The AI Energy Surge: Jason Plautz on Grid Strain and National Stakes
Season 2 Episode 18 •Show Notes
In this episode of Cyber Focus, host Frank Cilluffo sits down with award-winning journalist Jason Plautz of Politico’s E&E News Energywire to explore the growing tension between artificial intelligence, energy demand, and infrastructure readiness. Plautz breaks down how AI-driven data centers are reshaping the U.S. power grid—and what state and federal leaders are doing in response. The conversation covers legislative efforts in Texas and Georgia, the controversial idea of “kill switches” for data centers, and major federal moves like the Stargate project and DOE’s push to site data centers on federal lands. Plautz also unpacks the Trump administration’s AI and energy strategy, and highlights how tech companies could accelerate innovation in nuclear, geothermal, and other clean energy sources.
Main Topics Covered:
- Why AI is driving an unprecedented spike in electricity demand
- The strain data centers are placing on existing grid infrastructure
- How states like Texas and Georgia are responding with new legislation
- The feasibility and controversy around data center “kill switches”
- The Stargate project and the Trump administration’s AI-energy policy direction
- DOE’s plan to co-locate data centers and power sources on federal land
Key Quotes:
“Some of these [data centers] have been compared to like mini malls. If you imagine a site that big running computers, imagine how much power that’s going to need.” — Jason Plautz
“AI or data center use could triple by 2030 in the U.S. Right now it accounts for about 4% of the nation’s electricity use. It would account for 12%…. the equivalent of 53 million households just running data centers. — Jason Plautz
“Lawmakers have said is they don’t want a situation where the grid is strained and you have an entire block of houses without power, and across the street is a data center that’s still humming.” — Jason Plautz
“This is really an opportunity, I think, to leap forward in some of the energy technology that’s been sitting dormant—because all of a sudden, you have deep pockets and a lot of interest.” — Jason Plautz
“We’re seeing a lot more concern about what would happen if there were to be a cyberattack on the grid. What would that mean—and how can we build the grid without making it more vulnerable?” — Jason Plautz
“This is an economic competitiveness issue as well as a national security issue—and it’s a race neither we nor Beijing want to lose.” — Frank Cilluffo
Relevant Links and Resources:
“Artificial Intelligence’s Thirst for Power Demands Greater Focus on Cybersecurity of the Energy Sector” by Frank Cilluffo
“State lawmakers grapple with energy demand for data centers” by Jason Plautz
https://www.eenews.net/articles/state-lawmakers-grapple-with-energy-demand-for-data-centers/
“Study finds headroom on the grid for data centers” by Jason Plautz
https://www.eenews.net/articles/study-finds-headroom-on-the-grid-for-data-centers/
“Energy is AI’s barrier to entry. David Sacks knows it.” by Jason Plautz
https://www.eenews.net/articles/energy-is-ais-barrier-to-entry-david-sacks-knows-it/
“Chris Wright elaborates on DOE data center build-out, job cuts” by Jason Plautz
https://www.eenews.net/articles/chris-wright-elaborates-on-doe-data-center-build-out-job-cuts/
Guest Bio:
Jason Plautz is an award-winning journalist based in Denver, currently reporting for E&E News‘ Energywire, where he covers electricity and the clean energy transition. He focuses on the intersection of environmental policy and politics, and his work has also appeared in Science, High Country News, and Ars Technica. A former reporter in Washington, D.C., Plautz was selected for the Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado and brings experience in reporting, editing, and audio production.
Transcript
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Jason Plautz [00:00:00]:
Data centers are an energy story right now. Some of these sites have been compared to like mini malls. If you imagine a site that big running computers, imagine how much power that’s going to need.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:00:14]:
Welcome to CyberFocus from the McCrary Institute where we explore the people and ideas shaping and defending our digital world. I’m your host, Frank Cilluffo and this week I have the privilege to sit down with Jason Ploutz. Jason is a, an award winning journalist living in Colorado. He writes for Politico’s E and E Energy Wire and, and is doing some fascinating reporting on a number of topics that are really important right now, but I think are going to be even more salient and relevant in the days ahead. Looking at the power needs to be able to power AI and the twin goals of having AI dominance as well as, as as well as power dominance. Jason, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Jason Plautz [00:00:57]:
Absolute thanks for having me on.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:00:59]:
You know, Jason, I thought maybe to start and we’re going to make your recent articles or links to your recent articles available in our show notes, but I thought maybe to start to set the stage. What is this power demand? How significant is it? And if you can give us a sense of scale in terms of numbers.
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Jason Plautz [00:01:22]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, um, this is not the first time that there have been warnings that the tech industry is going to drive up power demand. Um, you know, obviously we had the, the Internet boom, the tech boom. Now we’re looking at this A.I. boom. Um, and people seem to say this, this one’s really real. And the reason is you have these data centers to, to power AI, to run these models. To run artificial intelligence requires data centers that are running massive computations, taking in tons of power and they’re running almost around the clock.
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Jason Plautz [00:01:58]:
The kind of rule of thumb that I hear is the five nines, 99.999% of the time. So this is coming also at a time when the grid is already seeing a huge load increase. If you think about electric cars electrifying your homes, just the sheer number of new appliances, new electronics that are coming into everybody’s homes, new manufacturing, there are tons of new loads that are coming onto the grid. AI data centers are just one of them, but they’re a really significant one. And it’s one that really people have to get right.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:02:36]:
And just in terms of scale and what makes this unique or different than previous demands on electricity that we’ve seen over the years. You mentioned the Internet. Obviously electric vehicles is something we’re living through now and obviously we’ll have residual concerns going forward. But what makes this different in your eyes?
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Jason Plautz [00:02:59]:
Sure, I think it’s really the scale and the size and the demand. You know, an electric vehicle, for example, it’s only plugged in for maybe a few hours a day. Maybe it’s plugged in overnight. You’re talking about with these data centers. They’re running virtually 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They’re taking a huge amount of power. And you know, I think one important piece of it is where they’re coming on. So you have places like Virginia where you have the world’s largest concentration of data centers.
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Jason Plautz [00:03:34]:
That’s a huge strain on, on the grid as they start to come online. California, Texas, we’re even seeing data centers come in in rural areas where there may not be connections. And then as you mentioned at the top, this also comes as the US is competing with other countries to try to become AI dominant. Right. This is a huge effort from the administration, it’s a huge effort from the country’s tech companies. So they want to build here, they want to have these data centers operating here in the US and they want to be scaling up as quickly as possible to be able to run these operations as quickly as possible, to be, you know, having AI models as quickly as possible. So you’d asked about some numbers. There’s a pretty big range of estimates out there.
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Jason Plautz [00:04:22]:
It’s a little hard to get, you know, firm estimates of what’s happening for a number of different reasons. But I think one of the most reliable ones came from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. That’s a DOE backed national laboratory. And what they estimated in their report, which came out just at the end of 2024, is that AI or data center use could triple by 2030 in the U.S. right now it accounts for about 4% of the nation’s electricity use. It would account for 12%. That’s by the end of the decade by the raw numbers that they did. I won’t bore you with the gigawatts and terawatts and everything, but just think of this.
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Jason Plautz [00:05:05]:
They say by 2030 that could be the equivalent of 53 million households just running data centers. So when you talk about scale, that’s what we’re talking about here.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:05:16]:
When you talk about scale and scope. And I think you framed it right in that this is an economic competitiveness set of issues as well as a national security set of issues. And I think it’s a race neither us nor Beijing want to lose. So I think we’re in the early, not to use a bad metaphor, but we’re in the early innings right now in terms of, of what this means. You know, you’ve written about developers pledging hundreds of billions of dollars for AI infrastructure and I know we’ll talk about the administration’s policies later on. But what do you think this means in practical terms for the grid?
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Jason Plautz [00:05:57]:
Sure. So when you ask that question, I think of just last month I was down in Houston for this conference which is CERA week. It’s called the super bowl of energy. It’s this big oil and gas developers conference this year. Google was there, Amazon was there, Microsoft was there. All anybody could talk about was data centers. Data centers are an energy story right now. When you talk about these hundreds of billions of dollars that are coming online.
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Jason Plautz [00:06:27]:
Some of these, the hyperscalers they’re called, these are massive, massive projects, kind of city size projects that are coming online and they need a huge amount of power. We talked about they’re running 24 hours a day. They’re taking in, you know, if you imagine some of these sites have been compared to like mini malls. If you imagine a site that big running computers, imagine how much power that’s going to need. And so the reason it becomes this concern for the grid is that that’s A, a huge load. But if they’re drawing from the grid, that’s a huge amount of power that now the utilities need to provide. If they are investing in a power plant or trying to draw a power plant, well, that’s now power that the utility needs to replace and get onto the grid. Even if they’re building their own power plants,
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Jason Plautz [00:07:19]:
it’s called colocation, where you would build a power plant on site or maybe build a big solar farm, they still have to be connected to the grid. So that’s transmission infrastructure. So it’s an investment no matter what. It’s a potential strain on the grid no matter what. And that’s where this conversation is happening because this is coming on very quickly at a time when there’s already other demands on the grid.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:07:44]:
And you know, we’ll talk about who pays for it and how in a second as well as how do we build out the infrastructure while not impacting reliability and simultaneously not passing it all to the ratepayer. I want to get to the economics in a second, but you’ve also written some fascinating stories on how states are looking at how they can contribute and play a role in powering the power. And I think two in particular you served as you identified as potential models, Texas and Georgia. Any lessons other states can learn from them and maybe paint a little picture on what they’re doing?
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Jason Plautz [00:08:27]:
Yeah, absolutely. So some of this is still happening, right? Take Texas, for example. We’ve had recent forecasts there that the main grid in Texas could see its load double. Wow, that’s huge. And lawmakers are really trying to get on top of this, right? Regulators and lawmakers trying to get on top of this. And there’s a bill that recently passed the state senate, is now moving to the state House, and it has a number of requirements for data center developers. But they would have to put up more information up front, give state regulators a little more information about what’s coming online and when. They’d have to pay for some transmission fees.
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Jason Plautz [00:09:08]:
They’d have to replace power or agree to send backup power to the grid if they’re taking power that’s already existing. Basically what lawmakers have said is they don’t want a situation where the grid is strained and you have an entire block of houses without power, and across the street is a data center that’s, that’s still humming. And we’re seeing this in a lot of states. You mentioned Georgia. Georgia is another hotspot for data centers. And even their lawmakers are saying, okay, how can we get these developers to pay for more to make sure that, you know, we’re not going to lose power? It’s kind of a shift because just a few years ago, you had states lining up to offer incentives to data centers. Um, how many tax breaks can we give? How easy can we make it to build? And now you’re starting to see, because of these power concerns, more regulators and more lawmakers are saying, okay, hang on, we still want this, but what can we do to make sure that this isn’t going to damage the electric grid?
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Frank Cilluffo [00:10:09]:
And I guess that’s the crux of the issue. If you’re a state lawmaker, a governor in this House or Senate, how do you do this without impacting reliability? And clearly, the stability of what is already, some would argue, potentially fragile.
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Jason Plautz [00:10:28]:
Exactly. And to be clear, the data center developers want this too. Right. If you talk to the tech companies, if you talk to the companies that are building these sites, they don’t want to be responsible for crashing the grid. They don’t want to pull power. They don’t want to raise people’s rates. So I think that there really is a common interest here in how do we get these sites online, get them powered, how do we build the infrastructure that’s needed to power them, to do it quickly, but to do it without impacting everyday Americans.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:10:58]:
And, you know, while not necessarily part of our conversation today, it also brings about a whole new set of vulnerabilities in an attack surface, if you think about it, not just destroying or disrupting some of the data centers, but also potentially poisoning some of those data centers. That could have huge implications for, for the country and even more broadly. So I think that we want to make sure that cybersecurity is not a footnote and afterthought in all of this. Any, any, any thoughts on that? And I, I don’t want to go too deep there, but, but any, any thoughts you have?
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Jason Plautz [00:11:35]:
Absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s not my area of expertise, but I know that that has been a really common topic, keeping those issues up front. Right. Both on the data centers and on the grid side, we’re seeing a lot more concern about what would happen if there were to be a cyber attack on the grid. What, what would that mean? And right. How can we build the grid without making it more vulnerable.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:11:57]:
And more resilient simultaneously. You also wrote about ERCOT or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Talk us through about the kill switch issue. So I know it’s a little controversial, so I’d be curious what your thoughts are there and what you’ve learned.
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Jason Plautz [00:12:15]:
Absolutely. So this, this is part of that bill that I had mentioned in Texas, SB6, which is about large loads, mostly meaning data centers. And in there, the original language had what was called a kill switch. So it’s an idea that seems kind of simple. Right. If you’re the grid operator, there’s stress on the grid. Let’s say we’re edging close to a blackout. Here’s this large data center that’s using a lot of power. If we turn that off, the problem goes away.
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Jason Plautz [00:12:45]:
So that’s kind of what lawmakers had proposed. It’s not quite as simple as that. It’s not like there would be a black box and all of a sudden the power would just go out for the data centers. But it basically gave state regulators a little more power to say, look, we need the power now. We need you to turn off. Obviously, data center developers were not crazy about this idea. If you imagine if you even at your house, you wouldn’t want somebody to just turn the power off. And these are companies that are, you know, running massive operations through these.
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Jason Plautz [00:13:20]:
So it’s definitely a topic of discussion that that language has already been relaxed a little bit, and it’s really just about giving more notice. You know, how, how can these data centers have more notice that a kill switch might be coming? They might need to relax their load a little bit. Because it’s…
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Frank Cilluffo [00:13:38]:
Based on your digging in, do you have any insights, your personal insights on what your thoughts are around that?
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Jason Plautz [00:13:44]:
Sure. I mean, I think that we’re going to reach a point where regulators want more flexibility from the data centers. And again, it’s just a conversation about how do you make that happen. You know, I think one thing that I’d like to bring up is there was a really interesting study out of Duke University that looked at flexibility for data centers. That’s gotten a lot of attention. You know, basically the issue here is when we talk about stress on the grid, we don’t mean every day, we don’t mean every month. It’s really a handful of hours out of the year. So if you think about a hot summer day, you know, down where you are, maybe you get a text from your utility and it says the grid is stressed this evening, can you turn your thermostat up 2 degrees for a couple of hours? We’ll give you a, you know, few bucks credit on,
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Jason Plautz [00:14:35]:
on your bill, and that you get enough houses doing that, it relaxes the load on the grid, and all of a sudden that that stress is gone. What this Duke University study was looking at is what if data centers could do that? What if we could ask data centers to turn down a little bit? Would that make enough room on the grid to really build this out without having to build new power plants, without having to build new gas plants or new solar farms? And they found, yes. So to get into some of the numbers here, they said if you could get data centers to turn off and to turn down, not off, turn down for 0.5% of the time, that’s 44 hours out of the year, that the grid could take on 98 gigawatts of new load. If you bump that up to 1%, that’s 88 hours less than four total days out of the year. And not all in one block. This is sort of a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there.
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Jason Plautz [00:15:36]:
The grid could take on 126 gigawatts of new load without having to build new power plants. So this is really becoming more of a conversation. Can, can the regulators, can the utilities, can the grid operators convince data centers to be more flexible with their load to turn off or turn down in times of need?
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Frank Cilluffo [00:15:57]:
You know, Jason, are there other, I could see this being very contentious, just anyone saying turn up your, turn your air up a couple degrees when it’s 112 outside and what have you. Are there other countries that have initiated similar activities that you’re aware of and this Duke study, do they look at others perhaps? I’m just thinking out loud here.
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Jason Plautz [00:16:22]:
I don’t know of other countries that have done this. I know that this is becoming more of a conversation. And one model that was actually cited in this study is Google. Google has data centers all around the world and what they’re able to do is shift the load. So the really heavy stuff that’s taking the most computing power, they can move that around the globe. So let’s say it’s, it’s the middle of the night in Asia. Power demand is really low in the middle of the night. There might be a lot of wind blowing.
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Jason Plautz [00:16:54]:
Energy is cheap. Well, let’s just shift all of our really heavy load over there and then, you know, let’s use our U.S. data centers to do something that’s a little easier when the grid is stress.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:17:06]:
Well said. And are our grids smart enough to do that? Because I think it’s almost agnostic to the source. Right. It could be from nuclear, traditional electricity, solar, you name it. Netting that all together though, could be a little complicated. And are our grids smart enough to do that today, you think?
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Jason Plautz [00:17:31]:
Yes and no. So the grids are smart and are getting smarter. They’re dealing with a lot of issues that I think even 10 years ago, a lot of the grid operators weren’t really prepared to deal with or didn’t know that they would have to deal with. You talk about these different sources and that gets into a really interesting discussion because ultimately once an electron goes onto the grid, it doesn’t matter if it came from…
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Frank Cilluffo [00:17:57]:
Boom. It doesn’t matter. Yeah.
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Jason Plautz [00:17:58]:
…a solar farm or a gas plant or a coal plant. But you have some of these companies, you know, Microsoft has climate goals, Google has climate goals. They don’t want coal or gas power going into their data centers. Well, how do you do that unless you’re directly plugged into the wind farm or the solar farm or the nuclear plant or what have you. You don’t know if the electron that’s coming into the data center came from a gas plant or a coal plant or solar farm or what energy source it could have come from. And so you’re seeing a lot of different solutions to this. Sometimes it means a developer will come on, Microsoft say, will come to Southern Power in Georgia and say, we want to build, you know, a X gigawatt data center here, we don’t want it powered by coal. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to invest to build the equivalent X gigawatts of clean energy to put on the grid.
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Jason Plautz [00:18:55]:
So that way you’re saying, yes, we don’t know where the direct electrons are coming from, but we’ve added enough renewable energy to make it work.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:19:04]:
Interesting.
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Jason Plautz [00:19:05]:
Yeah, a lot of really interesting discussions around that.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:19:08]:
You know, and I feel like this issue, like many others are painted as either or propositions. It’s either ratepayer or it’s data center. The reality is we kind of need both. Right? I mean, and it’s figuring out in those exceptions how we titrate that more efficiently. Am I fair on that or?
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Jason Plautz [00:19:30]:
Exactly. I mean it’s as I said, you know, when we talk about the grid being stressed, we’re not talking about the middle of the day most days. We’re talking about those, those handful of hours when it’s really hot and everybody’s cranking up their air conditioners or it’s really cold and everybody’s at home turning on their, their heaters and their stoves. So it, it, it’s really about finding the room in those handful of hours out of the year to make sure that the, the data centers can continue to operate but everybody’s lights can still stay on.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:20:02]:
You know, let’s pivot a little bit to the current administration and some of their policies and proposals in this particular space. You’ve written some really interesting articles that zeroed in a little bit on David Sachs’s view. The so called AI crypto czar as well as obviously new Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s views on some of these issues? Let’s start maybe with Stargate project which was the, the, the, the big announced investment. What are some of your thoughts there and what do you think it’s trying to address?
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Jason Plautz [00:20:37]:
So the, the Stargate project, some of your listeners may have heard of it because it was announced in the White House. Donald Trump was, was there with officials from SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX, they’re all partners on this project, this Stargate data center project which is going to be built in Abilene, Texas and it is massive. We’re talking about 25 gigawatts. It’s an enormous site. It’s going to be used for artificial intelligence modeling, building these models. But I think it’s really attracted a lot of attention. A, because the investment, we’re talking $500 billion.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:21:22]:
Yeah, that’s not chump change.
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Jason Plautz [00:21:23]:
It’s, it’s not chump change.
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Jason Plautz [00:21:25]:
I wish I could have $500 billion. The size and the power demands and I think the, the power side of this is really interesting. So the reason it’s being located in Abilene, Texas is not because it’s a lovely place to be. Not that it’s not a lovely place to be, but it’s there because there’s actually a lot of wind in West Texas that’s not being used. There’s a lot of wind power that just gets, it’s called, curtailed because there’s not enough transmission to move it to where it needs to be. So this data center is going to be off taking some of that wind. They’re also building a natural gas plant on site that’s going to be used for backup power and they’re going to be connected to the grid as well. So this has attracted a lot of attention, A, because the White House brought a lot of attention to it, but B, because this is a huge project and I think just seeing how this plays out, how it gets built, it’s being built incredibly quickly.
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Jason Plautz [00:22:19]:
It is going to be breaking, it’s already broken ground and could be opening this year. It’s being built incredibly quickly. And I think there’s a lot of attention to is this going to work and how successful is this going to be.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:22:32]:
And I think it signals direction in terms of policy priorities going forward. And, and clearly the devil’s going to be in the details, as it always is. But, but it does recognize, I think it, it’s cognizant of the direction that the administration’s going in. You’ve also written a little bit about David Sacks and the fact that he’s playing an outsized role in artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure. Anything to add to our viewers and listeners on that?
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Jason Plautz [00:23:04]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, your listeners may know David Sacks, who is part of the so called PayPal mafia that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel came out of, you know, an entrepreneur, billionaire investor out of Silicon Valley. And he’s been given this role of AI and crypto czar in the White House, sort of an amorphous role here. But he’s really said, you know, we have to take the shackles off AI. So early in Trump’s term, the President revoked some AI restrictions. This is really more on the technology side and the regulatory side, less on the energy side. But revoking some of the restrictions that were put in place under the Biden administration, they’re now reworking and coming out with their own guidance here. In my writing and in my research, I didn’t find a whole lot that David Sacks had to say about the energy side of things, beyond the recognition that this is a huge energy play and we’re going to need to be building.
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Jason Plautz [00:24:07]:
And I think it’s really going to be interesting to see as this new AI guidance comes out, what does the administration have to say about how the power is going to come through? How do you make that nexus work?
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Frank Cilluffo [00:24:21]:
And I think the challenge of sort of you have policy promulgated out of D.C., maybe less of a federal role, but still a federal enabler, and then more responsibility on industry and, and state, local, tribal, territorial. It sometimes that, that, that’s, that’s clean in policy making, not always in implementation. So it could, it could get interesting, right?
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Jason Plautz [00:24:48]:
Absolutely. I mean, you know, I kind of joked while working on that story, you have David Sacks coming from the tech world, the move fast, break things world. And then you look at the building the power plant, building a power plant, building a transmission line. There’s no such thing as move fast in that world. It takes a long time just to source the materials, get the approvals, pass the NEPA, the environmental reviews to get things built. It takes a long time to get a lot of this power infrastructure built, which is part of why the grid is under some strain already. And I think it’s going to be kind of an interesting collision here to see, you know, how quickly, you know, how quickly can we build these things, the infrastructure that’s needed to support AI, which wants to move as quickly as possible.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:25:41]:
Especially when some of our competitors, primarily one competitor, that’s an afterthought in terms of their planning. So, yeah, that I think it is interesting. You got two races going on simultaneously.
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Jason Plautz [00:25:59]:
And certainly this is guiding some of what we’re seeing from the Trump administration in terms of energy policy. They’re trying to make it easier to build. They’re trying to make it easier to get power plants connected. You know, when we’re talking, this is before Trump is going to announce later today an executive order that’s going to make it easier to keep coal plants open. Lifting, possibly lifting some of the environmental reviews and environmental restrictions on them. This was certainly something we saw in the first Trump term. And this is a really driving force in the second Trump term of energy dominance. Right.
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Jason Plautz [00:26:34]:
Making it easier to build things, lifting some of those reviews and just getting more power onto the grid.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:26:40]:
You know, to segue to another set of issues. DOE is, and you’ve written about now looking to site data centers on federal land. And obviously that has lots of implications. I’d be curious what the strategy is and what you learn there.
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Jason Plautz [00:26:57]:
Sure. So this is actually something that came out of the Biden administration. Just in the last couple of days or last couple of weeks of Biden’s term, there was an executive order that would have made it easier to build data centers paired with renewable energy on federal lands. It was the one AI related executive order that Trump did not revoke. That one is still active. And what the Department of Energy and Energy Secretary Chris Wright came out with last week was a plan to potentially cite data centers and co-located power, so that means power that’s directly connected to the data centers, on the sites of 16 federal laboratories. And I think this is a really interesting proposal and there’s sort of a synergy here.
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Jason Plautz [00:27:45]:
So on the one hand you have these federal labs, they have land and they have power. A lot of them are experimenting in kind of new sources of power source renewable energy, what have you. So there’s an opportunity, right? What do data centers need? They need land and they need power. So you can cite them here. And then there’s a synergy because you have these are the Department of Energy officials and researchers who are working on sort of cutting edge technology in the energy space. So this is opportunity to say we’re going to build a small modular reactor nuclear power plant at one of these labs and see if it can work on a data center. We’re going to experiment with some of the flexibility that we had talked about. How can we use a data center.
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Jason Plautz [00:28:34]:
And then maybe some of that computing power from the data center can be turned back and applied to the federal labs, allowing them to do more work quicker.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:28:43]:
Interesting. Sort of like eating their own dog food as well.
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Jason Plautz [00:28:47]:
Exactly right. Hopefully you scratch my back, I scratch yours type situation.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:28:52]:
Hey, Jason, let me ask you the unfair question. Let’s look five years out. What does this look like? What’s the story you wish you wrote five years from now on this issue? And how do you, how do you see things unfolding?
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Jason Plautz [00:29:05]:
I wish I knew I could make a lot of money if I knew how things were going to play out. You know, a lot of really smart people are thinking about this, right? There’s a lot of urgency from the grid side and from the tech side to make this work. And I think that that common interest, that urgency means that this is going to work out somehow. What that looks like, we still don’t really know. Does it mean that tech companies are going to be building their own power plants to site things? Possibly. Does that mean that…
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Frank Cilluffo [00:29:37]:
Some of that’s happening now, right?
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Jason Plautz [00:29:39]:
Right, exactly. Some of that’s happening now. Does it mean more flexibility from the data centers? Possibly. Does it mean that we have some areas where maybe data centers don’t get built because there’s just not the infrastructure there? Possibly. It’s probably a combination of all these things. I think certainly I would bet on, just given the interest in this, given the interest in AI and the race that we’d mentioned, this is going to work. We’re definitely going to see more data centers on the grid no matter what. And I think we’re just going to find a way to make it work.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:30:18]:
Jason, finally, what questions didn’t I ask that I should have?
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Jason Plautz [00:30:23]:
I love that question. I think one thing that I did want to bring up is we talked about the federal labs a bit, but this is also an opportunity for innovation. And I think we’re seeing that. We have really deep pocketed tech companies coming in and saying what can we do to get round the clock clean power? So we’re seeing more investment all of a sudden in these small modular nuclear reactors. You may have seen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. The process has started to restart that plant because tech centers want that. Investments in geothermal energy are really coming along because tech centers say this is a clean, reliable source of energy. In Virginia, there’s even a partnership with a fusion company to get this really, really advanced form of energy on the grid to power data centers. So this is really an opportunity, I think, to leap forward in some of the energy technology that’s been kind of sitting dormant because all of a sudden you have deep pockets and really a lot of interest in getting as much clean power as possible.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:31:36]:
Jason, that was very well said. And again, not to mix bad metaphors or give bad analogies, but it is a Manhattan Project only not necessarily driven by the defense industrial base here, which could have some ancillary benefit, but by the tech sector. So where there’s money, where there’s a need, I think we’ll find a solution. But if you know what it is, let me know. So, bottom line, Jason, thank you for your excellent reporting. Thank you for spending some time with us today and keep doing great things. So I appreciate it.
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Jason Plautz [00:32:13]:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for the time.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:32:15]:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Cyberfocus. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing your ratings and reviews help us reach more listeners. Drop us a line if you have any ideas in terms of topics, themes, or individuals you’d like for us to host. Until next time, stay safe, stay informed, and stay curious.