Jennifer Hiller and Sebastian Herrera of The Wall Street Journal report about how the largest tech companies are looking to buy nuclear power directly from plants, which could sap the grid of critical resources. They write:
Tech companies scouring the country for electricity supplies have zeroed in on a key target: America’s nuclear-power plants.
The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear-power plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity to new data centers needed to meet the demands of an artificial-intelligence boom. […]
The discussions have the potential to remove stable power generation from the grid while reliability concerns are rising across much of the U.S. and new kinds of electricity users—including AI, manufacturing and transportation—are significantly increasing the demand for electricity in pockets of the country. […]
Before Amazon purchased the Pennsylvania data center, a Talen nuclear reactor had an outage last fall and the data-center campus had to pull power from the grid, according to people familiar with the incident. The need for grid power was unexpected, and additional system protections have been put in place since then to avoid a repeat, the people said.
Talen and grid operator PJM declined to comment on the incident.
Read more here.
