And beyond physical infrastructure there are the intangible assets: the learning and the process innovation across multiple fields.
The upfront price for all that may end up steep, or fair, or even cheap… the truth is no one knows yet
It's like comparing a railway line from a mine to a smelter with a city's road network.
Utility scale power stations have outputs measured in GWs. Data centres are measured in MWs, although people are trying to build GW scale data centres at the moment. But even then a data centre will want a proper grid connection, otherwise they have a massive single point of failure in the form of the directly connected power station.
It’s also very unlikely that purpose built power station is capable of offering cheaper than grid power anyway, except in the very special situations like Hydro. So if you’re gonna build a datacentre, you will want a proper grid connection capable of providing all you needs. Even if you’re running on dirty gas turbines in car park initially while waiting the grid hardening happen. In the long term, that grid connection is always going to be the cheapest, most reliable source of power, ignoring it completely would be foolish.
Furthermore, to elaborate on my point above: building new power plants in tandem with data centres that demand GWs of additional power does nothing to address the needs of the grid itself. The grid is not built to handle all that new power, and the consumer electricity demand is not there anyway.
Building new power plants immediately isn’t really required to serve data centre, they’re huge amounts of spare capacity in most grids that only exists for extreme situations. The hard part is making sure any existing capacity can actually be delivered to the new data centre. New power plants will get built to rebuild spare capacity over time, or more likely, solar and wind will get built to reinforce that spare capacity over time.
Datacentres are useful grid loads because they all have backup power on site capable of powering the entire site as an island. Which means grid operators can ask them to disconnect quickly if they need to extra power for short periods of time to handle power spikes, or local grid faults. So it’s possible to connect quite a lot of extra data centre type load before generation capacity becomes a serious issue.
Really, now? Yeah, they can ask, but do data center operators just go "oh grid needs our power! Let's switch to backup!"
That seems unlikely. Why would a data center (or any large consumer of electrical power) be forced into a backup/contingency plan, when no crisis exists at all? Other than drilling/practice runs, I cannot see them readily agreeing to this. Is it actually a routine occurrence?
Of course they do. The grid is going to load shed regardless, better to disconnect in an orderly fashion (especially as the grid will pay you to do so) than wait for your local substation to disconnect you.
> That seems unlikely. Why would a data center (or any large consumer of electrical power) be forced into a backup/contingency plan, when no crisis exists at all?
Because they get paid to do it. This is pretty basic demand side management that’s been the bread and butter of grid management for decades now. Grids will offer discounts to large loads that allow themselves to be disconnected at short notice, and will then pay those loads for the periods they’re disconnected. There’s usually multiple tiers of discount and payment depending on how fast a load can disconnect, and how often the grid expects to call upon that facility.