[ad_1]
Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have made big bets on nuclear power to secure electricity for their data centers, as artificial intelligence and cloud computing drive up energy use.
But as Amazon and Meta discovered last week, those bets are anything but certain. A series of recent rulings by regulators have dashed their hopes of a quick solution to their electricity needs. Currently, Microsoft’s plans to revive a reactor at Three Mile Island are moving forward.
Perhaps unexpectedly, these barriers have nothing to do with nuclear power itself, illustrating the challenges of building massive data centers without securing new sources of electricity first.
For example, Meta plans to build an AI data center next to an already operating nuclear power plant. But as the project progressed, regulatory hurdles began to pile up. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in an all-hands meeting that one obstacle was seeing a rare species of bee on Earth. According to For a Financial Times report. (Many bee populations are currently fragile, at best, after decades of exposure to a new generation of pesticides, among other stressors.)
Amazon has plans too Hit a snag. The company plans to build a new large-scale data center next to the nuclear power plant near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and use a large portion of the plant’s electricity. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees US electricity and natural gas grids, voted 2-1 on November 1 to reject an expansion of an existing data center power agreement that would have allowed Amazon to connect directly to the power plant.
The concern in Amazon’s case was that other customers would likely suffer less reliability — outages or blackouts — and higher costs as the data center would divert much of the massive power plant away from the rest of the region’s power grid.
This likely won’t be the last time FERC wades into the power issue of high-volume data centers: The commission has at least Eight more Large co-location requests for review.
[ad_2]