“The growth of the grid cannot keep up with the demand for AI, so an ‘all-in-one’ strategy is essential – with gas as the key bridge,” Cully Cavness, founder and president of Crusoe, told WIRED in a statement. “This is not a destination; it’s the foundation we’re building on as we invest in batteries, solar, wind, and small modular nuclear.
Some technology companies are publicly embracing gas innovation. This week, Microsoft signed an agreement with oil giant Chevron to supply up to 2.5 gigawatts of gas power to a data center in West Texas.
For his part, Thomas sees behind-the-meter power as a key energy strategy for data center developers.
“It’s important to realize how new this book is,” he says. “This is not something that any business was doing until the last year or so, and now it’s very popular. The speed is better than waiting for the network.”
Since the beginning of the AI arms race, Big Tech companies that once shared aggressive climate goals have agreed to back off, increasingly building power-hungry data centers. Despite an increase of almost 50 percent in overall production in the last five years Google said in its performance report last year that it has reduced the production of its data center by 12 percent. And the company has announced its commitment to renewable energy. In addition to the Armstrong campus, Google’s Texas investments include a data center in Haskell County that, according to a press release, “will be built next to a new solar and battery storage facility.” Google is also building several large-scale renewable energy systems behind the meter, as Thomas reviewed in a recent report.
With the administration in charge of both data center athletes, scorning greenhouse gas reporting policies, and pushing America’s natural gas, it seems likely that behind-the-meter gas electricity will exist despite huge production costs. In March, the White House gathered executives from seven major technology companies, including Google, to sign a non-binding agreement to protect ratepayers, including a commitment to “build, deliver, or buy the next-generation infrastructure and electricity needed to meet their new energy needs.” Experts told WIRED that the agreement was largely symbolic, since neither the data center developers nor the White House have much control over policies that would lower electricity bills.
Some lawmakers, however, are questioning Big Tech about the climate impacts of their data center projects. Just a few days after the White House event, three Democratic senators sent letters to several AI companies and data center developers, including xAI, OpenAI, and Meta, expressing concern about specific data center projects and their potential impact on the environment and climate. (The lawmakers did not send a letter to Google, but they did send a letter to Crusoe asking about an unrelated project.) The senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, asked that the executives of these companies answer several questions about their proposed data centers, including why they decided to power the data centers with natural gas instead of renewable natural gas.
“It is proven that climate problems and major economic consequences will occur if we fail
limit the increase in global temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, “the senators wrote in their letter to the technology managers, setting the need to significantly reduce the production of greenhouse gases to achieve this goal.
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