While many see the gold plated promises of new jobs and tech money in a historically underserved region, we need to be mindful of the risks many Louisianans will be shouldering for decades to come.
This project consists of three gas plants and some transmission upgrades and represents a significant increase to the amount of power Entergy needs to service its customers. A 25% increase to be specific.
This is a huge project, and if there’s anything climate change-impacted Louisiana doesn’t need it’s more gas plants. While the project comes with promises of new solar and carbon capture technology, the application in front of the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) does not include those resources and ELL would have to come back to the LPSC for further approval. ELL has consistently faced solar development roadblocks from individual parishes due to land use concerns AND carbon capture has yet to be proven as a commercially viable technology, as Entergy acknowledged in their application. So it’s important to note that any mention of greenhouse gas emission offsets are just promises, that may or may not come to fruition.
We also know that ELL did not put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) for generating resources, meaning alternatives like wind, solar, & storage resources were not given a chance to compete. Given that Entergy is requesting that the project not be required to comply with the Market Based Mechanism (MBM) order there’s no way of telling if this is the lowest cost resource to serve the data center – aka if we’re getting the most bang for our buck. Additionally, the proposed 10 month timeline is extremely accelerated, especially for this amount of generation and the complexity of the request.
These types of gas plants generally have a 30-45 year lifespan, yet there’s no guarantee that the data center will need that power for that length of time. The current agreement with Meta is only for 15 years. Who is going to need (and pay for) 2.3 GW after that? That’s also considering things go as planned. A lot can change in the tech industry in 15 years.
We also know we’ve fallen for that false promise before. This project will no doubt bring hundreds of construction jobs, but those will be temporary. The number of long term jobs to run the data center is questionable. While ELL claims it will take hundreds of people to run a data center, we remain skeptical. A data center is just a giant warehouse filled with computers. Sure it will require service and maintenance but are there job training resources in those fields for local residents? Does the promise of jobs justify putting LA residents on the hook for potentially $3.2 billion
Maybe this is a great project. Maybe this will put LA on par with other tech forward states & bring in that much needed Meta money to lift us into the 21st century. But, we’re keeping a healthy dose of skepticism on this one because we’ve fallen for false promises before.
As AI and data centers pop up around the U.S., these facilities are becoming energy behemoths, consuming vast amounts of power, water, and other resources to keep servers cool and operations running 24/7. This creates issues (higher energy rates, environmental harm, and long-term risks) for towns and cities that sometimes need to double their power generation capacity to meet that demand. For instance, in Georgia Power, the utility that serves much of Georgia currently only needs 16GW to serve its customers. Their latest data indicates that data centers will demand an additional 31GW of power.
