Range Global Coal Index

PROJECT STARGATE ENERGY ANALYSIS Project Stargate is going to need an enormous amount of power: each of the five Stargates needs about 5 gigawatts (about five million people's worth) of constant electricity for each ~$100b supercomputer project. Let's break it down. Each center will want at least 6 GW of firm capacity available, minimum, at all times. I expect total power costs to run (very roughly) $4 billion per year per Stargate, or about $100 per MWh. For reference, Microsoft is paying a bit more than $100/MWh to get 17% of one Stargate's-worth from restarting Three Mile Island. This price will allow for building new power plants and securing power from old ones. This is going to start as a natural gas and coal play. New natural gas turbines from GE-Vernova and others will be the backbone of this effort for the short and medium term. Combined cycle natural gas plants use a natural gas-burning turbine (much like what powers jetliners), but with the hot turbine exhaust directed onto pipes filled with water, which boils into steam and runs a steam turbine. Combining the gas turbine and the steam turbine gets you above 60% efficiency converting fossil heat into electrical power. Five GW of efficient gas turbines will need about 0.7 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/day) or 7 billion cubic meters (7 bcm) per year, just under 1% of the USA's current daily production of natural gas. Five of these 5GW centers would require about 4% of America's current natural gas production, if totally fueled by gas. America currently exports about 10% of its natural gas production. If you are wondering why the "Energy Emergency" Executive Order, here it is: we can't increase gas exports to Europe and Asia while powering Project Stargate without natural gas price increases for Americans, unless we also increase and maintain that increase of natural gas production. Which in turn means we need to expand exploration and drilling straight away, to have the gas in a few years. A number of coal plants will get a new lease on life, to provide replacement power for the grid, because power from nuclear, gas, and coal plants located close to a new Stargate cluster will be redirected to these centers instead of their existing customers. Because Stargate will require ultra-firm power at highly concentrated locations, renewables will probably not play a major role in directly powering Stargate except as an accounting fiction to "offset" emissions from the steady fossil power built for each center. So these companies may pay for some solar somewhere to be built to "lower the carbon" but it'll be even faker than it's been up until now. NUCLEAR STARGATE? Nuclear is 4 to 5 years behind where it should be for this exact moment. We can partially blame the companies behind Stargate because until very recently they had superwoke "100% Renewables" policies driven by their marketing/investor relations/ESG teams. China can build America's best large reactor design in 5 years, plus a few years before that setting up the power plant location. We have lots of locations more or less ready to roll for these exact reactors. Each Stargate would require 6, or three pairs of 2 GW reactors linked together by transmission lines. Existing nuclear can get small capacity uprates, and we can restart a few reactors in different states. That's not enough, though it will help a bit. Can we use small reactors? Well, the designs aren't ready yet, so even in an optimistic case we won't get the first tiny prototypes turning on before 2028, and as late as 2031. It would take 500 little 10 MW reactors running constantly to power a Stargate. It would take 5 large reactors. China will be building ten of these per year, year after year, by 2030. I expect Stargate participants to make bets on one or more microreactor and small reactor plays just in case. If we can get ready to build large reactors straight away, and if the US government supports with loans, we can aim to replace natural gas plants and retire the old coal plants ten years from now with new large reactors. To make this "gas first, then uranium" policy work, Stargates and their new gas plants will have to be sited near transmission corridors connecting them to nuclear plants ready to host new reactors. Each Stargate would require 5% of America's current nuclear fleet to run, but there are only a few clusters of reactors close enough together to power a full center today. More later.