The Ledger, every show

“I don't think there's a credible argument for behind the meter nuclear at a data center in the near future. And by near future, I mean, The next couple of decades.”

“All the stuff we thought we were going to build in this country, or thought we could build, a lot of that's not going to get built, because of all the things we've just been talking about. Like, I think that, and this problem is going to persist for the forese…”

“I still believe that the vast majority of the computation is going to be done in large data centers. Large being defined as hundred megawatts or more in my world.”

“The only argument, you know, you ever had for building something like a baseload generator in Texas is that sometimes the price would go to 5000 or 9000 dollars a megawatt hour, but with the massive amounts of solar and storage coming out of the grid, which yo…”

“It's possible, though I suspect that given the, my fundamental belief is that the demand for compute, let's just say through twenty-thirty, will exceed the available power in the market. And therefore, the marginal value of the next watt or gigawatt, frankly, …”

“There's no reason to believe that AEP is going to connect 90 gigawatts in the next 10 years.”

“So I think it's a little bit overblown to say, and I think this is also true of Something like the conversation around crypto, but that these are highly curtailable loads that you could just, you know, attach a training model to a wind farm and only run it, yo…”

“The focus that these companies have right now is getting data centers online in the next, Two, three, four years, and nuclear is not going to solve that problem.”

“And so there is, I think at this point, a point of coming to grips with the fact that those targets are probably not achievable in the time horizons that they had all set.”

“And, you know, I had someone ask me the other day, well, what happens if, you know, if NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient? And my response to that is, well, then Meta or Microsoft or Google will plug in twice as many chips. If they have the…”

“I think we can. I think there is a lot of levers that we have at our disposal, you know, and I have, I've had empathy for my friends in the southeast. I know that they're under a lot of pressure, and I know that, you know, they, they're at the tip of the spear…”

“They're not solving any problems this decade, right? That is a 20 thirties and probably a late 20 thirties. Opportunity.”

“We'll find a way to make more chips. There's a lot of capital in that space. I, I'm more concerned about can the electrons keep up with the growth.”

“I'm skeptical that we're actually going to achieve that growth rate without some significant movement in terms of how fast we're investing in grid infrastructure.”

“And if you look at the actual facts, like, data centers do not use that much water relative to, you know, fill in the blank, almonds, avocados, golf courses, you know, so.”

“In fact, I was talking to Someone from GE Vernova yesterday, and he was talking about for this gigawatt data center, they're having to build 2.6 gigawatts of capacity across generation and batteries and everything else.”

“If you look at it in a place like Texas, for instance, where the average price for electricity on any given day is actually pretty low. Like the real time price may be sitting around 20 dollars a megawatt hour. So you go off grid in Texas and you're paying som…”

“So it does take some work to get it, and you're right, no one's done it at a, at any real scale yet but I think we're gonna see it pretty soon.”

“That's still going to be a relatively small percentage of the overall market because we can't put everything in West Texas, right? We still are going to have The tendency to want to be closer to major metros where that sort of land availability is going to be …”

“But if all, if too many people try to do that all at once, you're going to create a labor problem and you're going to have significant delays in getting a lot of this infrastructure stood up.”

“The cost of a data center today in terms of the full stack CapEx deployment all the way through GPUs is about 25 twenty-five million a megawatt or twenty-five billion a gigawatt”

“If you go even back to January of this year, PJM had Roughly four gigawatts of anticipated data center demand for AEP by 2030, and by May, AEP revised that up to closer to 15, in just five months, right?”

“So now every new data center in Dublin is getting a natural gas generator behind the meter so it can be flexible and, you know, avoid that contribution to system peak.”

“Most people that work at a utility today have never worked at a utility during an era of growth.”

“The tranche sizes each year that you're having to go out and procure are now being measured in the gigawatt scale. So you're no longer immaterial to utilities load forecast. In fact, in many cases, you are the utilities load forecast.”

“I definitely think that we over-index on counting on, quote, energy miracles, because, again, going back to what we were talking about before, it takes a long time to build this stuff. So we are not going to have significant contribution of, say, nuclear energ…”

“There was a great RMI study that just came out very recently that looked at the PJM system and determined that you could unlock in excess of six gigawatts of extra capacity, and this is, I mean, PJM's a 90 gigawatt system, so six gigawatts is not nothing. That…”

“We're going to have a huge deficit of powered land in this country to serve, again, not just data centers, but also all the domestic manufacturing that's looking for the same thing and hydrogen and other things that are also going to be looking for clean energ…”

“There was a fantastic story just in the last week about Quincy Washington building a fifteen million dollar aquatic center and they have a hundred and fifty million dollar state of the art school and their unemployment rate has gone from like 29% to six percen…”

“Electricity prices did not go up for a hundred years as we massively expanded the grid.”

“I just look at the pie of total data centers by 20 30 and pick your date in the future. I'm a big believer of terrestrial data centers are still going to be, like, the vast majority of the way we build data centers. Like, I just don't, I'm not sure how much it…”

“I think with some of the AI training sites, we've seen it's more of a move away from backup generators.”

“And some of them are big tech companies, and some of them are just two guys with a truck that decided they were going to be data center developers, and they go get a queue position, and they have to pay 10,000 dollars, that's it, to get in the queue.”

“Over that decade, we had gone from a baseline of, you know, a couple hundred megawatts, and we were growing at a relatively rapid pace, but that's also kind of a small denominator. So the incremental tranches every year that we had to go procure were measured …”

“It's almost 20% of the entire country of Ireland's electricity are data centers, and they're almost all in Dublin.”

“Amazon Talon deals is, it's sort of a corollary to what John's talking about, where, you know, what you're doing is saying, Go, go to where the power is... Here you're just saying go to where the capacity is, right? And you could argue whether it's clean or no…”

“Even if you just take the, all the big tech companies and ignore the rest of the data centers, that alone is, is probably at least 15 to 20 gigawatts of capacity.”

“I mean, on a total cost basis, you know, over a fifteen-year period, and, you know, TCO is the way we think about it in the world, land is about one percent. Of the cost to operate a data center. You know, the full stack with servers and everything.”

“They operate one of the highest voltage Systems in the country. So they operate a seven 65 KV system which is, you know, higher than what anyone else has. There's a little bit of seven 65 in New York as well.”

“Early in the two, you know, 2010 time frame, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, you know, they maybe all had a few hundred megawatts of data center capacity. Well, now you get to the end of that decade, now they're all sitting on a few gigawatts of capacity”

“I think when I joined Microsoft in 2011, there was somewhere between a 102 hundred megawatts of data center capacity, which is not nothing, but compared to what it is today is pretty minuscule.”