From IEEE Spectrum, August 12:
The deal has become a flash point over energy fairness
When Amazon Web Services paid US $650 million in March for another data center to add to its armada, the tech giant thought it was buying a steady supply of nuclear energy to power it, too. The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station outside of Berick, Pennsylvania, which generates 2.5 gigawatts of nuclear energy, sits adjacent to the humming data center and had been directly powering it since the center opened in 2023.
After striking the deal, Amazon wanted to change the terms of its original agreement to buy 180 megawatts of additional power directly from the nuclear plant. Susquehanna agreed to sell it. But third parties weren’t happy about that, and their deal has become bogged down in a regulatory battle that will likely set a precedent for data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, and other computing facilities with voracious appetites for clean electricity.
Putting a data center right next to a power plant so that it can draw electricity from it directly, rather than from the grid, is becoming more common as data centers seek out cheap, steady, carbon-free power. Proposals for co-locating data centers next to nuclear power have popped up in New Jersey, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere. Sweden is considering using small modular reactors to power future data centers.
However, co-location raises questions about equity and energy security, because directly-connected data centers can avoid paying fees that would otherwise help maintain grids. They also hog hundreds of megawatts that could be going elsewhere.
“They’re effectively going behind the meter and taking that capacity off of the grid that would otherwise serve all customers,” says Tony Clark, a senior advisor at the law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer and a former commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), who has testified to a U.S. House subcommittee on the subject....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
Amazon Just Bought A Nuclear Powered Data Center
and other links embedded in "Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power".