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Posted on 11/10/2025 2:37:30 PM PST by DFG
Some artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are vacant in California because the local utility cannot provide the electricity required to operate them, according to Bloomberg.
Although developers in Santa Clara, California, have completed shells of data center projects, the facilities remain empty and unpowered because the city-owned utility Silicon Valley Power (SVP) cannot supply enough electricity to meet their energy demands, Bloomberg reported. California imports the second-largest amount of electricity of any state, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and has been phasing out reliable power sources like coal as it pursues a rapid green energy transition.
Big Tech pledged to meet emissions goals similar to California’s aggressive climate targets in a move that James Taylor, President of the Heartland Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation has left the industry grappling with an inadequate and unreliable power system.
“The same tech industry that now bemoans a lack of available and reliable power is the same tech industry that for the past 20 years teamed with climate activists to prematurely retire coal power plants and block new natural gas power plants,” Taylor told the DCNF. “American consumers were punished with rapidly increasing electricity prices as a result. Now Big Tech is stuck with an inadequate, unreliable, wind and solar future of their own making. This is called justice.”
Data center expansion and onshore manufacturing are driving much of America’s rising power demand, according to EIA. The Trump administration rolled out a plan to promote AI and streamline data center development in July, citing the need to achieve global technological dominance and beat China in the AI race.
President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency” on his first day back in the Oval Office while his Department of Energy (DOE) sounded the alarm over approaching blackouts should the U.S. continue to phase out reliable power supply without adequate replacements. Aging energy infrastructure and harsh green energy mandates set by former President Joe Biden and several Democrats at the state level sharply limited reliable, baseload power sources like coal while promoting intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.
“The demand has never been higher, and it’s really a power-supply problem that we have,” Bill Dougherty, executive vice president for data center solutions at CBRE Group Inc., told Bloomberg. “There are portions of data-center demand that need to be as close as possible to population centers. … That is the demand that needs to be in California. They can’t bring it online because there’s constraints on power.”
The Golden State has ambitious climate goals, with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom aiming for an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and carbon neutrality by 2045. The governor’s office touted in July 2025 that California was “powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023,” citing government data that included several zero-emissions sources including wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric power and nuclear energy.
The state imports nearly 90% of its natural gas supply, which accounts for about 35% of its energy portfolio, according to information from California Energy Commission (CEC) and EIA.
SVP and Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
California has the second-most expensive electricity in the U.S., behind only Hawaii, a report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found. In 2024, the national average was ¢12.68 per kilowatt-hour kWh, compared with over ¢27 per kWh for California households, according to EIA data.
Janine de la Vega, an SVP spokesperson, told Bloomberg that “SVP is undertaking a $450 million system upgrade to meet the needs of these and other customers, and the project is currently on schedule to be completed in 2028.”
Notably, sixteen Republican attorneys general warned several Big Tech companies in September, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta that their “misleading” green energy claims could exacerbate America’s risk of blackouts. Republican Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who led the letter, wrote that “as a result of big tech’s misleading energy use claims, coal and natural gas plants are being shut down, putting communities across the country at an increased risk of blackouts over the next few years.”
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Reality always wins.
Deny reality, or fail to understand it, and you lose.
In California? Bwahahahaha! They’d destroy the beauty of their mountaintops with insufficient windmill generation before they’d ever consider nuclear.
What’s hilarious is that one of the MAIN items in atmosphere is water vapor. Nuclear power plants use and emit LOTS OF water vapor.
If you have lots of cool water to use as a coolant, you don’t have to emit much water vapor.
In space, you probably need to use radiative cooling (being in shadow would help...)
Come on. They vote like they are in the dark.
He can put some of those India immigrants to good use
More efficient than solar cells as can work 24/7
Imagine acres of Indian peddlers
Each AI center requires a steady 5,000 megawatts in power (5 gigawatts).
“The same tech industry that now bemoans a lack of available and reliable power is the same tech industry that for the past 20 years teamed with climate activists to prematurely retire coal power plants and block new natural gas power plants,” Taylor told the DCNF. “American consumers were punished with rapidly increasing electricity prices as a result. Now Big Tech is stuck with an inadequate, unreliable, wind and solar future of their own making. This is called justice.”
READ this several times.
My response is they can GFO.
TRUMP should start bringing back Nuclear Power.
Clean, efficient, endless, and, YES, safe.
Why aren’t data centers allowed to be built only if they source and pay for their own electricity needs, with their costs not allowed to be subsidized by an increase in cost of electricity for residential users ? politicians need to precluded from taking kickbacks from data centers owners for allowing data centers to be built unless the data center can create and support their own sources of electricity.
something here fails the common sense standard: before investing tens of millions in data centers, wouldn’t you think the owner/operators would first determine whether guaranteed power would be available?
You would think a quality data center would know how to generate it’s own power.
Data centers being proposed for northern Virginia want to run power lines from a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania through Maryland, that will be supported by a 22% increase in the price of electricity for Maryland residents as the only “benefit,” when Northern Virginia already has a nuclear power plant at their Lake Anna. Wonder how much Maryland governor Spend Moore is getting out of this deal? Obviously, his constituents only get an increase in the cost of our electricity, and the seizing of private property to provide access for the power lines supporting towers.
If they want the power, they should pay the increase.
Suppose anybody learned a lesson here about so-called “alternate energy sources”? It would seem to me that first call on energy sources would be for lighting, heat, A/C, & really necessary industrial power, Not AI.
Suppose anybody learned a lesson here about so-called “alternate energy sources”? It would seem to me that first call on energy sources would be for lighting, heat, A/C, & really necessary industrial power, Not AI.
‘why dont the make their own power‘
Actually SVP has their own power generation. They have lower rates than PG&E and the city has favorable terms to attract data centers. For example, a data center wants 4k feed onsite and SVP will build a substation on data center on site and pass half the cost to the data center.
I have a friend who is the senior estimator for SVP and he is always telling me about the politics of the city of Santa Clara.
The problem is entirely the loony greens. They are closing down natural gas-fired plants because those use ultra-cheap fossil fuel, and nuclear plants because those might explode and knock the earth out of orbit to plunge into the sun.
Furthermore they won't classify hydro-electric plants as renewable even though their fuel is renewed each year by snow and rain.
The jack-ass forces energy companies to shut down or leave the state, and then wonders why there’s no energy. And he want to be President?
Watts are a rate. Humans are good for about 250 watts in a short burst. Measured by a classmate in a measurements course in the early 70’s. A recumbent pedal configuration yielded the highest rate of those measured. Newscum is net negative.
If lit, his hair would at least generate some anthropogenetic global heating.
Start with O’Shaughnessy.
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