Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Amazon Is Building Its Own 7.65-Gigawatt Gas Plant in West Texas So Its AI Data Center Never Has to Plug Into the Grid

Transcript

Amazon Is Building Its Own 7.65-Gigawatt Gas Plant in West Texas So Its AI Data Center Never Has to Plug Into the Grid · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the data center brought its own power plant. Cleanview and The New York Times reported this month that Amazon is behind a gas plant in West Texas large enough to become the single largest source of carbon pollution in the country.
• 0:18
  [Guest] Amazon confirmed the site: GW Ranch, in Pecos County, built by Pacifico Energy. Thirty-five gas turbines, up to seven point six five gigawatts.
• 0:26
  [Host] Give me that in something I can picture.
• 0:29
  [Guest] Enough to power one point nine million homes at peak. And at first it isn't wired into the Texas grid at all. Until now, every data center Amazon owns ran off the public grid.
• 0:42
  [Host] Texas approved something that big without a fight?
• 0:45
  [Guest] Regulators permitted it in January to release up to thirty-three million tons of carbon dioxide a year. America's dirtiest power plant in twenty twenty-four, a coal plant in Alabama, put out just over twenty million.
• 0:58
  [Host] Is that a forecast, or a ceiling nobody expects to hit?
• 1:02
  [Guest] A ceiling. Plants rarely emit what their permits allow. It's still the story, because nobody required Amazon to ask for less.
• 1:10
  [Host] And is seven point six five gigawatts being built, or announced?
• 1:14
  [Guest] Gabriel Collins of Rice University's Baker Institute told Inside Climate News that Texas super-projects often get oversold, and the ones built arrive in slices over years. The permit is the ambition, not the schedule.
• 1:26
  [Host] Why build your own plant now? Amazon didn't need one last year.
• 1:31
  [Guest] On August third, Governor Greg Abbott ordered an audit of every data center waiting to plug into the Texas grid, freezing new approvals. If you can't get into the line, and you have Amazon's balance sheet, you stop needing the line.
• 1:46
  [Host] A utility deciding when you connect is a veto nobody has to say out loud.
• 1:51
  [Guest] And routing around it is routine now. Griffin Bird, who tracks gas plants for the Environmental Integrity Project, told the same outlet there is just an explosion of these things, and he's having a tough time keeping track.
• 2:05
  [Host] Amazon says this won't raise costs for Texas families. Does that hold up?
• 2:10
  [Guest] While it stays off-grid, yes. But finish Amazon's own sentence: the campus is designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.
• 2:19
  [Host] Off-grid until the line moves. So how big does this get?
• 2:23
  [Guest] Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report put data centers at four point four percent of American electricity in twenty twenty-three, and up to twelve percent by twenty twenty-eight. Amazon is betting on the top of that range.
• 2:39
  [Host] And what does leaving the shared system cost the people who stay?
• 2:43
  [Guest] Rocky Mountain Institute named this in The Economics of Grid Defection: once departure pencils out for your largest customers, the poles, the substations, and the storm crews get paid for by whoever is left.
• 2:56
  [Host] What does Pecos County get?
• 2:57
  [Guest] The turbines and the air. West Texas holds the exhaust while the compute and the profit ship somewhere else. And Amazon's own July sustainability report put its emissions up sixteen percent last year, a company record.
• 3:11
  [Host] So even if this plant never touches your bill, every private gigawatt is demand that never shows up in a rate case you could have argued at.
• 3:21
  [Guest] A regulator can only rule on what gets filed. This never gets filed.
• 3:26
  [Host] Patrick Deglon's book Unscarcity puts energy in what he calls the Foundation, the layer you're owed because you exist. Pecos County is what it looks like when the largest customer buys its way out of that question.
• 3:39
  [Guest] For more on who pays for the AI buildout and who quietly gets to veto it, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.