Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.
A large battery storage site is about 500MWh.
So this is totally doable and it’s also going to be economical as soon as the US has built enough LNG export capacity.
https://constructionreviewonline.com/top-5-largest-data-cent...
I think that's a fair point, I underestimated the power needs.
For a 1GW data center, the economical case is probably to build about 2 GWp of solar, plus a 5GWh battery or so.
That is not unrealistic:
https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/masdar-and-consortium-par...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/28/catl-secures-worlds-l...
On a sunny day, that will let you to power the data center fully from solar for most of the day, and partially through the night.
Obviously you need ~1GW of gas turbine capacity as well, for the non-so-sunny-days, so the economic case for solar here is dependent on the fuel price.
Either way, in winter you’ll need the gas turbines, I didn’t claim otherwise.
There isn't a single battery this big today, but if batteries continue following the exponential growth curve they've been on then there probably will be in the next decade or so (if not sooner).
- The ratio between "some water" and "the pacific ocean" is a lot higher than 5
- On an exponential growth curve, a factor of 5 isn't all that much.
This probably isn't feasible for a data center being built today (although they could build solar to at least reduce their fossil fuel power generation needs during the day). But it probably will be for data centers being built in 5-10 years time.
Basically it's important to differentiate between "we can't quite do this yet" and "we'll likely never be able to do this". And powering a data center with rewnewables+batteries is definitely in the former category.
