Sheldon Kimber, CEO of Intersect Power, discusses the long-term energy drivers of artificial intelligence.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kimber: Data centers are entering an era where grid connection is optional
“Generally speaking, I think we're moving into an era where grid connection is optional and should be optional. And that, you know, we should be able to, you know, operate these things fully off grid if necessary.”
Opinion
Kimber: Hybrid renewables and gas engines beat new combined-cycle plants
“If you go build a CCGT right now for 2000 dollars KW and, you know, like you can't even find sort of like You know, labor unions and pipe fitters and whatnot that have ever even built these things in many cases, right? You know, it's going to take five, six ye…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Kimber: AI data centers will never offer flexible power load
“Every second you aren't running that at a hundred percent capacity factor is enormous amortized cost, right? So that it's just, it's one of those things where it's like, you'd be a fool to turn it down. You have to at some points because operationally, you kno…”
Insight
Kimber: Edge LLMs trigger recursive queries, massively multiplying datacenter power demand
“Every smaller distilled LLM that is power efficient doing inference is going to launch thousands of queries to bigger, more capable models that can actually reason their way through buying something on Amazon and reason. So it's almost like increasing the worl…”
Disclosure
Kimber: Intersect pivoted clean power assets from hydrogen to AI
“We thought maybe hydrogen would be first because of the supply side supports under the IRA. The demand just didn't materialize, and now all of a sudden, AI has just swept up all of the assets that we developed for, you know, behind the meter And co-located loa…”
Assertion Open · timeframe Feb 2028
Kimber: Co-located renewables can power Texas data centers carbon-free 75%–80% of the year
“75 to 80% of the hours of the year, we can run fully carbon free with, you know, wind, solar, and batteries all on the same site. And then, you know, 20%, maybe a little over 20% of the time, we need to have some gas or we need to use the grid.”