| Datacentre power
they could be consuming 12% of the nation’s electricity.
Estimates from Kinder Morgan and Energy Transfer put the total natural gas demand for the US between 6 and 10 Bcf/day within a couple of years. “A lot of this will be for behind the meter power,” said Mullins. “More than 25% of new facilities above 500 MW will have behind the meter power by 2030, up from 1% today.” He cited examples such as Meta using gas turbines for its Hyperion project in Louisiana. Also, the Stargate project in Texas will be powered by natural gas and fuel cells, while xAI is ordering up to 60 gas turbines as well as battery energy storage for a supercomputer project in Memphis, Tennessee.
Coal, solar, and batteries Britt Burt, senior vice present of power industry research at IIR, said that, nevertheless, coal would not be going away quite as fast as expected. There are already announcements about planned closures being delayed and he expects
this trend to continue. This ultimately means more investment in aging coal plants to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. He predicted that solar investment would continue to lead in North America as it has done since 2020. Battery storage investment, too, will be strong. Wind investment, on the other hand, peaked in 2019 and investment in offshore wind is drying up. Natural gas investment has been flat for a decade and has been surpassed by wind or solar (or both) each year since 2015. That just changed, with a surge in 2025. IIR expects natural gas power plant investment to top $35 billion by next year and stay there for several years. “Natural gas is being built-out to levels we haven’t seen in many years and that will continue for years to come,” said Burt. “In the early 2000s, everyone was building natural gas and it is like that again or perhaps even stronger.” Most of that investment is in brand new facilities. But there is plenty of money being sunk into expansion of existing facilities, upgrades, and maintenance. Texas leads with 51 active natural
gas projects totalling around $31 billion, followed by Alberta, Canada with 19 projects of almost $10 billion then North Dakota with three projects of almost $8 billion.
Despite an apparent slowdown, he says renewables (especially solar) are going to continue to expand. Some timelines might be adjusted but the overall trend toward solar adoption will continue
“More solar farms and battery plants will be built with or without the tax credits,” said Burt. “Land- based wind is also moving forward and repowering of old wind farms is growing in investment.” Nuclear energy is another beneficiary of the investment boom. The money is being spent on small modular reactor (SMR) development, improvements to existing plants, bringing decommissioned plants back online, and even on plants that were stopped mid-construction almost a decade ago.
“There is a major wave of nuclear capacity on the long-term horizon and a lot of it will be used for data centres,” said Burt.
Fermi America and Siemens Energy collaborate on gas turbines and nuclear steam
Fermi America, in partnership with the Texas Tech University System, says it has two letters of intent with Siemens Energy, one to secure delivery for 2026 of three F-class SGT6-5000F gas turbines and the second to collaborate on nuclear steam turbine technologies. Both are said to be “in support of Fermi’s 11 GW AI campus”, proposed for Texas.
The campus is envisioned as a “flagship example of the Trump administration’s strategy”, says Fermi: pairing advanced, reliable, quickly- deployable natural gas generation with nuclear power and modern infrastructure to ensure the US can safely meet America’s growing
energy demand — particularly from AI and high-performance computing. With the new agreements, Fermi’s gas generation equipment secured or under LOI to date now totals 2.0 GW of combined cycle power scheduled for 2026 delivery.
“No one understands the global energy race better than Donald Trump,” claims former US Secretary of Energy and Fermi Co-Founder Rick Perry.
Fermi Energy’s nuclear ambitions include the deployment of four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors and the collaboration with Siemens Energy is focused on integrating that company’s
steam turbine technology, generators and control systems into these units. Fermi notes that Siemens Energy has been involved with “several modernisations of turbines and generators at multiple nuclear plants.”
Fermi says its nuclear plans align with the Trump administration’s executive orders to accelerate advanced nuclear deployment, streamline nuclear regulation, and ensure that the US infrastructure needed for AI and data centres has “the clean, reliable, always-on power that only nuclear and strategic redundancies can provide, without unnecessarily putting a strain on the public grid.”
Visualisation of Fermi Energy’s ‘behind the meter’ 11 GW AI campus planned for Texas
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