Comment by cogman10
10 hours ago
It's not the only GW datacenter planned [1]. AFAIK, a majority of these big datacenters are going to produce their power via natural gas turbines. I don't know of any that are actually planning on powering themselves via renewables or even nuclear power.
The sub 100MW data centers are mostly relying on the grid, but even a number of them plan on having natural gas turbines.
The way to regulate that impact is with a wellhead severance tax, though. The whole fact of the data center is incidental.
I agree, that'd be a great way to approach things. The problem is a lot of the regulators are instead looking at doing tax breaks for these data centers when they should be taxing them (and other businesses) for the externalities of the problems they'll cause.