Welcome To Topix Too Forum

 Uphill battle for new coal
Energy companies and utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. for myriad reasons. Environmental regulations raised the cost of burning coal. A gusher of natural gas made that fuel more economically competitive. Plummeting solar and wind costs pushed more capital-intensive coal facilities out of the mix.

Yet tech companies have proven willing to explore costly energy projects like geothermal and nuclear to feed energy-hungry data centers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to revive “clean, beautiful coal.”
-
But analysts in the energy sector have been skeptical of the TerraSpark project’s viability.

Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that supports a shift to cleaner resources, said that while many large energy infrastructure projects are built by experienced energy utilities, DOE in its June grant announcement turned to companies that don’t appear to have deep pockets or relevant experience.

“Who’s financing them, who’s going to invest in them?” he said. The government grants will “help a little bit, but you’ve got to convince the markets of the credibility of your project.”



“I find that pretty thin at the moment here,” he said.

Ryan Sweezey, director of North American power and renewables at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said that if the developers plan to have a data center or other industrial customers that directly tie in to the plant, coal boilers likely won’t be able to ramp up and down quickly enough without batteries.

Sweezey said the executives’ lack of experience in energy or coal plant development was a “major red flag.”

Hooking up AI data centers directly to power sources — an increasingly popular model for the electricity-devouring sector — is “very complicated” and requires “serious expertise,” said Sweezey.

Adding a carbon capture and storage system to the mix further complicates that picture, and would catapult the overall cost, which could be over $10 billion, he predicted. Tolpegin said the entire cost of the energy campus and coal plant could be “in the billions.”