By Vijay Jayaraj
In Pecos County, Texas, crews are clearing scrubland for a power plant that will burn natural gas and answer to no one but Amazon. With 35 turbines and a generating capacity of more than 7 gigawatts, the plant will be able to produce more electricity than the Grand Coulee Dam. A state permit allows the facility to emit 33 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, roughly double what comes from an Alabama coal-fired generator that has topped America’s emissions tables for years.
Now recall who founded the company building the gas behemoth. That would be Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who just 5 years ago told delegates at a U.N. climate summit that a rocket ride had shown him a planet that was finite and fragile, prompting a pledge of $2 billion to “restore” nature. The applause was warm. The carbon-intensive private jet that carried Bezos to the Scotland meeting was noted by critics and forgotten by everyone else.
Now, his company is financing what may become the largest point source of carbon dioxide in the United States, whose contribution to the greening of ecosystems should be welcome.
You are watching a conversion, and it deserves your attention because of what forced it.
The template, not the exception
Amazon did not stumble into natural gas. It joined a queue. Enverus Intelligence Research projects that user-owned turbines will account for about 40% of new data center capacity through 2030. Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal for power from a Chevron gas plant in neighboring Reeves County. Interconnection subscriptions are full, transformers are back-ordered, and the only metric that matters is the time it takes to get a power plant in operation.
In 2021, Facebook’s parent company Meta declared climate change one of the most pressing challenges facing the world and positioned itself among the largest corporate buyers of clean electricity. Then came its Hyperion data center in Louisiana. Regulators approved three combined-cycle gas plants for it in August 2025. In March 2026 Meta tripled the order, funding seven more and making the totals 10 gas plants and nearly $11 billion of investment. Meta will underwrite 15 years of revenue, while the turbines will run for 30 – a mismatch that has a dissenting member of the Public Service Commission warning that households may inherit the balance.
Elon Musk built an empire on the premise that combustion belongs to the past. In 2024, he said that a carbon tax was the only action needed to solve climate change. More recently, addressing G20 ministers, he warned of a significant power shortfall next year and defended data center construction against negative public sentiment. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, in the same meeting, asked governments for more electricians and more electricity. Neither man requested more wind and solar installations.
Energy Physics Forces a Hard Reset
Big Tech’s turn toward dedicated gas power does not settle the climate debate, but it exposes the distance between a political narrative and a power grid capable of supporting industries. When servers must run, physics gets a vote and realities are acknowledged.
For example, at the start of 2026, every grid-scale battery in the United States combined could meet national demand for only 15 minutes. Modeling the PJM regional power system through 2045, Jonathan Lesser and Mitchell Rolling found that a grid of wind, solar, and batteries would need 10 times the generating capacity of gas and nuclear power. It would also cost about seven times as much, and cover a land area larger than the PJM service area, which comprises most of the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest.
Yet, despite these facts, pseudo-scientists, grifters, and demagogues lectured for 20 years that coal is immoral, natural gas is a bridge to nowhere, and so-called green technologies are the planet’s salvation. Banks denied financing for hydrocarbon projects in developing countries where surgeons operate under lights powered by unreliable generators and where hundreds of millions cook with sooty wood and dung.
The lesson is the same for data centers and households: Prosperity requires electricity that is available when needed. Dependable systems of conventional energy sources will continue to power the tech revolution and human progress for decades.
Originally published at American Thinker, September 13th, 2026.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
Tags:United States, Texas, Amazon, Vijay Jayaraj
Profits before principles…
That’s the difference between morons like Miliband…and morons like Bezos…
I take umbrage with that characterization. The latter is a nasty person but not a moron. As for the former, i think calling him a moron is insulting to morons.
Ahh the crayon boy is back. If this were the UK I could claim offence at this display of boldness and have the police rough him up.
Well, maybe not, but they could give him a visit and a non-sentence, thought crime stamp or something similar.
The “carbon footprint” of bold text far exceeds that of normal text. You are killing innocent electrons and forcing power generators to exhale more rapidly.
So, you are against more electricity. Got it.
I listened to the discussion between Elon Musk and Alice Weidel. The both agree that energy is needed and it must come primarily from dispatchable power. Alice Weidel has been talking about the energy shortage in Germany. That is one of the few places on earth where electricity cost more per kWh than in California. They import massive amounts of electricity (like California) and it has led to a deindustrialusation of Deutschland.
The only people who support wind and solar power are the renewables industry and those who cannot count.
You forgot the deluded people who believe the propaganda they have been pummeled with for nearly 40 years. And think “renewables” can “save” us from the nonexistent “crisis.”
But I suppose they might be counted among those who can’t count. But maybe there needs to be an additional category for those who have no perspective, no context, and no awareness of the Earth’s climate history, and what previous warm and cold periods were like for humanity.
I use “ignorant”. Encompasses all people that absorb what the renewables industry/politicians/activists say, and those who simply have no opinion because they don’t care to look into it.
I cannot help but shake my head at the fact that this small bit of common sense (viz. the realization that we need more cheap and reliable power) has only dawned upon the general public when it can be “purchased” by an offsetting amount of more nonsense (viz. that we need that power for more datacenters to support the AI idiocy).
I have asked this before and I’ll ask it again: How about we just build the powerplants and not the datacenters?
It seems to be the poor fate of the human race that we correct ourselves from falling off one side of the horse only by falling off the other.
Well, I don’t see anything startling in observing that these guys adopt a Marxist approach to principles when it suits.
Groucho that is, not Karl.
As in –
“These are my principles.
But if you don’t like them, I have others . . . “
An in-depth study of 20th Century history shows that the only hope for a true Utopia is the birth of more committed Groucho Marxists! Sadly, most Karl Marxists lose their sense of humor when half their brain and their common sense is removed to aid in the indoctrination process! Another way to say Marxist with a “K” these days is DemoKKKrat!
Here in the US people worry about datacenters driving up electrical costs due to building infrastructure to get power to them. I think that’s a rounding error compared to the cost of the bazillions of cubic feet of gas these power plants will consume daily. Nat gas prices will skyrocket.
Bazillions.
Thank you for such a precise and accurate number!
An obvious Obama fan when it comes to elecctricity.
No, far from it. I only try to point out that once again very few if any are looking at total costs for projects. There is plenty of dialogue about costs to build power plants and high voltage lines for data centers. But where is the analysis of how much more natural gas will be needed?
In my view, coal or nuclear to add capacity would be a good option but that’s just my opinion.
Fair enough. I was objecting to your excessive hyperbole.
Natural gas has advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is no bulk onsite storage of fuel.
Coal has advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is the bulk transport of solid fuel that is offset by bulk onsite storage of fuel.
Nuclear has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is policy driven. No easy means of recycling spent fuel rods.
All are subject the the whims and vagaries of market dynamics.
As to your point about looking at the total costs for projects. Concur. The total lifecycle costs are what put SV and WTGs in the economic trash bin.
Forget the meat and potatoes you want the graveeeeee!
The wind farm being paid £300m to stop producing any power
Figuring things out for yourself is the only true freedom anyone has.
Those that allow someone to tell them what to think is surrendering their freedom and enslaving themselves to the ideology.
Wind and solar can’t sustain the grid with or without data centers. Remove wind and solar from the grid.
“The thirst always wins in the end.” Blade.