coal and oil.

Saw something about the EPA rolling back air quality regulations too

Good times

Any available gas turbines are already being sucked up. Old commercial jet engines are a very popular choice right now.

I dunno, at least some of planned datacenters ARE doing that. For example an absolutely ENORMOUS Solar Farm is being built in Cheyenne, Wyoming for another Microsoft DC. For a previous MS DC a big ass wind farm was built. Meta is building a fuck you sized DC in Cheyenne and recently inked a deal with Terrapower for a natrium powered reactor.

I dislike having to defend these assholes but the Green Energy thing has been done, is being done, and they have definite plans to do more of it.

Natural gas fuel cells were a pretty popular choice there for a while. Bloom energy has been marketing their shit towards datacenters for as long as I can remember, and as far as I know they use a similar mechanism to hydrogen fuel cells where you're just stripping electrons off of the methane molecules.

Apparently they're looking at tying together hundreds of stand alone generators from Caterpillar.

Long overdue but a welcomed return nonetheless.

I know the grid in Texas is (was?) separated from the main national grid, and I guess, maybe something like this could eventually lead to a state wide grid that's disconnected from the main grid, and maybe that's very much the long term intention and a real problem.

It would take awhile to manifest as a big issue though as at least the blurb indicates it has to be for newly built power plants and new loads.

If a data center wants to build their own offgrid power system though I don't see the harm in that? In the future they might very well be building SMR's to power only their facility.

I think it should all still be overseen by whatever existing regulations there are and kept to the same standards though. And maybe some rules about connecting them to other purpose built ones under this same grouping?

Like, Apple builds one, and then Google builds one. Google and Apple can't join together.

Maybe even limit it to some strict commercial type use, so Google can't be doing this to power a google city where residents live.

Edits: Clarity and thoughts along those lines.

Edit: Oh and it should be mandated to be green energy.

The issue, I think, would be they likely will end up being coal and gas… adding insane pollution.

Sounds good except Grok is powered by gas generators poisoning small communities.