President Donald Trump plans to speed power plant development for co-located artificial intelligence data centers using his energy emergency declaration, he said Thursday.
“I can get the approvals done myself without having to go through years of waiting,” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I'm going to give emergency declarations so that they can start building them almost immediately.”
Earlier this week, Trump hosted several of the founders of the Stargate Project at the White House. The Stargate Project is a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX. The project envisions “immediately” spending $100 billion on co-located data centers with an initial focus on a site in Abilene, Texas.
“We need to double the energy we currently have in the United States … for AI to really be as big as we want to have it” to compete with China and other countries, Trump said.
Co-locating generation and data centers “was largely my idea,” Trump said. “Nobody thought this was possible … I told them that what I want you to do is build your electric generating plant right next to your plant as a separate building connected.”
Coal-fired generation could be used as a backup for the data centers, according to Trump. “Nothing can destroy coal, not the weather, not a bomb, nothing,” Trump said. “It might make it a little smaller, might make it a little different shape, but coal is very strong as a backup.”
Trump’s co-location comments appear to align with newly appointed Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie, according to ClearView Energy Partners.
“Chairman Christie has supported co-location on the condition that developers site data centers adjacent to new power plants,” the research firm said in a client note on Thursday. “He has raised concerns about data centers or other energy-intensive facilities co-locating next to existing baseload resources, which, in his words, would reduce ‘big dispatchable resources out of the supply stack.’”
In November, Christie joined FERC Commissioner Lindsay See in a 2-1 vote to reject an amended interconnection service agreement that would have facilitated expanded power sales to a co-located Amazon data center from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania that is majority owned by Talen Energy. Talen on Jan. 15 asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to overturn FERC’s decision.
Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group, said fast-tracking fossil fueled power plants for data centers would hurt utility ratepayers.
“Trump's fake emergency to justify fast-tracking coal- and gas-fired power plants to supply power-hungry AI data centers will expose American families to higher utility bills, spoil air quality and gush increased greenhouse gas emissions,” Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, said in a press release.
