Speaking Tuesday at the North American Gas Forum in Washington, Wright suggested that running existing generators available at big-box stores, data centers and other industrial facilities could increase the power of 35 nuclear power plants. “We’re going to highlight the 35 gigawatts of potential that are out there today,” he told the audience of potentially extremely excited executives, who generally had their eyes on dollar signs at the idea of filling up gas-fired generators and running them 24/7.
According to Wright, the energy demands of the ongoing AI data center expansion can be met from already existing generators. That solution, which was not adopted in the past for a number of reasons that would ultimately lead a person to conclude that it is a bad idea, would have run into obstacles in the past such as emissions standards and environmental concerns. But that doesn’t really matter under the Trump administration, which has cut red tape on rules meant to keep communities safe from pollution, so why not run a gas-guzzling generator for months? Certainly, they emit dangerously high levels of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants linked to the risk of respiratory problems, heart disease and cancer. But if you choose to ignore it, it’s not really an obstacle.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Wright said, “When people say, ‘AI will raise the price of my electricity,’ it’s actually the opposite.” “The way to lower electricity prices is to produce more electricity,” apparently ignorant of the fact that you can only do this because of an obligation to provide affordable and reliable energy to your citizens, rather than waiting for billion-dollar corporations to come in and charge you for every drop of electricity you have, while leaving others with the bill.
This whole generator idea has apparently been on Wright’s mind for a while. Last month, he appeared on Fox News and pitched the same idea of tapping into Walmart’s backup systems to rapidly ramp up power generation. “We’ll have backup generators already at data centers or behind Walmart and we’ll turn them on when we need additional power generation,” he told host Brett Baer.
No word on whether Walmart or anyone else volunteered to leave their emergency backup generator running the whole time so a bunch of GPUs could spit out a 10-second clip of Mario throwing a banana peel at a cop.
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