alt Hacker NewsWell what I'm saying that is that on the Texas grid, solar and storage and wind are the cheapest energy, and being deployed in massive amounts because only on the Texas can an investor make money by providing the cheapest energy. (For most utilities, they take a fixed rate of profit and are incentivized to use the most expensive possible energy if they can get away with it.)
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?
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> But why would they go this direction?
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.
> What this tells me is that like most hyperscalers, Microsoft is not price sensitive on the electricity side,
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?
Solar makes sense for utility generation because demand goes down at night. For datacenter usage demand is effectively constant, so theyd need a fuckload of batteries which is where all the cost goes. It doesnt make sense to power 2.6 GW overnight fully on batteries. Much simpler, a.k.a faster, to just buy a plot next to an area with excess gas and build the whole thing there.
I can think of a few angles that might have pushed them towards gas, mainly (a) they wanted on-demand generation cap, (b) they didn't want to get into the batteries game at the volume they'd require, or (c) they didn't want to deal with securing the space needed to produce 2.6GW of solar. Also yeah they're definitely not price-sensitive, any of the hyperscalars is more than happy to pay extra to get exactly what they want.
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.