“Some large fraction of the data centers being planned in Texas right now… are being planned by companies that never built a data center before. Like, these are cowboys. Most of those projects are going to die.”
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
David Victor was explaining why the data center boom is a headache for utilities, which can't tell which projected demand is real. He suggests the forecasts feeding grid investment may be inflated.
Transcript
…everything's going up. But they're sensitive to the posted price and not to the real price. And in that world, I think it's become very hard to get people to believe the argument that more data centers would actually be good for us because they would help lower power prices for everybody else.
…kids into good schools and they progress. That's kind of inverted. Now people are worried about their kids' futures. And this all gets, you know, the totem for all of that is a data center, this physically large, imposing gray box that's just showing up in communities and really alienating people.
…the table. You wake up in the morning, you're doing something new. You've got small modular reactors, you've got solid-state transformers, you've got HVDC, you've got all these other things that are coming inside the industry, and demand in some places is really rising quickly. All that said, the data center build out is a huge challenge for the utilities because they don't know what to believe. Some large fraction of the data centers being planned in Texas right now, it's a place that I've looked at the data most recently, are being planned by companies that never built a data center before. Like these are cowboys. Most of those projects are going to die. And then on top of it, you've got all these crossholdings inside the tech companies that have made AI tech very, very frothy. And you're already beginning to see some of the air come out of that bubble.…
Yeah, and I think there's also an element of not wanting your politics to be for sale to the highest bidders, right? I mean, what we saw in Texas was remarkable, really. You know, Elon Musk put in hundreds of millions of dollars into this election to try and keep Texas red. He completely failed…
The Texas Senate race was extremely expensive. It was a crucible in which all these issues of corruption and money and politics are flowing and around which there's some kind of investigations that are going to happen at the federal level that may end up actually not focusing on Texas money. That…
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