Innovative Solutions Like This One Will Drive Natural Gas Demand For Decades

The dramatic expansion of the number and scale of planned datacenter projects across the United States has generated a great deal of news over the last year. The central question in many of those stories centers around the power needs of these projects, and how the power will be generated.

Early developers hyped their preference to use electricity generated by wind and/or solar to power their projects but found the 99.999% datacenter uptime requirements can’t be met by these intermittent power sources, even when backed up by stationary batteries.

With new nuclear projects facing permitting times of 10-15 years and coal being crowded out by emissions regulations, more recent speculation has centered heavily on natural gas as being the fuel of choice for developers whose projects won’t be interconnected into a regional power grid. Natural gas generation is cheaper and faster to build than nuclear, and, while anti-fossil fuel activists complain that gas still comes with emissions, it presents a far cleaner alternative to coal.