President Donald Trump plans to accelerate the development of power plants for co-located artificial intelligence data centers using his energy emergency declarationhe said THURSDAY.
“I can get approvals myself without having to wait years” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I’m going to make emergency declarations so they can start building them almost immediately.”
Earlier this week, Trump hosted several of the Stargate Project founders at the White House. The Stargate Project is a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX. The plan plans to “immediately” spend $100 billion on co-located data centers, initially focusing on a site in Abilene, Texas.
“We need to double the energy that we have right now in the United States … to really make AI as big as we want it to be” to compete with China and other countries, Trump said.
Co-locating production and data centers “was largely my idea,” Trump said. “No one thought this was possible…I told them what I wanted you to do is build your power plant right next to your power plant, as a separate connected building.”
Coal-fired generation could be used as a backup for data centers, according to Trump. “Nothing can destroy coal, not the climate, not a bomb, nothing,” Trump said. “It might make it a little smaller, give it a little different shape, but coal is very powerful as a backup.”
Trump’s co-location comments appear to fit newly appointed Mark Christie, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, according to ClearView Energy Partners.
“Chairman Christie supported co-location on the condition that developers site the data centers adjacent to new power plants,” the research firm said in a client note Thursday. “He raised concerns about co-locating data centers or other energy-intensive facilities next to existing core resources, which, in his words, would reduce the “important distributable resources outside the supply pile.” »
In November, Christie joined FERC Commissioner Lindsay See in a 2-1 vote. to reject an amended interconnection service agreement this would have facilitated the expansion of electricity sales to an Amazon data center co-located from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, majority owned by Talen Energy. Talen asked on January 15 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to overturn FERC’s decision.
Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group, said accelerating fossil fuel power plants for data centers would hurt utility ratepayers.
“Trump’s false urgency to justify the rapid implementation of coal and gas power plants to power energy-hungry AI data centers will expose American families to higher utility bills, worsen the quality of air and will lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions,” Tyson Slocum, director of Citizen’s Public Energy Program, said in a press release.
