It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly.
Front and center is the data center that Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania.
The arrangement between the plant’s owners and AWS — called a “behind the meter” connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant’s capacity — to the data center. That’s enough to power more than a half-million homes.
And yet your hypothesis is clearly false, since until now they all used the grid and the grid was not improved.
Also, vast majority of companies will keep using the grid. It just doesn’t make sense for a data center that uses a good chunk of nuclear powerplants output.
Well I can provide examples near me of the grid being improved, now it’s often hard to directly link these to data centers as the power utilities will often focus on reliability and reducing costs as the reasons but based on where these are being built and where new data centers have been opening it does match up a bit with them trying to beef up connections to the west side. And again like I said these things do have environmental impacts that should be considered and all kinds of other reasons why they may not be the best thing to do but it does show that the network is being improved atleast indirectly because of data centers using more capacity.
https://www.portlandgeneralprojects.com/projects/harborton-reliability-project/
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/portland-general-allete-grid-united-north-plains-transmission/717312/