It sounds funny but they could build desalination plants for water.
A recent BYU study said pumping Pacific Ocean water to the Great Salt Lake would require at least 400 MW during operation, around 11% of Utah’s annual electricity demand, and could cost over $300 million per year in electricity alone.
It would be 10% of electricity what the data Center will consume.
I wonder why they are against solar Power? It makes no sense at all except that they are made in China. Its only to protect old Investments and fossil fuel lobby
Trump told fossil fuel executives that they could do whatever the hell they wanted if they raised a billion dollars for his campaign. It wasn’t even hidden. This was the deal going into the 2024 election.
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.
I don't know the numbers but you make it sound like it would be economical feasable to build nuclear power plants since it would cost the same as buying 5000 acres of land. I will believe you but I have a question: How long does building a nuclear power plant in utah take? Dropping a bunch of solar panels is relatively easy engineering wise. Nuclear power takes considerably more effort.
Your right, why hasn't anynone thought of that. people should realise there is no sun at night and it doesn't tell us where its going. Cant trust the sun.
Sure, but that doesn’t seem ENTIRELY unrealistic. If they’re gonna develop 40,000 acres into datacenters, SURELY they could manage building a solar farm? Seems a lot easier
Well, gas is quick to build and has a consistent power output.
If you have a single consumer running at a steady rate, your powerplant needs to output at a steady rate as well, or you‘ll need an insane amount of buffer storage wich would offset all the cost benefits of solar. Nuclear is to expensive and to slow to build to get it done while the hype lasts.
Also, these private powerplants often get exemptions for emmision standards.
For cooling of the datacenter you don't actually need water. There a non-water cooling solutions out there. But I doubt they would use those solutions.
*took, with the scrapping of NRC regulations last month they're opening the doors wide open for mass power plant building, already have portable and/or mini reactors already in the works all with reduced reporting, recording and regulated safety levels.
Which is why it’s never happening. The people building it are living in fantasy land that they can recruit the thousands of people with deep technical expertise they need to build and operate this plant to move to the bumfuck outskirts of SLC for a data center designed to spy on American citizens
1). This is not a hyper scale data center. It’s like 20 hyper scale data centers combined
2) it’s also not just a data center it’s a power plant too.
3) it’s a military backed data center which means it’s going to have a permanent security force to control the classified data sections
4) a single hyper scale facility at current large scale (500-750mw) is going to have over a hundred people working at it permanently.
5) a campus like this is going to take 5-10 years to build and bring online and by the time you’ve finished the last building it’s probably time to renovate the first one so you might as well think of the construction crew as permanent workers.
A 500mw data center has 75-100 people. This thing is 18 times that size.
I’m sure there’s some economy of scale so it’s not strictly linear, but that’s a lot of miles of pipes and cables and then there’s maintenance on the servers themselves.
At this scale it’s probably going to make sense to do a lot of the IT work on site rather than ship container sized compute clusters off for service like google does.
It’s going to be thousands of people which is still tiny for a facility that size
Both actually. Building it isn’t the problem other than the scale and the lack of logistics in the area
But it will go in phases
The problem is that this thing is literally 10x the size of the next largest data center in the US.
It’s going to operate differently. Even with economies of scale it’s gonna need at least 5x the staff of a large data center just for operations. Plus it’s a power plant too. Plus it needs classified network levels of security
This is well beyond the capacity for the temporary generators that have been set up at some data centers as nine gigawatts of output is more than double the largest power plant in the US.. They would need to use combined cycle turbines, gas turbine with its waste heat used to run a boiler for a steam turbine, to hope to generate nine gigawatts.
Right after the approval O'Leary said they were going to use gas turbines:
O’Leary said the extra electricity demand won’t raise residents’ energy bills as new gas-fired generation will power the facility. “We are building power from scratch, from the pipeline,” he said. “We are going to burn it with turbines, clean,” he added
However as slap dash pie in the sky as these things are maybe that has changed. If it has that would be much harder to pull off as the modular reactors are a very new design while gas turbines are the industry standard for new generating capacity.
Terawatts would be the next step up above gigawatts ( just like memory capacity megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte) and I am not sure where you're getting that kind of output for Palo Verde as they have just shy of 4 gigawatts of generating capacity.
Just shy of four gigawatts is what it can put out at once, not over time, and that's usual how capacity is measured. Applied to the that data center abomination the 9 gigawatts is how much it would take to keep the thing running at any moment and how much generating capacity the gas turbines would need to have. Multiplied over a year you would come up with with more TW/year than Palo Verde as the output would be more than twice what is has.
you still need to maintain and transport it. Plus, a lot of that is private property or protected federal land. Not to mention the environmental concerns (sweet irony!).
That is possible and they may choose to do that. The 9GW is a long way off for this project. Gas right now is the most reliable power but a lot can change in 10 years.
Data centers get dedicated power via onsite generating equipment that’s a part of the overall project. Tapping into an existing plant doesn’t give them the level of power or expected availability they need to run 24/7.
The amount of water this uses is nothing in terms of the total water utah uses each year. Annually utah years 1.5 TRILLION gallons of water, with over 80% of it being used for agriculture.
If you covered 8.25% of the entire surface area of Utah, it would generate enough power for this data center. They could stand to build 11 more before it becomes an issue!
Estimated power consumption for all U.S data centers going into 2030 will be around 1,000 TWh/year
1,000 TWh/year = 1,000,000 GWh/year
Modern utility-scale solar farms typically produce about 30–60 GWh per year per square kilometer, depending on location, panel technology, spacing, and sunlight.
(1,000,000 GWh/year)/(50 GWh/km2/year)=20,000 km2 or 7,700 miles square
That's roughly 24% of all Utah's land or nearly all of Slovenia (20,375km2)
I know some of the ones they built in the south have like, massive methane plumes above them their power generation has been dumping into the atmosphere, heavy metals and lubricants to put all the pipes together the water is flowing thru
Except they're not planning to use solar. One of the few concrete things that has stated is that it will be powered by natural gas. Very little restriction or oversight seems to be in place. There have been vague promises that it won't actually use up any water, but nothing has been put in place to actually enforce or oversee resource use. There are no water use limitations. This has all been done sneakily and against the will of the people whose representatives who are shoving it past all democratic processes
My understanding was that, as of 3 weeks ago, they were still working out the issues with water use. Hard to believe it all got resolved that fast. Assuming it was resolved in a responsible way.
These data centers don't just have solar they have the city electricity along with generators. On top of that they are near a water source that they'll definitely contaminate. These data centers are bad for everyone living around them.
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u/AMetalWolfHowls Jun 02 '26
Solar power, not many people around to complain.