“We're seeing a lot of data center growth being served by new fossil fuel plants. Very easy to understand. Like you just have this new fossil fuel plant manifest next to a data center, and it's just burning through fuels that wouldn't have been burned if that data center wasn't built at that size with that level of impatience.”
Volts · Climate & Energy · October 2026
Context
David Roberts asked for the elevator pitch of the case against data centers. Joshi splits it in two: new fossil plants built beside data centers, and extra demand on grids that still run on coal and gas. This is the first half.
Transcript
…reason as to why I was like, okay, I think I really want to focus narrowly on this. People have derisively sort of called it carbon tunnel vision, but when no one else is really doing it, I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to have the tunnel vision because I don't think anyone else is doing it.
Right. Somebody's going to do it.
And to answer the other part of your question on, I guess, the overall, you know, short elevator pitch version of the case against data centers, it's really, really straightforward. I think you can split it into two simple categories. The first is that we're seeing a lot of data center growth being served by new fossil fuel plants. Very easy to understand. Like you just have this new fossil fuel plant manifest next to a data center, and it's just burning through fuels that wouldn't have been burned if that data center wasn't built at that size with that level of impatience. And then the second half on power grids, right? Like you have data centers that kind of pop up and then demand power from your grid. That grid has to change somehow in response to that data center's new existence. It can change in a multitude of ways. The predominant way that we're seeing is from whatever's currently on the grid. And many grids are heavily served by coal and gas at the moment.…
All right. So let's talk a little bit of numbers then. Let's try to give people a sense of kind of what data centers are doing to power sector emissions right now. Maybe like what they're doing to power sector emissions currently. And then this kind of like bewildering array of projections that…
Yeah. So we're seeing places where greenhouse gas emissions were falling, the rate at which it falls kind of decelerates a bit, right? Like it kind of puts a bit of a wedge in that lovely downwards trend, you know, that we were seeing in certain places. I've done a fair bit on Australia, for…
I was going to get to this later, but might as well talk about it now. Like, I mean, I have such mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I do not want us to come out of all this thinking that increased demand for electricity is bad for reasons that I know you understand. We want increased demand…
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