Quick question. What do you do with a fifty-year-old power station that already has four gigawatts of grid access sitting on a thousand acres? As of this morning in North Yorkshire, you pitch it as an AI campus. This is The Data Center Daily for Tuesday, November 3rd. Polls are open across the country, and we'll leave the results to tomorrow. Today: Drax, Brookfield and Radiant put a twenty billion pound number on a data centre at Drax Power Station. The Washington Post adds up the carbon behind Big Tech's new gas plants. Grid Strategies prices the Senate's transmission bill for data centers at 55 billion dollars. And OpenAI launches what it calls the Grid Protectors Program. Follow the show and the next briefing lands in your feed on its own.
Kai Nicol-Schwarz, writing for CNBC:
Brookfield estimates that total investment, including semiconductors, could exceed £20 billion ($26.8 billion), with an initial £2.5 billion investment as part of phase 1.
Phase one targets up to 100 megawatts, operational from the first quarter of 2028. The partners have an ambition of 500 megawatts between 2028 and 2031, and CNBC reports the longer-term target is more than a gigawatt, with no date. Backing comes from the Brookfield-Qai joint venture, Qai being headquartered in Qatar, with Brookfield's Radiant platform building and operating. Drax shares were up 8.2 percent in early London trading. Two and a half billion pounds for a hundred megawatts. That's roughly 25 million pounds a megawatt, chips included. Fine. What I actually like is the site. Per Drax, the estate has 4 gigawatts of grid access and 2.6 gigawatts of active dispatchable generation, plus cooling systems already in place. Most developers would kill for that connection. Read the conditions, though. The release says phase one depends on planning, on regulatory and network approvals from government and the system operator, and on securing a suitable tenant. So, no customer has signed yet. That last one does a lot of work. It's a powered shell looking for a hyperscaler. And remember what that dispatchable generation is. Drax calls the station the UK's largest single source of renewable electricity by output, and the fuel is biomass pellets. So the power story here is a fuel supply chain, not a wind farm. The partners say they fit the government's new Data Centre Covenant, which promises faster time to power and planning for strategic sites. Chief executive Will Gardiner pitched it as securing the station's long-term future and hundreds of jobs. Community consultation starts shortly, and Drax is targeting the start of the planning process in the coming months.
Evan Halper and Kevin Schaul of The Washington Post, in a piece carried Monday by the Anchorage Daily News:
Just two gas projects Amazon recently signed on to, which would power planned data centers in Texas and Pennsylvania, would produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest facility in the country, the giant James H. Miller Jr. coal plant in Alabama that powers 1 million homes.
The analysis was done for The Post by Gianluca Guidi, a Harvard T.H. Chan researcher, using air permits and disclosures largely gathered by Cleanview. The Post estimates those two plants alone would equal a 28.5 percent increase over Amazon's reported footprint, which was 80.85 million metric tons last year. The gas plants for Meta's Louisiana campus would emit more than all of Meta does today. And it's everybody. A Chevron-built gas plant for Microsoft in West Texas. OpenAI's Pike County, Ohio campus burning more gas than the Microsoft and Google projects combined. Anthropic signing onto gas in West Virginia and around Memphis. Almost none of these megaprojects include carbon capture. Matching your annual usage with renewables doesn't change what comes out of the stack at 2 a.m. The method matters. The Post assumed the plants run at 50 percent capacity. Amazon and Microsoft figures come from air-permit filings, the others from project announcements. The companies say they remain committed to net zero, and Amazon says it has enabled 712 carbon-free projects totaling 42 gigawatts. Two disclosures from the paper itself: Jeff Bezos owns The Post, and The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI. Guidi's point is the one for anybody underwriting these things. Once a gas plant is built, it has a very strong incentive to keep running, long after the GPUs it was built for are obsolete. He says a generation or two. The chips won't last one. Meta told Louisiana regulators that speed to market was utterly crucial in choosing the state. That trade-off is the whole story.
Shane Snider, writing for TechTarget:
Grid Strategies, a consulting firm that specializes in the power sector, estimated in a recently published white paper that the pricing changes would generate approximately $5.5 billion annually in transmission charges, compared with roughly $2 billion that data centers currently pay.
This is the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, Senate bill 5653, which we last covered on Friday, October 30th. It would have FERC charge data centers for their share of existing transmission and for the incremental cost of serving them. What's new is a price tag. Over ten years, Grid Strategies gets 55 billion dollars, 35 billion embedded and 20 billion incremental, which is about 35 billion more than current arrangements. And it lands on PJM and MISO. About 82 percent of the annual charges, 2.31 billion a year in PJM and 2.25 billion in MISO. PJM pays more on a smaller pipeline, 13.4 gigawatts against 16.7, because its transmission rates run higher. ERCOT is excluded, since FERC doesn't traditionally regulate transmission there. The inputs: 40.3 gigawatts of new capacity outside Texas, from Enverus's third-quarter high-confidence tracker, all assumed to take firm service. Rob Gramlich of Grid Strategies doesn't expect most data centers to go off-grid to dodge the charges. He sees behind-the-meter generation supplementing utility service, not replacing it. The bigger number is buried. Section 2107(b), the Ratepayer Protection Floor, could recover another 136 billion in generation costs over ten years if states fully implement it. The paper is clear that's potential exposure, not a forecast. And Neil Osnato at Persistence Analytics had the line of the day: Congress can change who pays for the transmission line. It cannot legislate the data center's demand into existence. Which is why he wants collateral and termination terms tied to verified milestones. And none of it happens until the bill passes and gets signed.
OpenAI, in a company post on Monday launching what it calls the Grid Protectors Program:
That means designing facilities to reduce electricity use when needed and working with utilities to agree on how much demand can be reduced, how quickly and for how long. The arrangements will differ by location, and we will share additional commitments as they are finalized.
The pilot is the planned Effingham County, Georgia campus, still in development. OpenAI says it has committed to pay the full infrastructure and electric-service costs there, and that its Georgia Power agreement includes up to 1,000 megawatts of flexible demand response. It also cites Georgia Power's projection of about 950 million dollars a year in customer savings from 2029, across its whole portfolio of large-load agreements. A thousand megawatts of curtailable load is real if it's in the contract. Everything else is a press release. The program has no megawatts outside Georgia, no penalty for not curtailing, nothing. And the timing. Tom's Hardware, citing Axios, reports OpenAI is also floating a rebrand of data centers as AI Compute Campuses, with Chris Lehane calling the midterms a movie trailer for 2028. To be fair, the post concedes the limits. It says flexibility cannot replace investment in new supply and transmission, and that long-term contracts and financial assurances should protect other customers if a project is delayed or canceled. Which is the Osnato checklist from the last story, written by the customer. Good. Now put it in a tariff.
If the chips side of this matters to you as much as the power side, try our sister show, AI Daily Briefing. It covers top AI news for engineers, founders and investors every weekday, and sorts real capabilities from demo hype, fast. They tell you what the model does. We tell you which substation it's going to melt.
That's the briefing. Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 4th, we'll start sorting out what last night's votes mean for permits, from Texas on down. And Thursday the Texas PUC takes up the Batch Zero complaints. Busy week. The Data Center Daily is a Lantern Podcast. I'm Sarah, that was Matt, and we'll talk tomorrow.