The data halls at Project Jupiter are nearly finished, and they still have no power. On 15 October Oracle and the microgrid developer Yucca Growth Infrastructure (YGI) proposed a change to the Bloom Energy fuel cell plant that is to supply Oracle's campus at Santa Teresa in Doña Ana County, New Mexico: an enforceable permit condition that limits how many megawatts the fuel cells may put out. Oracle says this cuts permitted emissions by about 35 %.
A Cap Instead Of New Hardware
According to Oracle, projected emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and hazardous air pollutants fall by about 35 %, and greenhouse gases from about 8.8 million to about 5.7 million tons a year. No new equipment types and no new pollutants are added, and the planned IT capacity stays the same; the company says availability for customers is not affected. YGI filed the change as a supplement to its pending application with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED). The release does not give the value of the cap or the number of units.
The number of units came up on a site tour instead. Mahesh Thiagarajan, who heads Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, estimated that the campus will need about 7,000 fuel cells, The Santa Fe New Mexican reported. More than 4,000 workers are on site, but work on the microgrid itself has not started while the permit is open. Oracle also proposed paying El Paso Electric $100 million over ten years for emergency backup power, with bill credits of up to $55 million a year for up to three years for the utility's customers.
The Permit Is Still The Gate
The hearing officer, retired federal judge James O. Browning, has moved the weeklong public hearing in Sunland Park from September to 7 December, which makes a 23 November deadline for NMED's decision moot. Emails released this month show that NMED's own modelling found higher pollutant concentrations than the developers' earlier work. The group New Energy Economy has asked for the application to be dismissed as incomplete; that motion is to be heard on 26 October. The paper counts this as the fourth application to the state in 11 months, and the gas pipeline that is to fuel the plant has also been delayed. Oracle had already trucked compressed gas to other sites when pipelines ran late (our earlier report).
An output cap on a prime-power plant is an unusual tool, and it has a technical side that the release does not cover. If thousands of units may not all run at full output, the operator has to decide which ones carry load, how much spare capacity stands by and how quickly it may be called on without breaking the permit. The backup contract with the utility suggests that part of the answer lies outside the fence. For people planning on-site generation for data centers, Jupiter shows how much of the schedule now depends on the air permit rather than on the equipment.
Sources: Oracle (via MarketScreener), The Santa Fe New Mexican (via Yahoo News), Microgrid Media
