The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) risks filling Texas air with toxins, a report has found.
State regulators are considering proposals for more than 100 new gas power projects — the vast majority of them entirely new plants — to power a new wave of data centers, according to findings published early Wednesday by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP).
More than 30 have already been permitted in a process that amounts to a “rubber stamp,” the EIP said.
“To meet its increasing demand for electricity, Texas should be encouraging more clean energy instead of feeding public subsidies to dirty fossil fuels,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.
The plants spread across the state but cluster around Houston, the I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio and the oilfields of West Texas.
If all are built, they could produce as much pollution each year as another 27 million new cars and trucks — the equivalent of doubling Texas’s current motor vehicle fleet, the report found.
Oil and gas pollution includes volatile organic carcinogens such as benzene, asthma-triggering compounds including ozone and nitrogen oxides and lung-burrowing particles like PM 2.5.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental regulator, declined The Hill's request for comment on the analysis.
The report comes in the wake of the failure of a slate bills at the Texas legislature that had sought to restrict the growth of renewables in favor of gas power — an issue that drove an acrimonious inter-party debate within the state’s ruling GOP.
One major reason for that failure: the state’s insatiable demand for electricity, which the state’s grid managers have estimated could double by the end of the decade, largely due to new cryptocurrency miners, data centers and oilfield operations.
In the fight over the renewable restrictions, wind, solar and battery advocates pitched their technologies — which can be installed much faster than gas — as ideal to meet that demand.
“Everything is supposed to be bigger in Texas, but there's no need to go big with gas plant pollution when there are cleaner alternatives,” said Adrian Shelley, the Texas director for civil society group Public Citizen.
“Texas is already number one in clean energy, which helps save the electric grid and reduce consumer costs, so we should rely on clean energy to increase our supply of electricity,” Shelley added.
But with a “frantic race” to build capacity amid long wait times to connect to the grid, data center developers are increasingly turning to a new wave of privately owned gas plants, according to reporting this week from The Texas Tribune.
One such plant, outside the rapidly growing Central Texas town of New Braunfels, will generate about 1.2 gigawatts of power — about two-thirds as much generation capacity as is needed for the million-plus people of nearby Austin.
But all that power will go entirely to data centers, the Tribune found.
Despite the plants’ size — some are large enough to power a medium-sized city — EIP contends that Texas regulators incorrectly classified three of them as belonging to a Clean Air Act category designed for minor sources of pollution.
That would mean that the gas plants will not have to use the best available technology to clean their emissions, causing a greater release of health-harming chemicals.
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