New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper in the long run to just put solar panels all over the buildings and parking lots, and maybe some surrounding fields, and an array of batteries to run off of at night? Maybe add some wind mills too, seeing as Texas generates a tremendous amount of power with wind already.

You aren’t thinking about the scale properly.

“some fields”, “parking lots”, “maybe some windmills” is a wildly vast under estimation of what would be required to do it.

7.65GW is A LOT.

The USA doesn’t even have an active 1GWh solar farm today. It’s 900MW, and it is 4600-5000 acres and is 1.3 million panels

To run batteries off that, you need to 3-4x that would be a 30GWh generation capacity battery to run in the non sun periods and give some buffer for bad weather. Then you need a massive battery as well to store it all. It would need to be able to run at least for a couple days, which means it needs to store 367.2 GWh (48h storage), so my solar numbers above are actually probably wrong since you won’t fill that up in 1 day, but maybe that’s okay if the size is just an emergency amount. 122GWh battery would probably the be minimum for a perfect summer condition 100% of the time day/night cycle.

The largest upcoming battery installation in the USA is 1.15 GWh, which is not built yet.

I’m not saying don’t do it, but you’ve really glossed over the sheer scale of it, and I doubt they’d be able to easily put the solar field near the datacenter, so there’s extra costs around transmission lines as well.

Edit: For 30GW of solar you’re looking at around 153,333 acres, or about the size of Dallas Texas, before the battery storage

Edit: Updated battery figures