NOVEMBER EDUCATIONAL MEETING
Thursday, November 12th at Noon
WHERE: LWVCNM Offices Conference Room, 6739 Academy Rd. NE, ample parking available. In person (members and guests only); Zoom (members and general public)
TOPIC: HYPERSCALE DATA CENTERS IN NEW MEXICO
SPEAKERS: THE DATA CENTER & MICROGRID STUDY COMMITTEE OF THE LWVCNM
This will be a hybrid meeting at 12 PM with in-person attendance in the LWVCNM conference room.
The Data Center and Microgrid Study Committee will present information about its ongoing study for this general meeting of the League of Women Voters of Central New Mexico. The nine-member study committee has spent the last six months learning about data centers in New Mexico, their impact on the environment, the kinds of jobs they bring to the state, and the current state of the electric grid.
There are more data centers in Albuquerque than any other area of the state. Of the four counties the Central New Mexico League covers, only Bernalillo and Valencia have operating data centers. The cluster of data centers in Albuquerque is mostly in the downtown area and are small scale; the largest draws about six megawatts. The Public Service Company of New Mexico’s electric grid has been able to absorb their power needs, and they have all received air quality permits for back-up generators and are connected to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Authority.
Hyperscale data centers are different. Meta’s data center in Los Lunas began on a small scale and has over the past 10 years grown into a hyperscale data center. It has had a complex growth pattern, requiring that PNM design and build a separate electric substation, paid for by Meta. Meta’s growth was slow and manageable, but we are seeing a new wave of development in which an enormous project is announced and local communities are forced to react. Here’s what is happening all around us.
Hyperscale data centers are bringing enormous change to New Mexico. They are defined by the Congressional Research Service as having more than 5,000 servers in buildings of more than 10,000 square feet, and drawing more than 100 megawatts of electricity.
Project Jupiter, a hyperscale artificial intelligence learning data center near Santa Teresa, is being built for Oracle and Chat GBT. It plans to build a fuel-cell microgrid capable of generating nearly as much power as the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), the largest investor-owned electric utility in the state, generates.
Google has announced that it is exploring the possibility of building a 7-gigawatt hyperscale data center capable of generating about 3 times the amount of electricity generated by PNM near Hobbs in Lea County.
What does that actually mean for our air quality, our water use, our economy, our landscape and our pocketbooks? We will have a chance to talk about the changes the data centers are bringing, and some things the state and local governments might do to enhance their positive impacts and mitigate their negative impacts.