Further, there's a gas turbine shortage so Microsoft choosing to put their (presumably limited) allocation of gas turbines in West Texas, where they have good alternatives, seems a bit mysterious. Why not save that massive amount of turbines for the northeast DCs, where renewables work far poorer yet gas is more reliable?
The reasons that seem most convincing to me:
1. Political environment is hostile to renewables and Microsoft doesn't want to paint a target on their back by choosing solar plus batteries, the choice others are making in West Texas.
2. Grid connection drastically changes economics, but pipelines for gas are cheap or something, so the massive cost and delay from grid interconnection simply isn't worth it
3. There are particular political favors going on with Chevron, e.g. Chevron wants gas in the area and is willing to increase MS's turbine allocation if they do it in west Texas, or Chevron is helping get around pesky local political approvals for data centers, or something like that.
The cost of gas does not seem like a justification for this, though.
With enough batteries they might get through the night, but seasonal shortages are much harder to handle that way.
I bet a carbon tax on data centers would be popular if the Democrats get back in.
In short, you're going to have to build your own power plant anyway, so why bother with the grid? Gas is the cheapest, fastest zero-to-production choice for onsite power generation, and has been for a long time. Unless you're dealing with nuclear, the fuel cost just doesn't matter compared to the rest of the buildout, and gas wins because you can take off-the-shelf turbines and bolt them down.
You can only get away with it in places that don't care about environmental regulations, which are the places most likely to approve new buildout of gas infrastructure anyway. Nobody in the northeast is going to approve the creation of a brand new carcinogen factory.
Is it, though? There's a ton of projects out there waiting to get their solar on the grid in west Texas, partnering with one of them and launching the project early while waiting on the interconnection queue, and adding enough batteries, gives a more robust solution right now without the SPOF nature of large single generators.
Add to that the long backorder list for gas turbines right now, with no end in sight, and I'm surprised that Microsoft would power this particular location with turbines because it's probably their best chance to do off-grid massive solar projects.
Massive off-grid solar is what China is choosing for some absolutely massive new industrial projects. Nuclear is a no-go because it takes so long to deploy, but solar + batteries are cheap COTS and available in abundance, unlike gas turbines.
gas turbines run at night too so there's no storage/backup supply issue to consider. They also take up significantly less space than wind or solar and those data centers are already gigantic.
When you can colocate across the street from someone who's otherwise paying to get rid of it is.
When the fuel is free-ish who cares about backorder on turbines. You can run big diesels on NG (just like the pipeline people do).
If demand > supply then the price goes up. Doesn't mean you can't buy something though.
Respectfully, the laws of NPV and IRR hurdles don't matter in Chinese infrastructure.
Whatever you choose in the US, it's not cheap, and developers crawl over each other to sign up hyperscalers. Race to the bottom.
Yes.
There is no point in waiting for interconnection when you can just... not do that, and do all your generation behind the meter, with complete control of the generation to match your load. Solar wants an interconnect so they can sell off surplus; with gas you just turn the dial down to meet the load and walk away.
The clock is running on the datacenter goldrush. 70-90% of the capex window is going to be soaked up just with construction time. Introducing a capricious ERCOT permit process and shopping around for friendly solar projects to hop in bed with makes no sense when you can just write a check and solve the problem forever.
I'd bet the deal with Chevron was to enable Microsoft to hop the queue here and get those GEV turbines soonest.
Data centers would ideally run at ~100% utilization, so any drop in solar output needs to be fully met by batteries.
I don't think this is broadly accepted among major data center operators.
Cheap gas is great, but 2.67GW of new build natural gas in this market will cost $6-8 billion in fixed costs. You need wholesale pricing of ~$50-60/MWh ... OVER 25 years! ... to recover just the fixed costs.
For West Texas, prices averaged mid-$30s over the last year.
Microsoft has all of the leverage here, and Chevron wants a big announcement in an area where they don't have a lot of experience.