The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity.
To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state’s power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants “emit significant amounts of CO2” but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center.
Meta said it will work with Entergy to eventually bring online at least 1.5 gigawatts of new renewables, including solar, but that it had not yet decided which specific projects to fund or when those investments will be made. Meanwhile, the new natural-gas plants, which are scheduled to be up and running starting in 2028 and will have a typical lifetime of around 30 years, will further lock in the state’s commitment to the fossil fuel.
The development has sparked interest from the US Congress; last week, Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a letter to Meta that called out the company’s plan to power its data center with “new and unabated natural gas generation” and said its promises to offset the resulting emissions “by funding carbon capture and a solar project are vague and offer little reassurance.”
The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. While some climate advocates have hoped that cleaner renewable power would soon overtake it, the booming power demand from data centers is all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon.
The reality on the ground is that natural gas is “the default” to meet the exploding power demand from AI data centers, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of its Deep Decarbonization Project. “The natural-gas plant is the thing that you know how to build, you know what it’s going to cost (more or less), and you know how to scale it and get it approved,” says Victor. “Even for [AI] companies that want to have low emissions profiles and who are big pushers of low or zero carbon, they won’t have a choice but to use gas.”
The preference for natural gas is particularly pronounced in the American South, where plans for multiple large gas-fired plants are in the works in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Utilities in those states alone are planning some 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years, according to a recent report. And much of the new demand—particularly in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia—is coming from data centers; in those 3 states data centers account for around 65 to 85% of projected load growth.
“It’s a long-term commitment in absolutely the wrong direction,” says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. If all the proposed gas plants get built in the South over the next 15 years, he says, “we’ll just have to accept that we won’t meet emissions reduction goals.”
#dependent #natural #gas #decades
