A New Google-Funded Data Center Will Be Powered by a Massive Gas Plant

[highplainsdem]

Source: Wired

A new data center being built with investments from Google will be partly powered by a natural gas project that emits the yearly emissions equivalent of putting more than 970,000 additional gas-powered cars on the road.

According to a Texas state air permit application, the Goodnight data center campus in Armstrong County, Texas will be partly powered by private natural gas turbines that will emit more than 4.5 million tons of greenhouse gases each year. This is more than ten times higher the yearly emissions of an average natural gas plant, and more emissions per year than an average coal plant.

Michael Thomas, the founder of Cleanview and author of a new report on Google’s power strategy for its data centers, says that Google’s focus on and continued commitment to renewables is often held up by environmental groups as an example of Big Tech doing things right. But the plans for this campus, he alleges, illustrate how even big tech companies with stated climate goals and a public commitment to renewable energy are exploring fossil fuel investments as the AI race heats up.

While the Goodnight campus is not the biggest fossil fuel project planned in the US to power data centers, nor one that will create the most emissions, the fact that the company is seemingly now exploring private, off-the-grid gas power for their data centers “suggests that something is changing,” he says.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-will-be-powered-by-a-massive-gas-plant/

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Environment? Who needs a healthy environment when you can have AI Overview to rip off websites, steal their traffic AND throw in lots of errors for free?

Who needs a healthy environment when you can addict AI users by letting them generate lots of AI slop images with Gemini?

[OC375]

1. I think of all those new Lennar homes with legit "all gas" everything. Gas stove, heat, water, etc...

That's going to be tough.

[highplainsdem]

2. Powering data centers with natural gas is much worse, though, because the race to build more

data centers is driven by genAI, which itself is unnecessary and harmful.

It's a shame that AI owners and execs and the venture capitalists helping to maintain the AI bubble can't be forced to live right next to the data centers, so they have to put up with the noise and pollution themselves.

[OC375]

4. Agreed

I worry for freezing families with high gas bills, cold water and wet clothes, in addition to mother earth. There has to be affordable alternatives.

[highplainsdem]

5. Trump's doing all he can to stop people from using alternatives. It's going to take years to recover

from the damage he's done in just the past 14 months.

[pecosbob]

3. Build 'em and we will monkey-wrench.

[hunter]

6. The article says a 900 megawatt gas turbine power plant...

... but it's not clear the author knows what that is.

"Additional gas-powered cars on the road" is another one of those fuzzy units like "enough to power ___ homes."

That's about a billion dollars of power plant, enough to power a large city.

At this moment California's electric demand is about 27,000 megawatts. It would take about 30 of these electric plants to power the entire state.

A single 900 megawatt electric plant could power a city the size of San Francisco.

That's one of many reasons to reject Imitation Intelligence. Natural gas is a very dirty fuel that contributes greatly to global heating. It's not any better than coal and will end whatever is left of the natural world as humans have known it.

I use the phrase "imitation Intelligence" because language is important. "Artificial Intelligence" implies that these machines are intelligent. They are not. They are merely a poor imitation of a single narrow facet of actual intelligence.

[jfz9580m]

8. K&R

Always like your posts Hunter.

[progree]

7. 🚨"for these projects, gas is king" Nearly 100,000 MW of natural-gas fired power are currently in development to power

Last edited Thu Apr 2, 2026, 10:03 PM - Edit history (4)

centers (so the 900 MW of the Goodnight project is just a tiny part (0.9%) of this).

From the article (emphasis added by progree) -

As data center developers face lengthy wait times to connect to electricity grids and rising concerns over consumer electric bills, they’re increasingly turning to building their own energy, or what’s known as behind-the-meter power. For these projects, gas is king; data centers are now driving a US boom in natural gas. Nearly 100 gigawatts ((100,000 MW -progree)) of natural-gas fired power are currently in development throughout the US solely to power data centers, according to research ( https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-gas-boom/ ) published by the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor in January.

Per the Global Energy Monitor research, there are at least 15 projects in development across the US that are larger than the Goodnight campus. Several of these projects have only just been announced or are still in the development phase, and have not yet filed air permits detailing just how much greenhouse gases they will emit. But the numbers that have been made public are jaw-dropping: . . . ((a couple examples given -progree))

These are horrendous numbers.

For scale, Hunter above posted at about noon Pacific Time that California is using 27,000 MW of power (from all sources) at the moment. California is the 4th largest economy in the world, larger than Japan's.

[littlemissmartypants]

9. The inevitable explosions... gonna be LIT¡!¡! 💥

[Wonder Why]

10. Is this another trump fart joke?

[Figarosmom]

11. Like the air in Texas is breathable now.🤢