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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [theregister.com]:

Google believes the US electricity grid can't deliver the energy needed to power datacenters that deliver AI services, so has formed an alliance to build industrial parks powered by clean energy, at which it will build "gigawatts of datacenter capacity" across the nation.

The search megalith announced [blog.google] its plan on Wednesday. Google president Ruth Porat wrote that the US is poised to enjoy strong economic growth thanks to AI, increased manufacturing activity, and the electrification of transport and other industries. But Porat thinks those opportunities could be missed due to the wonky electricity grid, which she wrote has "not kept pace with the country's economic growth opportunity" and is sometimes "unable to accommodate load increases."

Google's response is a deal with solar energy firm Intersect Power, and financier TPG Rise Climate, to build industrial parks next to renewable energy generation facilities that Porat wrote will be "purpose-built and right-sized for the datacenter." Google will build datacenters at those parks – meaning they have a long-term customer from day one – and believes it can build bit barns faster under this arrangement.

Intersect Power agrees [intersectpower.com]with that analysis, describing the deal as a "'power-first' approach to datacenter development."

The generation plants Intersect Energy builds will also be connected to the grid, and provide power to other tenants of the industrial parks.

Intersect Power's portfolio [intersectpower.com] consists of 2.2GW of operating solar PV and accompanying battery storage in operation or construction.

Intersect doesn't appear to have any wind investments. It previously sold [prnewswire.com] a 1.7GW bundle of renewable energy generation in California and Texas to SoftBank – all of which involved solar power.

Google and TPG are investing $800 million into Intersect to fund the deal. Intersect noted in its press release announcing the partnership that the first co-located clean energy project with Google is slated to come online in 2026.

Where that facility will be located is anyone's guess – Google told us that it didn't have anything else to share about the news beyond what has been revealed in press releases, but would share details on specific projects "soon."

Intersect Power didn't respond to requests for comment.

Despite Google's admission that its CO₂ emissions rose 13 percent [theregister.com] between 2022 and 2023, Google maintains AI is not the reason for the increase as it remains a small fraction of its datacenter workloads.

The search giant has made several renewable and low-carbon energy investments this year – the Intersect deal is just the latest it's announced. All its programs, a Google spokesperson told us, fulfill the biz's "overall focus [on identifying] structures and pathways to power generation that add carbon-free resources to the grid to meet growing load with new capacity."

In June 2024 the big G announced a deal with Nevada-based NV Energy to use geothermal power for its datacenters [theregister.com] in the state. That transaction also saw Google sign a Clean Transition Tariff (CTT) – a deal that requires energy customers with a minimum monthly load of 5MW (eg, Google) to cover the costs of new clean energy projects by paying a premium over what they'd be charged for energy drawn elsewhere from the grid, essentially funding the cost of new projects.

The Chocolate Factory believes CTTs will improve on its previous efforts to source renewable energy.

"The customer gets fixed-price power and ownership of the environmental attributes of the power procured, which enables Google to meet its voluntary corporate clean energy commitments," noted a report [columbia.edu] on CTTs from Columbia Law School.

There is one catch here: Getting CTTs approved in Nevada requires the blessing of the state's Public Utilities Commission. Despite the application being lodged months ago, the PUC is yet to approve the deal.

Regulators' opinions on the deal are unclear, and according to a document [regmedia.co.uk] [PDF] filed last week by the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada, the hearing isn't scheduled to take place until late May. Regulatory niceties mean approval for CTTs might not be official until sometime in June or July, we're told.

Google also signed a deal with Kairos Power in October to outfit future datacenters with small modular reactors [theregister.com] (SMRs), making it just one of many tech giants turning to nuclear power to feed its facilities. As we've noted in multiple stories of late, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others are investing heavily in the power of the atom [theregister.com] to power future datacenters.

Kairos hasn't built a working reactor molten salt SMR yet, and only has plans to get a test facility up and running by 2030. There aren't even many SMRs in the world – China, Russia, and Japan each host one functional unit, despite several groups working on other designs.

And let's not get started on the scarcity of the fuel [theregister.com] needed to power such reactors: high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) that powers SMRs and other next-gen nuclear reactors is only produced at scale in China and Russia, and the US can only move so fast [theregister.com] to commercialize domestic production.

While it waits, Google has poured additional cash into carbon capture technology [theregister.com] to offset its greenhouse gas emissions – but the direct air capture provider behind it may not be able to scale up until the 2030s.

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