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Chevron signs 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for West Texas data center
- whalesalad 4mo ago> A majority of the generation will come from large GE Vernova turbines and associated electrical infrastructure, with additional capacity provided by Solar Turbines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. Solar turbines is an interesting name for a gas turbine company. "It's green energy, we put solar in our name"
- thelastgallon 4mo agoSolar Turbines is one of the world's leading manufacturers of industrial gas turbines, with more than 17,000 installed in 100 countries
- infecto 4mo agoQuick search shows the reason is nothing to do with your sarcasm. Its origin is traced back to a 1929 company, Solar Aircraft Company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Turbines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Turbines
- Kayou 4mo agoI agree with OP that the name, while maybe not deliberately, is really confusing in 2026. I thought that was a wind turbines or a solar panel technology, definitely not gas.
- infecto 4mo agoAnd it takes all of 30seconds to look up instead of posting sarcastic hyperbole that the company is trying to greenwash their product by name when it’s a 100 year old company name. Confusing as it may be for people like yourself, I don’t think it really defends posting sarcasm that is not based in reality.
- whalesalad 4mo agoI didn't really think it was greenwashing, just hilarious to have one of the largest gas turbine companies in the world named "solar turbines"
- anon7725 4mo agoIt's 2026 - they should change their fucking name.
- esseph 4mo agoHow did that work out for X? I mean, Twitter. Or Meta? You mean Facebook? Name recognition matters especially to people in particular segments.
- oasisbob 4mo agoHow is this sarcasm? I had almost the exact same thought in earnest: A gas turbine company being called Solar Turbines is quite interesting and unexpected if you're not familiar with that particular corporate history.
- infecto 4mo agoNot sure why it would be so contentious. I simply provided a reference to the why instead of commenting with a joke, sarcasm or whatever you feel like calling it.
- tokai 4mo agoMuch like that scoundrel Aurelian reviving the cult of Sol Invictus to greenwash the late roman empire. /s
- bob1029 4mo ago> A majority of the generation will come from large GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) turbines and associated electrical infrastructure, with additional capacity provided by Solar Turbines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT). When they say "large GE Verona", they mean the 7HA. This is an actual power plant with proper emissions controls. Not the aeroderivatives in parking lots we've seen so far. > Their plan includes the use of seven U.S.-made GE Vernova Inc. GEV 7HA natural gas turbines to deliver the plant's initial capacity. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/chevron-microsoft-deal-powers-7b-145600622.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/chevron-mi...
- epistasis 4mo agoFascinating they're going this direction when solar and batteries are so cheap in Texas... Nearly all new additions to the grid are solar, wind, and storage right now on Texas' grid. Not because of Texas regulations, but because Texas' grid is one of the few grids where generation decisions are all made by independent investors trying to make money. Especially with the shortage in gas turbine manufacturing, very surprising! Not sure if this says more about Microsoft or datacenters.
- dtagames 4mo agoMostly it says that the oil business runs the show here in Texas, and in Washington.
- epistasis 4mo agoBut I'm curious how oil could run the show for Microsoft though. Even if Microsoft wanted gas backup, they could add solar to the build, shut off the turbines during the day, and save money over an all gas setup. Perhaps Microsoft had better ability to overturn local opposition to data centers if they had Chevron's political influence over the politicians too?
- dtagames 4mo agoWhat I meant was that all political and economic decisions here go in favor of oil. The war, the proposed laws to make Chinese EVs illegal, the softening of environmental regulations, etc. Chevron and the US Government are joined at the hip, so these kind of deals "flow" naturally.
- rconti 4mo agoDC?
- softwaredoug 4mo agoWhile the US stays oil rich, we should expect the US to be a laggard in ending use of fossil fuels. China and EU are not oil rich, they’ll make a faster transition. Of course it’s idiotic to actively hobble clean energy. Or to put your finger on the scale for one source of energy, like the current administration does. But it’s not crazy to argue for “energy abundance” where the market just picks the cheapest energy on the market in the US and that just gradually moves cleaner over time.
- mixdup 4mo agoI guess that whole carbon negative by 2030 goal got shuffled down the priority list
- tencentshill 4mo agoAnother illustration that corporations do not have morals or ideologies. Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
- nielsbot 4mo agoAnd yet they are operated by people and people pull the levers. Interesting and confounding psychology there. This is where government regulation, ideally a smart representative of the people's interests, comes into play. Hence the effort for companies to do regulatory capture. (See point #1)
- auspiv 4mo agoThe current natural gas price in West Texas (the WaHa hub, north of Coyanosa, TX) is negative. And has been for a while. The price peaked (dipped?) to -$9/MCF a couple months ago. That means gas producers had to pay $9 per MCF for it to be taken away. Oil in the Permian comes with gas, a lot of it, so to produce oil, you need to get rid of gas. Wells I'm familiar with have 4000-5000 cubic feet of gas per barrel of oil. Recall in oilfield M = thousand, so that's 4-5 MCF per bbl of oil. There is no free gas pipeline capacity to get gas out of West Texas. Any time new pipelines are built, they are filled within months. This makes a ton of sense for oil producers (which are also gas producers) who can sell their gas for less of a loss (potentially a profit!) and also for MSFT who can lock in long term contracts for minimal cost. I'd guess these contracts are for $1-2/MCF which is win/win for the oil companies in the area and MSFT.
- declan_roberts 4mo agoEven corporate ESG policies bend the knee to cheap Texas energy!
- epistasis 4mo agoThis might make sense for oil producers to get rid of their natural gas, which is nearly a waste material, but I'm struggling to understand how it makes sense for Microsoft. Despite the cheap natural gas, and an abundance of investors and builders with natural gas expertise, in the competitive electricity generation market everybody is deploying solar and batteries in west Texas because it's still more profitable than gas generation. Further, there's a gas turbine shortage so Microsoft choosing to put their (presumably limited) allocation of gas turbines in West Texas, where they have good alternatives, seems a bit mysterious. Why not save that massive amount of turbines for the northeast DCs, where renewables work far poorer yet gas is more reliable? The reasons that seem most convincing to me: 1. Political environment is hostile to renewables and Microsoft doesn't want to paint a target on their back by choosing solar plus batteries, the choice others are making in West Texas. 2. Grid connection drastically changes economics, but pipelines for gas are cheap or something, so the massive cost and delay from grid interconnection simply isn't worth it 3. There are particular political favors going on with Chevron, e.g. Chevron wants gas in the area and is willing to increase MS's turbine allocation if they do it in west Texas, or Chevron is helping get around pesky local political approvals for data centers, or something like that. The cost of gas does not seem like a justification for this, though.
- jeffbee 4mo agoI had to go read the article to check because other operators have been entering into PPAs with oil companies, but for photovoltaic power. E.g. Google and TotalEnergies. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/09/totalenergies-signs-1-gw-of-solar-ppas-for-googles-texas-data-centers/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/09/totalenergies-signs-1... Also Google and itself. I guess there's a difference between Google and Microsoft after all. https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/documents/Google_Intersect_Texas_Announcement_-_June_2026.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/doc...
- flixspiek 4mo ago[flagged]
- advisedwang 4mo agoMicrosoft says [1] they're going to be carbon negative by 2030. Hard to see them doing that while deploying gigawatts of new fossil fuels. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability/carbon https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sus...
- ray_v 4mo agoit's easy ... they'll just change the definition of "carbon negative"!
- ecshafer 4mo agoIts easy, they are going to use fancy accounting to make it come true. Produce a ton of carbon, then buy a cheap, under-priced carbon credit to make it be a zero.
- speed_spread 4mo agoOr they'll use the greenhouse potential difference between released unburned methane and CO2 to greenwash the project.
- 21asdffdsa12 4mo agoSorry, but who in his right mind, signs contracts for 20 years - could you have imagined the world today 20 years ago? No and no. All one should do is sign snippet contracts of 5 years with the offer of an option to predefined condition. Split it into 4 sequences with a renewal.
- doikor 4mo agoVery normal. Here in Europe (well nordics at least) pretty much all the capacity of any wind farm is already sold before construction begins. The PPA (power purchasing agreement) is usually pretty much required to get the loan/funding anyway. Basically most projects start with the wind company using its own money to find a site and get it approved and then they go and try to find someone to sell the electricity to at a fixed rate before construction begins as selling directly to the spot market has way too much risk for the banks to give loans. Not sure how different it is in Central Europe with solar as there isn’t much solar up here in the north (just doesn’t make much sense as during the 3 to 4 months in the winter when electricity price is at the yearly maximum you produce effectively nothing)
- bluGill 4mo agoMany people. My house loan was 30 years. Commercial real estate is often 20. Commercial 30 year bonds are common. Many investments won't pay off unless there is a 30 year plan so lots of investors work on that long term. Even if an investment pays off sooner you often are accounting better off longer terms - see an accountant
- maxerickson 4mo agoThe power plant probably amortizes over roughly that period. Price would be higher without a matching purchase guarantee, and so on.
- burnt-resistor 4mo agoThis reminds me of startups signing 10 year leases on giant corporate campuses at the tail end of dotcom anticipating stonks perpetual growth.
- 1-6 4mo ago[flagged]
- gnerd00 4mo agoNewsom aside, the idea is to change from oil to non-oil, efficient from mono-industrial.. The US Oil minions claim to be blind to this and cite quarterly profits, again
- ZebulonP 4mo agoYeah, why would a governor be proud of pushing out two things that are unpopular with his constituents...
- cdrnsf 4mo agoGood riddance to both.
- jambalaya8 4mo agoyeah. good riddance to east texas also.
- julosflb 4mo agoAnd in the mean time, western europe is having its second heat wave even before summer starts.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- BoredPositron 4mo agoMhm... meteorological summer starts 1st of June. Solstice was yesterday as well.
- nba456_ 4mo agoIf Europe was as willing to drill for gas as the US is, they'd probably be able to run more ACs and save thousands of lives every year.
- bayarearefugee 4mo ago> If Europe was as willing to drill for gas as the US is, they'd probably be able to run more ACs and save thousands of lives every year. They'd also be accelerating the collapse of AMOC... after which they won't need ACs anymore. So I guess, yeah, this solves the problem of too much heat, in a fashion!
- rwyinuse 4mo agoNo need for that when solar power and nuclear exist. The problem in Poland, Germany etc is prematurely getting rid of perfectly good nuclear power plants, not lack of gas drilling.
- msm_ 4mo agoPoland? Poland is currently building its first nuclear power plant (there was another attempt before, but it was abandoned in the 90s). There are also a lot of smaller nuclear power plants planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Poland
- 4mo ago
- ck2 4mo agoWith all the fracking in the USA, literally exponential growth, one of the things they do is gas burn off for months, sometimes years at all the sites Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters? (and why not build the datacenters at the Bakken formation) You can see the burnoff from SPACE and it's for months at a time at each location, tell me that does nothing to global temperatures? (look at the date on these photos, two decades of burnoff wasted energy) * https://www.cnbc.com/2013/01/28/shale-gas-boom-now-visible-from-space.html https://www.cnbc.com/2013/01/28/shale-gas-boom-now-visible-f... * https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fields-of-burning-natural-gas-make-north-dakota-visibile-from-space-2533561/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- iAMkenough 4mo ago> Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters? Probably not profitable enough to set up the infrastructure to capture, store, transport, and sell that as a product. Profit potential is the only factor that matters to decision makers.
- Symbiote 4mo agoSearch "datacentre district heat Denmark" and you'll find several examples, such as Facebook's datacentre in Odense. Or one in Copenhagen, I didn't realize some small amount of my hot water (and heating in the winter) came from a datacentre. Neat.
- iAMkenough 4mo agoThat makes sense for existing infrastructure, taking waste heat from data centers and piping it through existing public systems. Especially for government environments like Denmark. I wonder what profits would need to be for a private energy company to install additional equipment at a remote fracking site to capture the burn off energy to then sell to a data center to then use.
- theredleft 4mo agolol no way it lasts that long
- jmward01 4mo agoI love how they are using a company named 'Solar Turbines'. Such an obviously misleading name. (From their website)[1]: Powering the future through innovative, sustainable energy solutions. Solar Turbines Incorporated, headquartered in San Diego, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. Solar manufactures the world’s most widely used family of mid-sized industrial gas turbines, ranging from 1 to 39 megawatts. More than 17,000 Solar units are installed in more than 100 countries with more than 3 billion operating hours. Solar is a leading provider of energy solutions, featuring an extensive line of gas turbine-powered compressor sets, mechanical drive packages, and generator sets. [1] https://www.solarturbines.com/en_US/about-us.html https://www.solarturbines.com/en_US/about-us.html
- mlsu 4mo agoTo be fair, solar turbines has had the name since 1929 (they were then called solar aircraft company). It’s not like they’re being intentionally misleading.
- matthewmcg 4mo agoThey’ve said the company name comes from San Diego being so sunny.
- jmward01 4mo agoThanks for point that out. I missed that context.
- acheron 4mo agoMaybe you should have looked it up before posting?
- jmward01 4mo agoI'll take a minute to respond here. Would you rather live in a world where people admit they made a mistake and thanked people that pointed it out or one where they didn't? You just sent a reward signal to the 'don't ever admit your mistakes' world in case you didn't realize.
- clearstack 4mo agocapex certainty for 20 years. smart if AI demand holds, very expensive if it doesn't
- fsuts 4mo agoWhy? They aren’t building data centres just for Ai but building that can be repurposed. They can use it for research or as new location as part of Azure and so on?
- clearstack 4mo agorepurpose theory works for a building. not for a 20-year power contract
- happosai 4mo agoYes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders - A Microsoft employee 2080
- sajithdilshan 4mo agoThe planet go destroyed millions of times during its 4 billion history. I'm pretty sure it will survive this time as well.
- nielsbot 4mo agoI'm not really worried about the planet, but humanity. But I get your point.
- sajithdilshan 4mo agomaybe the demise of humanity would be the best thing that can happen to the planet
- blitzar 4mo agoShareholder value has been destroyed millions of times and they survived just fine too.
- sajithdilshan 4mo agowho survived?
- jackbucks 4mo agoChevron and Microsoft agree to keep smoking crack and buy it for each other when needed and not tell anyone.
- jocelyner 4mo ago[flagged]
- ETH_start 4mo agoI think one of the highest-leverage U.S. economic strategies right now is to maximize the upside from the AI data-center boom. That means reducing any bottlenecks around not just data-center construction, but also adjacent industries like power generation and transmission. If the U.S. can scale the infrastructure around AI faster than other countries, it can gain a decisive economies of scale advantage in numerous industries that could lead to export boom.
- yobid20 4mo agochevron 6 is locked in place
- egorfine 4mo agoSo we should expect even more AI bullshit in Windows 12.