Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 12:14 AM UTC

hvb2 wrote: post #95

auspiv wrote: post #21

The current natural gas price in West Texas (the WaHa hub, north of Coyanosa, TX) is negative. And has been for a while. The price peaked (dipped?) to -$9/MCF a couple months ago. That means gas producers had to pay $9 per MCF for it to be taken away. Oil in the Permian comes with gas, a lot of it, so to produce oil, you need to get rid of gas. Wells I'm familiar with have 4000-5000 cubic feet of gas per barrel of oi…

I don't understand why datacenters especially shouldn't be able to run mostly on renewables. This won't apply to every datacenter, but the AI inference ones especially, should be seeing most demand during the day. So what's built in north America is used when it's daylight there? If so, isn't that a perfect case for solar? To be clear, I'm not saying it can power down, but at night it should be able to scale down sig…

Post by protocolture » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 12:41 AM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #39

epistasis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might make sense for oil producers to get rid of their natural gas, which is nearly a waste material, but I'm struggling to understand how it makes sense for Microsoft. Despite the cheap natural gas, and an abundance of investors and builders with natural gas expertise, in the competitive electricity generation market everybody is deploying solar and batteries in west Texas because it's still more profitable tha…

The cost of gas is completely irrelevant. In order to bring a new large load onto the grid, you have to coordinate with ERCOT, and they just made that process more tedious. Once you get your grid connection approved and built out, you have to source your own power anyway, and frankly there just isn't enough power on the market to realize the stated datacenter buildout goals in this country. In short, you're going to…

Post by Retric » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 12:48 AM UTC

buzer wrote: post #109

Retric wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can generally solve seasonal shortfalls cheaply by simply adding more solar / wind until you no longer have a seasonal shortfall just a massive surplus in a different part of the year. Put another way if you want to store power say 1GWh for the worst month, well a solar panel provides a lot of power over even the worst month. 20MW of solar panel averaging even 40MWh/day * 30 days = 1.2GWh and cost way less than 1…

> Near the arctic circle Wind fill the same niche. What do you mean? Long periods of calm weather during cold temperatures is not unheard of in Finland and does cause issues at times due to amount of wind energy that has been built in recent times.

Post by NDlurker » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:40 AM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #37

With all the fracking in the USA, literally exponential growth, one of the things they do is gas burn off for months, sometimes years at all the sites Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters? (and why not build the datacenters at the Bakken formation) You can see the burnoff from SPACE and it's for months at a time at each location, tell me that does nothing to global temperatures? (loo…

Post by chasd00 » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #116

skybrian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will also want reliable power, which seems like justification enough to keep their options open. A “phased, modular approach” sounds like it would give them options. Maybe Microsoft could install solar and/or batteries later and use their natural gas turbines for backup? With enough batteries they might get through the night, but seasonal shortages are much harder to handle that way. I bet a carbon tax on data c…

> They will also want reliable power Given the state of the power grid in Texas, this could be the most important consideration. Why? Texas is not connected to the national power grid, and only electricity from plants operating in Texas is available. The last winter and summer, demands on the grid have severely stressed, as reported in many places. In 2021 there as a state-wide crisis and almost a complete failure. h…