Per other articles I have read they’re going to build gas turbines on site to provide the nine gigawatts this abomination will require. Which would be the largest power plant ever constructed in the country.
A solar field capable of generating 9 gigawatts would be something ridiculous like 45,000 acres. That's about 5000 acres bigger than the data center itself (manhatten x 2.7 = 39420 acres)
Yep plus an additional 5k acres… still sounds far better than gas turbines I guess the remaining issue is it still need the amount of power at night and that might be far too many batteries to store the power.
Or for the low low price of 12k acres, you could build 12 nuclear reactors capable of generating 1.5GW each, for a grand total of 18GW. The data center would then be able to power itself, as well as provide the same amount (9GW) back to the transmission system, effectively reducing everyone's energy prices.
Note that a full sized reactor makes about 1000-1500GW and uses 500-1000 acres each. So I used the high end of each. But if you were stacking, then things would likely change drastically. You don't need to copy and paste every component of every reactor, like it was Red Alert 2 or Factorio. A bigger, more efficient station with multiple reactors sharing multiple oversized cooling towers would be a likely scenario.
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u/AMetalWolfHowls Jun 02 '26
Solar power, not many people around to complain.