AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116272/ai-natural-gas-data-centers-energy-power-plants/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=tr_social&utm_campaign=social&utm_content=socialbp

by techreview

5 comments

  1. **From the article:**

    The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to auto manufacturers (no takers) and after that to other industries that might want to occupy more than a thousand acres just off the interstate.

    So it’s no wonder that state and local politicians were exuberant when Meta showed up. In December, the company announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial-intelligence models at the site, with operations to begin in 2028.

    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.

    AI data centers are driving a surge in new natural-gas power plants around the country. What does that mean for our clean-energy aspirations?

  2. Fucking wild.

    All so we have real-time pricing for each customer at a grocery store (Kroger and Microsoft for example).

  3. So maybe we shouldn’t be aggressively kneecapping wind and solar power. The cheapest and quickest to build sources. What idiots think this is a good idea?

  4. I’ve been saying this for probably three years now. And I knew this was going to only accelerate once the election results were official.

    Welcome to the future.

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