Finally, Louisiana’s status as a low-cost destination for huge power users has begun to pay off. Now it’s up to wise heads to make sure deluded climate alarmists don’t spoil things.
At the last Public Service Commission meeting, as part of a filing, it was announced that Meta would build a data site at the state’s Franklin Farm location just off of Interstate 20 on State Highway 183 in Holly Ridge, Richland Parish. The 1,400 acre tract has been owned by the state since 2006 and until recently was considered a white elephant as the state had hoped to have a large manufacturer with thousands of jobs take up the spot. However, that never caught on since the site was undeveloped without utilities infrastructure.
Instead, it hit the jackpot with Meta, who said it will employ only 300 to 500 but with an average salary of $82,000 and will plow in as much as $5 billion to develop essentially a server farm. Information technology companies generally have been on a buying spree for servers as the backbone for artificial intelligence application, which take an enormous amount of computing power.
And power in the form of energy as well, with a good bulk of Meta’s investment going to obtaining that through Entergy Louisiana. While the site may be barren of utilities now, there are nearby water sources but crucially natural gas pipelines running through and around it. Given typical pricing in natural gas-rich Louisiana, this would bring one of the cheapest fuel prices in the world for a facility that is estimated to need enough power to light up half of the residences in the entire state.
Entergy filed with the PSC to build three combined-cycle generators, two on site, in connection with the project for over 2.2 gigawatts of power, as well as adding transmission line capacity. It specifically focused on gas because of cost and reliability in power provision that the intermittency of wind and solar sources lack. It intends that Meta pay for all of the new capacity, which would have the ability to incorporate carbon capture and sequestration and as-yet nonexistent commercially affordable hydrogen as a source of energy, but concedes the line upgrades may have some costs apportioned to all its customers.
Meta, trendy and as gullible as are many technology companies, also pledged some extra expenses to “offset” carbon release. It said it would help finance capture/sequestration at an Entergy plant in Lake Charles and would front money to build out 1,500 megawatts of solar power.
Despite that, wanting to insert so much more fossil fuel-based natural gas into the energy mix put officials with climate alarmism special interests into apoplexy. One whined, “We see (the gas buildout) as a huge threat – we are at a moment where we need to be phasing out fossil fuels and not locking it in for decades longer.” Another flogged Meta’s capture/sequestration offer and Entergy’s retrofitting of the same: “Entergy is proposing to add huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, with proposals to mitigate those emissions ‘in the future’ with largely unproven technologies.”
One even flat out lied in claiming with battery storage would make renewable sources feasible. In fact, to be able to store the entire load would take up about a tenth of the country’s existing storage as of earlier this year (of which the consortium Entergy is part of has one tenth of a percent of that), at a cost (last year) of over $2 trillion.
But that’s what these true believers are going to try to do as the PSC deals with the issue: force some kind of renewables requirement that would jack Meta’s rates sky high. That could kill the deal with Meta and be passed on to all Entergy consumers through the additional transmission lines needed.
The PSC must firmly back consumers on this issue against alarmists who put their faith in never-verified, scientifically-suspect catastrophic anthropogenic global warming as an outcome unless fossil fuel use is ratcheted back severely. It can’t allow them to kill the goose about to lay golden eggs for northeast Louisiana.