Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced on Monday that it will acquire the data center and energy infrastructure company Intersect for $4.75 billion in cash and “the assumption of debt.”
Though Google already owns a majority stake in the company, the deal will further support the Big Tech company’s build-out of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure while keeping Intersect’s operations separate, according to Alphabet. As America’s energy demand climbs while projected AI data center needs skyrocket, Big Tech has been searching for reliable electricity sources — with some companies looking to resurrect nuclear plants.
“Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive US innovation and leadership. We look forward to welcoming Sheldon and the Intersect team,” CEO of Google and Alphabet Sundar Pichai said in a statement Monday. (RELATED: Big Tech May Soon Have Monopoly On Power As America Faces Energy Crisis)
Alphabet notes that this acquisition “will augment Alphabet and Google’s ongoing commitment to partnering with utilities and energy developers across the sector to unlock abundant, reliable, affordable energy supply that enables the buildout of data center infrastructure without passing on costs to grid customers.”
“Intersect has always been focused on bringing innovation to the industry and we look forward to accelerating at scale as part of Google,” Sheldon Kimber, Intersect founder and CEO, said in a statement Monday. “Modern infrastructure is the linchpin of American competitiveness in AI. We share Google’s conviction that energy innovation and community investment are the pillars of what must come next.”
The Trump administration has advanced similar messaging promoting U.S. dominance in the AI industry, signing an executive order on Dec. 11 that decrees a “national policy framework for AI.”
“We remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it,” the Dec. 11 executive order reads.
While President Donald Trump stresses the vitality of building out data center infrastructure to keep America’s competitive edge in the AI race, some local communities have been protesting data center development over concerns the facilities will spike electricity costs, take up rural land and drain water resources.
States like California, Florida and New York have recently advanced or signed AI policies in moves their governors argue shield the public from Big Tech. Democrats and Republicans are split on AI messaging headed into the 2026 midterms, with prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle vowing to shut down data center development until clearer consumer and local protections are established.
Notably, some recent reports have referenced quiet data center deals between tech companies, developers and utilities that defy local communities’ wishes. Protesters have gathered to fight what they call “secret deals,” fearing that Big Tech companies will reap financial benefits at the expense of local communities, often without residents’ knowledge or consent.
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Interestingly, Intersect Power is based on solar plus battery.
I never use Google. Perhaps you do?
I won’t knowingly let any Google thing into my computer.
<strativarius>
For something like general ‘white papers’ on any given subject there is usually no substitute. Even Google Earth has no equal many times.
Perhaps you never have need of such services?
</strativarius>
For general, first-attempt searches I use DDG. When that fails, and I know given a particular subject that returns of a particular type or kind exist THEN I resort to Google.
_Jim
You are free to use it. I freely choose to avoid it.
Now suddenly nobody here uses google 😛
So you all have apple phones? Never use Amazon services?
Like to see the numbers. How much is based on solar plus battery? Is the whole enterprise running on that, and if not, what percentage? I guess if you are going to do this, Texas is one of the better places.
Unlike the UK, which is hell bent on doing the same, and which is the second worst place in the world for solar….
It is one thing to choose. It is quite a different thing to be forced into submission.
If Alphabet chooses unwisely, they will be Darwined by economic forces.
It would be a great idea to integrate the battery storage with the data centers. All of the power transfer between the batteries and the data center loads can be done with DC links. It would also give a huge incentive to improve the safety aspects of large BESS.
Well done Nick.
You presented information without declaring anything other than it is interesting.
You did not attempt to prove a point of view.
You did not insult anyone.
Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year.
Bwahaha. What a maroon! Your blessed Goog has server farms the size of Rhode Island in Oregon and Washington where they suck kilowatts off the dams on the Columbia River. Killing salmon like sardines, allegedly. Meanwhile they cancel doxx, deplatform, demonetize, and spew hatred at anyone who dares promote climate realism on the Internet. That’s called raging hypocrisy with a twinge of the dastard. This site, which you frequent, is on Goog’s shitlist, for instance.
And yet, despite Goog’s trillions, all their dastardliness, and all their fawning acolytes of climunism, they have LOST the debate. Big time. Down the drain counter clockwise. Bwahahahaha.
The huge increase in wind and solar deployment in 2023–2025 is from investment decisions made before Covid. Those projects have PPA that protect the owners to the extent they cannot possibly lose money. They were incentivized with tax credits, mandates, low interest loans, accelerated depreciation allowances and generous curtailment arrangements, all under the guise of saving the planet from CO2. Covid stalled that nonsense, Trump’s election ended it (praise the Lord, robbing the Treasury and stiffing ratepayers with sunshine and breezes nuisance power is an historical artifact).
But major corporations purchasing those projects with those PPA makes sense for them, for now.
Multi-billion-dollar projects take five years or longer to formulate. $millions are spent by corporations on individual projects before they are submitted to the Board of Directors for approval. Corporate management in 2021–2025 has not been spending $millions formulating $billion RE projects in the last four years for presentation to their BOD’s. Don’t doubt it. 2026 or 2027 will be the W&S peak.
Turn out the (wind and solar) lights, the party is over. The future is nuclear. China cancelled all direct wind and solar subsidies on June 1, 2025, and is now focused on nuclear expansion. We need to end the wind and solar fraud and build an assembly line factory to produce cookie cutter identically, one NRC design approval fits all SMR’s. These <100MW reactors will ship by semi-trailer to the job site for plug and play (Don’t doubt that either).
Peak Alarmism – Story Tip
Guardian is Eight Times More Climate Alarmist Than Other Newspapers – and It’s Getting Everyone Down, Study Finds
one such study recently, ‘Exploring catastrophic language use in climate journalism: A corpus-based study of articles published by the Guardian‘ authors Declan Lloyd and Emil Hazelhurst suggest that alarmism is not helping anyone to save the planet. “Well-intended language choices by journalists and news providers,” explain the pair, may be contributing to “post-traumatic stress, depression or a sense of helplessness in the face of global environmental challenges.”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/12/24/guardian-is-eight-times-more-climate-alarmist-than-other-newspapers-and-its-getting-everyone-down-study-finds/
Well intended or just plain doomerist?
The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.
Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned.
“We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.
“The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”
https://expose-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Why-the-Guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment-_-Environment-_-The-Guardian.pdf
8 times more loony.
““We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise”
She and the Guardian are not even close. They wouldn’t know real science if it walked up and bit them.
For a UK temperature check, I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch/cities/london-heathrow/average-temperature-by-year. The Tmax and Tmin data from 1901 to 2024 are displayed in a table. Here is the temperature data for these two years:
Year——Tmax——Tmin——Tavg Temperatures are ° C
2024——12.9——–6.9——–9.9
1901——11.8——–4.7——–8.2
Change–+1.1——+2.2——-+1.7
Although after 123 years the UK has undergone a slight warming, it is of little consequence because the UK will always have long cold and rainy winters. Part of this warming is probably due to natural variation and the cycle of AMO.
In 1901 the concentration of CO2 in dry air was ca.295 ppmv
(0.58 g CO2/cu. m. of air), and by 2024, it had increased to 425 ppmv
(0.83 g CO2/cu. m. of air), but this increase has had very little effect on temperature in the UK. Note how little CO2 there is in the air.
For a city temperature check, use:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/city name/
Enter the city name in lower case letters. If the city name is two words connect these with a hyphen. This format will display all weather and climate data from the beginning of the record to present. At the end of
the home page, there is a list of options for acquiring and display of weather and climate data. For London city data, use: “london-heathrow”.
For London city data, use: “london-heathrow”.
Sorry Harold, but no. I live in theTooting borough and when I drove to Mortlake – 5 or 6 miles away – it was much noticeably cooler by a degree or two at the very least. UHI and all that.
[Greater] London is a large area and Heathrow’s runway is far from representative of that. That’s where they get the record temperatures. Who gets most? General Electric, Pratt & Whitney or Rolls Royce? Who can say.
Did you try that link? I get a 404 error and I don’t know why. For the UK, I used:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch/countries/united-kingdom/average-temperature-by-year
No, I did not and it is, indeed, a 404, but then I question anything weatherwise that has the word extreme attached to it as a matter of course.
You can’t be too careful – especially if Heathrow or Kew [Gardens} are involved.
To get UK temperature data, try this,
https://www.extremeweatherwatch/countries/australia/average-temperature-by-year.
In the selection box click on it and scroll down to and click on “United Kingdom”.
It’s extremely difficult, it seems…
This site can’t be reached
Here is how I got the UK data file. My OS is MS 11.
I clicked on “New tab” and then entered in the search box at the top of the screen the URL:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/countries/united-kingdom/average-temperature-by-year, and it worked!
Try using the search feature of your OS for the above URL. Let me know if this works.
I just clicked on the URL, and this time it worked! I have no idea what was going on previously. Maybe this site computer had hiccup and a glitch.
I just clicked on the URL for a second check and it works.
At the end of the URL, put a city name. There is not a place named “city”. I tried “London” and got a town in Kentucky. !!
Try: Extreme Weather Watch
Pick and choose from there.
Winthrop is a small town in Washington State. Its High is 109°F and a Low of -48°F. Currently it has 16″ of snow.
This a test:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/london-heathrow/average-temperature-by-year.
This URL works. Next to “Month”: There is box for obtaining Tmax and Tmin data for each month of the selected year. Click on it and scroll down and click on a month to get data for that month.
@strativarius: I have to agree with you. Airports make a serious attempt to measure and report accurate runway temperatures because that temperature is needed in order to compute maximum takeoff loads for aircraft. All well and good. It’s tempting to use those numbers as representative temperatures for the region. No need to install and maintain a separate measurement facility someplace else in the region when the airport will do the job for free.
Trouble is that airport runways are really warm places. The grassy fields of a century ago have long since been paved over. As have the taxiways and loading areas and even the parking lots for vehicles around the airports. Not to mention the constant stream of jet engine exhausts at major airports.
Airport temperatures are presumably fine and necessary for their nominal purpose — aircraft safety. For meteorology? Maybe not so much.
I wonder how much of those small increases is due to the Urban Heat Effect.
That is unknown. I will go to EWW and ask them what data is used for countries. EWW uses NOAA’s temperature data base.
Don’t forget to deduct about 1C for UHI increase in the last 123 years if you’re trying to determine actual warming.
From the article: “Alphabet notes that this acquisition “will augment Alphabet and Google’s ongoing commitment to partnering with utilities and energy developers across the sector to unlock abundant, reliable, affordable energy supply that enables the buildout of data center infrastructure without passing on costs to grid customers.”
and
“While President Donald Trump stresses the vitality of building out data center infrastructure to keep America’s competitive edge in the AI race, some local communities have been protesting data center development over concerns the facilities will spike electricity costs, take up rural land and drain water resources.”
As the Alphabet statement shows, they are concerned about not increasing electricity costs to grid customers.
This falls in line with the statement from the Trump administration yesterday saying that AI data centers would *reduce* electricity costs for the surrounding areas where they are built.
Trump has said in the past that Data Centers should supply their own electricity without raising electricity prices for other customers on the local grid.
The Trump administration policy implies that Data Centers will build/pay for their own electricity production and will produce, at times, more than the Data Center needs and this excess will be available to the local grid to reduce local electricity prices.
Trump is always playing it straight, does not lie, reverse course or make contradictory statements, right?😆
You missed this memo: “Take DJT seriously but not literally.” {Salena Zito}
Intersect ‘Power’ (the company) – can anyone convince me this is not just another ‘grift’ against, (or in the field of) conventional power / energy generation companies that possess actual generation resources (e.g. coal, natural gas or nuclear powered steam producers that then turn or spin ‘turbine generators’)?
The head ‘dude’ at Intersect hails from Recurrent Energy, another (potential) grifting firm which is a subsidiary of Canadian Solar …
This just enables virtue signaling by Google while they are still dependent on the grid and fossil fuels when the sun don’t shine.
when the sun don’t shine and the batteries exhaust…
Intersect Power is all funded by private investment sources?
Great.
Good to see that taxpayers’ $$$$s are not being used again to fund solar madness as happened with Ivanpah, that disappeared $1.6 billion of tax collection, and is now being dismantled as a failure.
Google is being very aggressive in AI development and behind the meter power development. By buying up Intersect they are buying into the projects coming near term for orders in solar and batteries and placing them near abundant gas power resources. This buildout includes paying for new transmission line capacity, but not the type of transmission lines to nowhere for wind power. Use Gemini to look up these moves.
The topic of datacentres is always an interesting one w no clear left/ right devision.
I guess that’s why Alphabet is going with the big behind-the-meter bets to let the debate spin on elsewhere.
May the spirit of Christmas (or however you celebrate the holidays) bring and end to negativity and bring a gentle nativity of hope and humanity.
My guess is Intersect is about to enter the fossil fuel and nuclear business.
Isn’t it funny how these ‘green’ energy evangelists aren’t setting an example for the rest of us by relying on purely wind and solar power to operate their data centres?