I guess no impact on rates . Though locating a data center in a desert area with limited water and going through a drought seems similar to instituting a war in Iran. Idiotic.
And the fuel cells doesn’t solve the pollution problem. Just mitigates it.
The corporate entity responsible for the data center is located in Austin Texas. Austin has many surrounding lakes & 35 inches of annual rainfall. Seems ideal for a data center.
Last fall, construction began on the Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa. Developed by BorderPlex Digital Assets, the complex will be powered by a self-contained power system that is separate from the grid that supplies electricity to the public. It is being built for Oracle, which will use it to host artificial intelligence infrastructure for OpenAI.
According to Oil & Gas Watch, Project Jupiter is getting lots of blowback from the local community because of its large carbon footprint and its demand for water in an area that already suffers from scarce water resources. In response, the developer and Oracle announced in April that Project Jupiter will utilize fuel cells to make the electricity needed to power the data center instead of gas turbines and diesel generators.
Apparently the locals were supposed to bow down and thank the owners of the project for sparing them all the pollution those generators would have caused, but the people of Santa Teresa are not that easily fooled. Fuel cells convert methane into electricity through a chemical reaction with oxygen.
Colin Cox, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Oil & Gas Watch that while the fuel cell proposal is an improvement, it is still a climate disaster. “Ten million tons per year is more than the greenhouse gas emissions from Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and Santa Fe — New Mexico’s three biggest cities — combined. That absolutely trashes our state’s climate progress and makes a joke out of climate goals,” he said.
Cox criticized Project Jupiter for its failure to communicate with the local population in a transparent manner. “We get little bits of information here and there from various public filings,” he said. “When we finally found out how much of our water the first power plant was going to use, people were rightly outraged. Now they say this power plant will use less. What does that mean, and why aren’t they sharing that information?”