Pier LaFarge

Loose thoughts pre take off. The one thing missing from the whole 100% clean vs not holy war going on right now is a debate about i) priorities and ii) bottlenecks. Put aside theoretical preferred options. IF you believe hyperscalers and other invested parties are attempting to build as many data centers or very large clusters, they are spending $ billions of capex (depreciating GPUs cost > land, electrical, thermal, EPC), THEN Time to power is the most determinant factor in your decisions. While decarbonization is a serious goal for most hyperscalers, the race to win AI mandates they’ll pursue the fastest options to power. Gas - 2-3 year lead time on large turbines. Solar - 5 year timeline for interconnection queues Gensets (smaller turbines, reciprocating engines) - Multi-year timeline from what I hear? Islanded/off grid options may be feasible for a select few players (not everyone will do this; my bet is very little tbh but an aside) but if you’re going to spend all that $ and go to all that trouble, you’re going to go with the fastest possible option and be relatively risk averse b/c you want to put the chips to work and faster you’re uptime, the faster the math pencils. Seems like optimal spots are old industrial sites cause you already have infra where you needed (factors include fiber, proximity to gas pipe, transmission hookups, etc.) Of the above options, nat gas has at least a demonstrated ability to scale thru bottlenecks and provide firm baseload power. It becomes the preferred option - mostly out of limited evidence to suggest there could be viable alternatives. So given all that, any options you provide that offer competitive alternatives - speed, cost, ability to handle load, may displace additional gas usage. That is a net climate benefit despite it still relying on gas partially or because it’s displacing additional gas molecules that would otherwise be called upon. If you have a problem with that predicament, then I’d hate to point out the fact that natural gas play a huge role in current electricity markets and fossil fuels in our overall energy/heat usage across the country. Each incremental leg matters.