Data centers are placing unprecedented strain on electric grids across the country and across the world as the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into virtually every market sector unleashes an energy monster that we are woefully unprepared to feed. Meeting projected demand growth in coming months and years will require creative solutions and cutting-edge energy innovation, but it will also require an all-of-the-above approach that employs old energy systems in new ways. In one such attempt to keep up with AI data center demand growth, United States energy firms are beginning to pursue a hybridized model that features both nuclear power and natural gas in an unlikely but increasingly popular pairing.
Nuclear energy offers carbon-free, round-the-clock energy production, but the cost of building new nuclear power facilities is often prohibitively high and the regulatory timelines can be problematically lengthy. Natural gas is associated with significant greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s cheap, abundant, and relatively quick and easy to deploy. For these reasons, energy firms are increasingly viewing the energy sources as complementary components of a hybridized approach to shoring up energy security in the AI area.
In Texas, Blue Energy is partnering with GE Vernova to develop a proposed 2.5-GW hybrid nuclear energy and natural gas facility that very well may serve as a blueprint for many more facilities of this kind. “The plan is to use GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s (GVH) BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) at Blue Energy’s first planned site in Texas to create what the partners call a proprietary ‘Integrated Monopile System’ (IMS) as part of a ‘gas-to-nuclear’ re-sequencing strategy,” New Atlas recently reported.
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The natural gas and nuclear components will operate separately, but complementarily, within the same facility. “In this way, a single facility will combine the strong baseline power of nuclear with the flexibility of throttleable gas,” the New Atlas report goes on to describe. This also allows the plant to already get up and running with its natural gas operation while the nuclear energy portion is still under construction, as the development of the nuclear side of the operation will inevitably take much longer to clear regulatory and logistical hurdles.
The Blue Energy-GE Vernova plant is slated to begin construction of its natural gas components later this year, while the permits for the nuclear side of the operation will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2027. The project anticipates that it will begin producing energy from natural gas as soon as 2030, and from nuclear power as soon as 2032. Altogether, the anticipated 2.5 GW of energy will go to power a nearby data center campus.
“Combining our industry-leading HA gas turbines with the BWRX-300, the only small modular nuclear reactor under construction in the Western world today, provides an effective solution aimed to meet the demands of rapid AI expansion in the United States while decreasing time to power,” Eric Gray, CEO of GE Vernova’s Power Segment, was recently quoted by World Nuclear News. “Our collaboration with Blue Energy on this project exemplifies the innovative approaches required to help deliver the scale of electricity needed for this extraordinary demand.”
This project is not the only one to co-develop clean energy alongside natural gas-fired power capacity in order to power data centers. Google has recently partnered with Crusoe energy in North Texas to build a data center campus with an attached wind farm as well as a massive natural gas facility. While there are many advantages to this hybridized approach, as outlined above in the case of nuclear-plus-gas operations, there are also concerns that the approach is relying too heavily on fossil fuels at a time when decarbonization has never been more urgent.
These new hybridized facilities combining clean energy and fossil fuels on the same campus are a microcosm of a much larger conflict between energy security and sustainability. Big Tech is busily investing in all kinds of clean and cutting-edge energies in an attempt to offset the massive energy footprint – and associated carbon footprint – that it is unleashing through AI integration. But it’s evident that Silicon Valley is also, much more quietly, driving a natural gas boom.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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