A new way to power data centers: pair clean energy and… | Canary Media

It’s become the animating question in the U.S. electricity industry: How can power-hungry data centers get the energy they need?

The obvious answers have proven insufficient. Solar and wind power projects face yearslong wait times to interconnect to constrained grids. Moves to siphon off existing nuclear power to avoid these grid bottlenecks have proven controversial. And building new fossil gas–fired power plants will not only worsen climate change but may simply be impossible on the timeline that data centers require given current gas turbine backlogs.

But there may be faster and cheaper ways to bring lots of clean energy online to match new data center demand — it just requires some creative thinking.

One idea is to couple new clean power with some of the dirtier, if only rarely used, fossil-fuel power plants already connected to the grid — an approach that, counterintuitively enough, could end up not just faster but cleaner than alternatives.

That’s the proposition think tank RMI lays out in a recent paper describing the potential for so-called ​“power couples,” which the authors define as lots of new solar, wind, and batteries connected to existing fossil gas–fired ​“peaker” plants, which basically act as emergency generators for the grid at large, all in service of a data center or other facility that uses large amounts of power. …