There are cases where the fields can produce more than the pipelines can carry away. If you put your gigantic gas turbines right next to the fields you can obtain access to some extremely cheap fuel. They might even pay you to burn it sometimes. Negative gas prices are a thing.
Look at the map for 2026 of the grid buildout in Texas at the bottom of this page:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
All solar and batteries (yellow and black), with a few tiny blue dots for gas. It was the same story in 2025. And it will be the same story in 2027 because solar and batteries are getting even cheaper.
These are all decisions from private investors, trying to make money, and choosing solar and batteries over gas in the market where gas is the cheapest in the world, gas is like a waste product that's hard to get rid of.
Why would Microsoft choose dirty energy when all the profit-driven investors are choosing cheaper solar and storage?
It's something like 5-10 orders of magnitude cheaper to move information over fiber than it is to move the energy required to produce that same information through a [pipe/power]line.
Yes, this is weird and no, I have no idea why we do it, but it’s really weird to read “export it to east Texas” — to the extent that I had to re-parse the sentence to figure out what you meant.
Who cares if it's cheaper. It's that you're moving less of it. The more processing you can do near the source the smaller and cheaper your pipe out to the consumer can be.
Cut the tree on the hillside. Mill it in the valley. Then spend your precious boxcar volume shipping only the finished lumber out of the valley.
It’s easy to see.
> A majority of the generation will come from large GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) turbines.
Of course it’s idiotic to actively hobble clean energy. Or to put your finger on the scale for one source of energy, like the current administration does.
But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy on the market in the US and that just gradually moves cleaner over time.
So Texas is not a laggard when it comes to clean energy, they are actually driving clean energy forward the most, because clean energy is the cheapest and most profitable energy. And that's despite Texas having natural gas that's insanely cheap right from Henry Hub.
What this tells me is that like most hyperscalers, Microsoft is not price sensitive on the electricity side, because energy costs are tiny compared to the massive capital costs of the GPUs. But why would they go this direction? What political influence would make Microsoft choose more expensive electricity, when in the past they've been fairly good at driving clean energy forward in their data center power choices, and they'd pay a premium on energy costs to go with clean energy?
edit: for example that EIA list of new solar projects you linked indicates that the largest battery installations going up in '26 are all ~500MW, and that there are only four of them (of that size). I think the energy intensity of a multi-GW datacenter is the main reason that they're not going for solar here.
What this should likely tell you, is that you are missing information and have an incomplete picture of the situation.
Or it could be MSFT just likes to spend extra money for no reason because they are simply stupid. I'm gonna go with the former though.
I'd be interested in all these behind the meter setups for large 24x7 loads that are being built using solar+battery though. I haven't heard of one personally, but I must be lacking information on the subject since you seem so certain these are common?
sibling comment has it, they want to do power generation on site and not connected to the grid and all the PITA that come with that. Further, they can pitch power independence to the locals which removes a big argument from the anti-datacenter crowd. Finally, the power gen i saw at Stargate in Abilene TX which was maybe 10 units (if that's what they're called) took up maybe 30 acres of land so they're not very big compared to the rest of the campus.
Perhaps Microsoft had better ability to overturn local opposition to data centers if they had Chevron's political influence over the politicians too?
Chevron and the US Government are joined at the hip, so these kind of deals "flow" naturally.