Data Centers

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    The Food-Energy-Water-Compute Nexus: Adding the Fourth Letter

    The water board meeting ran late on a Tuesday in October. The applicant was identified only as Project Trillium, a code name pending NDA. The slide deck showed a 250-acre footprint twelve miles north of town, a substation that would double the county’s transmission capacity, and a request that read like a typo: 14 million…

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    The Three-Year Window: Powering AI Without Locking In Gas

    The decision was made on a Tuesday at four in the afternoon, in a conference room on the forty-second floor of a glass tower in San Francisco. The young analyst had laid two binders on the long table. One was three inches thick, labeled SOLAR + STORAGE. The other was less than half an inch,…

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    The Price-Setter: Why Blocking Clean Energy Raises Everyone’s Bill

    The staff economist at the state Public Service Commission had been staring at the same spreadsheet for forty minutes. It was a Thursday in late February, the heat in the building was set too low for the season, and her office still smelled faintly of the coffee she had spilled on Monday. The spreadsheet was…