By Matthew Gault Published January 14, 2025 | Comments (1) | Pioneer Natural Resources equipment near Midland, Texas, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. Michael Ciaglo/Bloomberg via Getty Images AI is power hungry and the companies behind the tech are striving to stand up nuclear reactors to feed it. But nuclear reactors take a long time to build and AI will need massive amounts of power years before theyre ready. So where will it come from? In the U.S., natural gas. The AI revolution will pump a lot more carbon into the air. A new report from the Financial Times detailed the coming natural gas boom. As climate change worsened, the world turned away from polluting sources of energy like coal and natural gas. The U.S. power grid was making progress on renewables and gas-based power production had slowed down over the past half decade.In 2024 it exploded thanks to data centers and AI. According to the Financial Times, the U.S. power grids reliance on gas will only go up. America will add upwards of 80 new gas power plants by 2030. Thats 20 percent more than was added in the last five years. On January 14, President Biden issued an executive order that cleared the way for even greater AI and energy infrastructure expansion. The order directed the Pentagon and the DOE to lease federal land to private companies looking to build gigawatt scale AI data centers.As part of the bargain, companies looking to build on federal land have to do it with so-called clean energy. To support these efforts, the Department of Interior will identify lands it manages that are suitable for clean energy that can support data centers on DOE and DOD sites, while enhancing permitting processes for geothermal projects, the order said. DOE will take further steps to promote distributed energy resources, advance siting of clean generation resources at existing points of interconnection, and support the safe and responsible deployment of nuclear energy.According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy, data center energy usage is expected to triple by 2028. This surge in data center electricity demand, however, should be understood in the context of the much larger electricity demand that is expected to occur over the next few decades from a combination of electric vehicle adoption, onshoring of manufacturing, hydrogen utilization, and the electrification of industry and buildings, the report said. Meta is researching nuclear energy, but it needs power now. The tech company is spending $10 billion in Louisiana on a data center and $3.2 billion on three new gas plants to power it. Microsoft is teaming up with Constellation to bring reactor unit three of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant back online. Last week, Constellation announced it was buying Calpine, an enormous gas power company, for $27 billion.American gas plants pumped more than 1 billion tonnes of carbon into the air last year. Thats the highest value ever recorded. There are ways to mitigate the carbon produced by natural gas plants, but many of the 80 slated for construction wont be equipped with carbon capture systems.According to the DOE, gas power plants and data centers are black boxes. While U.S. data centers are increasingly engaging in onsite electricity generation, power purchase agreements, and trade in various carbon credits, the lack of transparency around the details of these activities for all U.S. data center operators prevents including in the overall analysis, the DOE report said. Along with limiting the scope of this report, this lack of transparency highlights that data center growth is occurring with little consideration for how best to integrate these emergent loads with the expansion of electricity generation/transmission or for broader community development.In the announcement about Metas Louisiana data centers, Entergythe companys energy partnersaid it would add clean, efficient power plants to its system to meet growing power demands. It wasnt big on the exact details of its gas plants. Meta has pledged to match its electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy and will be working with Entergy to bring at least 1,500 MW of new renewable energy to the grid through its Geaux Zero program, the press release said. The Geaux Zero program is a local tariff that encourages the purchase of solar power. Buying some renewable energy doesnt mean the carbon will stop being pumped into the sky, only that Meta has promised to buy some solar to go along with it.The dream, of course, is for all these new data centers and AI systems to run on renewable and nuclear energy. The reality is that nuclear energy moves slowly. It can take a decade to spin up a traditional reactor and many of the smaller cutting-edge systems are untested, undeployed, and unproven. Its possible that big tech is at the cusp of a nuclear revolution thanks to incentives created by AI. But itll have to burn a lot of natural gas to get there before the reactors come online.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Kyle Barr Published January 14, 2025 By Thomas Maxwell Published January 13, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published January 13, 2025 David T. 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