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As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas, but as datacenter footprints explode amid the AI boom, regulators fear even the Lone Star state's utilities won't be able to keep up for much longer.

The Texas' Public Utility Commission is now warning datacenter operators looking to set up shop in the US state within the next 12 to 15 months that they won't be able to rely entirely on the local grid and will have to supply at least some of their own power. As some of you will know, Texas has at times suffered blackouts from demand overload, and outages sparked by storms damaging infrastructure.

"We can't afford to lose any of our resources off the system at this point, especially given those load-growth projections," Thomas Gleeson, who chairs the commission, told Blomberg during the Gulf Coast Power Association conference in Austin this week.

Chief among Gleeson's concerns is datacenters setting up shop near existing power plants and buying up the supply of electricity, making it harder for the grid to keep the lights on for everyone else. Instead, Gleeson wants to see datacenter operators arranging and supporting their own generation facilities before putting strain on existing infrastructure.

[...] To ensure their bit-barn projects don't run out of juice, some operators are cozying up to operating and even defunct nuclear power plants. This northern spring, Amazon paid $650 million for Talen Energy's Cumulus datacenter located directly adjacent to the 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant. Under the deal, Amazon will have access to up to 960 megawatts of power.

[...] However, bringing retired nuclear plants back online isn't always as easy as it sounds. As The Register recently reported, many older facilities will require extensive repairs and modernization before they're ready to start turning steam into electricity again.

Some operators hope to bypass the problems associated with legacy reactor designs by opting for small modular reactor designs from the likes of NuScale, Oklo, and others. During Oracle's Q1 earnings call last month, Ellison said the IT goliath had already secured building permits for a trio of SMRs.

But while SMRs have promise, none are operating.

[...] Some critics believe SMRs will never work. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis predicted the reactors will be "too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."

It's worth noting that while nuclear may be hot right now, it's far from the only option datacenter operators can consider – even it if is one of the cleaner alternatives.

AWS, for instance, briefly weighed using natural gas fuel cells to power some of its Oregon datacenters as an alternative to grid power, and ultimately abandoned the plan. In the energy-constrained Irish market, Microsoft is using natural gas to keep several of its datacenters online.

But, if Redmond is to be believed, the 170 megawatt power plant containing some 22 gas generators only supplies power during periods when the national grid is unable to keep up with demand.

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