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.