Switch says its data centers have run on 100% renewable energy since January 2016. In northern Nevada the company now has state approval for a 510 MW gas plant of its own. The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada approved the application on Tuesday, 10 November, Nevada News & Views reports: Commissioner Tammy Cordova moved to approve it as modified, Chair Hayley Williamson seconded, and the motion carried. The plant, called ASR-IX in the filing, is planned at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Storey County, on the site of the former Fulcrum BioEnergy refinery.
Nine SGT-800 Turbines In Simple Cycle
The application was filed on 17 June by a company named Nexus Fulcrum LLC, and in September Switch disclosed that it is the ultimate owner. New Project Media, which read the filing, lists the equipment:
- six Siemens SGT-800 gas turbines of 57 MW each and three SGT-800 B4 units of 56 MW each, running in simple cycle with selective catalytic reduction;
- electrically driven gas compressors, fed from a new lateral to the Great Basin pipeline system;
- a diesel emergency generator of roughly 3,735 horsepower and a diesel fire pump.
The plant takes up about 20 acres of the refinery site, which Switch bought out of bankruptcy in 2024. Construction is to start in the first quarter of 2027 and finish in the fourth quarter of 2029, followed by testing and commissioning.
Nevada News & Views describes the plant as behind the meter, built mainly to supply Switch. It quotes the commission's draft order as saying the project is needed to provide reliable service to Switch, and NV Energy told the regulators that growth at the industrial center has outrun the power available in the region. One figure in the draft order stands out: of the 510 MW installed, about 400 MW could actually be delivered. Water demand is put at about 145 acre-feet a year, the company's own estimate, to come from the industrial center's improvement district.
What Has To Be Filed Before Building
The commission's decision does not let anyone break ground yet. The draft order lists 13 further approvals: five from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, among them the air permit, which will have a 30-day public comment period, six from Storey County, one from the FAA and one from the Nevada Department of Wildlife. Nexus has five years to obtain them, otherwise the order lapses.
The Nevada News & Views article is a contributor piece and openly critical; it misses a decommissioning guarantee among the listed conditions. An objector calculated up to 1.94 million metric tons of CO2 a year; Nexus answered that this rests on the high-end figure used for air permitting and is not a forecast, and the commission did not treat it as the likely outcome.
Switch is not alone at the industrial center. The Great Basin Sun reported in late October that Fleet Data Centers plans two temporary gas plants there, 218 MW and 144 MW, to run for two to three years until NV Energy can serve the sites, and that a 324 MW plant in Fernley received its conditional-use permit on 7 October. The paper also quotes NV Energy's resource plan, which sees 2029 or 2030 as the earliest date for new combustion turbines of its own, and gives the 2025 system peak in northern Nevada as 2,073 MW. Against that, the Switch plant alone amounts to about a quarter of the region's peak.
510 On The Nameplate, 400 At The Busbar
Neither source explains the gap between installed and deliverable output, but it is a familiar one. A gas turbine's rating applies at standard conditions, and on a site that lies higher and gets hotter than those conditions the machine gives less, most of all on the summer afternoons when a data center's own cooling load peaks. The station's consumers, here the electric gas compressors among others, take their share before any power reaches the customer. Cooling the intake air is the usual way to win back part of the hot-day loss on gas turbines.
Whoever sizes a campus on a plant like this should plan with the output on the hottest afternoon of the year. The nameplate is the number in the press release.
Sources: Nevada News & Views, New Project Media, Great Basin Sun
