What do you do when the utility says seven years and the turbine makers say 2031? A growing number of data center builders buy aircraft engines that have been rebuilt to run on gas. TechCrunch summarised the trend on 3 November, drawing on a New York Times report of the same day.
Who Is Buying Them
The supplier named in the report is ProEnergy, which rebuilds a GE engine of the type found on Boeing airliners into a power generation unit. Crusoe, the Denver company building the first Stargate campus at Abilene, Texas, ordered 13 of these units in April. xAI has eight converted jet-engine turbines in Mississippi supporting its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, according to state permits and satellite images cited by the Times. Boom Supersonic, the startup developing a supersonic airliner, has begun selling a version of its engine as a data center power plant. Crusoe cancelled a $1.25 billion deal for 29 of those turbines in September, the report says, while still planning to use turbines.
The Reason Is The Calendar
The numbers in the article are all about waiting. The International Energy Agency is cited as saying that connecting 100 MW to the grid in Northern Virginia takes about seven years. A Mitsubishi Power executive told Bloomberg that most new turbine capacity is expected to be online by 2031. Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen says converted units can have a data center running in about 24 months, and that speed is their main attraction. The report also mentions Nscale, which lost Microsoft as anchor tenant for a site at Loughton in England after the local utility said it could not deliver enough power until the early-to-mid 2030s.
The price is efficiency. According to the Times, these machines burn more fuel and emit more than turbines designed for gas plants, and more of them are needed for the same output. Some experts quoted expect the efficiency and environmental objections to grow within a year or two, which would make them a bridge rather than a permanent plant.
Bridge Power Has To Be Planned Like A Plant
A machine bought to run for three years still runs at full load in summer, still needs fuel, permits and maintenance access, and still has to be moved or replaced when the grid arrives. Aeroderivative units, reciprocating gas engines and diesel gensets are all being used this way now, and each brings its own heat to reject and its own noise to manage at the fence. The background on turbine lead times is in our report on Mitsubishi Power; our gas turbine page covers the cooling side of these installations.
Sources: TechCrunch
