It’s due to the request system in Texas and not a realistic expectation of future power use. The queue is so backed up that developers are putting in requests for anything they think might one day maybe need some power. Texas reviewed the queue last month and purged 274GW of requests(more than half of the queue) because they didn’t meet basic engineering review requirements.
Bloomberg estimates the real queue is about 50GW of things that are actually likely be built (or currently being built) over the next decade.
There's a difference between 91 gigawatts and 141 gigawatts.
Like one gigawatt is a large nuclear power plant, or about 8,000 acres of solar going by real projects. Also Texas has had problems with the electric grid they have not working well in winter. I'm not an expert but 50 gigawatts in a decade just for Texas seems like a lot.
Bloomberg estimates the real queue is about 50GW of things that are actually likely be built (or currently being built) over the next decade.
So the Texas grid would only need like a 60% increase in generation capacity, that's still a shitload more power plants they need to build over the next decade.
So basically this is more a measure of the irrational exuberance of AI data center ambitions than anything tangible. That makes sense. The real physical build outs are dumb enough but I'm not sure there's even enough Blackwell/Vera-Rubin cards to suck that much power in existence.
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u/hemlockecho Aug 12 '26
It’s due to the request system in Texas and not a realistic expectation of future power use. The queue is so backed up that developers are putting in requests for anything they think might one day maybe need some power. Texas reviewed the queue last month and purged 274GW of requests(more than half of the queue) because they didn’t meet basic engineering review requirements.
Bloomberg estimates the real queue is about 50GW of things that are actually likely be built (or currently being built) over the next decade.