Google's first data center in Wyoming will run mostly on natural gas. The company announced on 5 November a long-term investment of $17 billion in Laramie County, near Cheyenne, and named the supply: a 702 MW fuel cell plant with carbon capture, plus power bought from gas plants run by two local energy companies.
Fuel cells first, then the gas plants
Google has contracted with American Electric Power for the fuel cell development, which it describes as the largest planned project of its kind. Bloom Energy will make the cells in the United States, and they turn natural gas into electricity without combustion. AEP said in October that it would spend about $4 billion on the plant. TNW, citing POWER Magazine, reports that Google takes the output under a 20-year agreement and that the plant should be fully running by the end of 2028. We covered the AEP side of the deal in our item on the Mainspring linear generators.
Google also buys power from gas plants operated by Tallgrass Energy and Black Hills Energy. With Tallgrass it is running a front-end engineering and design study on adding carbon capture to Tallgrass's combined-cycle turbines. The captured CO2 is to be stored underground at Tallgrass's Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub nearby. Google says a large majority of the project's emissions will be captured but gives no percentage. Counting Wyoming, its contracted capacity from plants with carbon capture is now close to 1 GW.
Paying for its own power, and the local mood
Google says it will pay for all the electricity the site uses and for the infrastructure its growth makes necessary. The buildings will be air-cooled to keep water use down. Google, Tallgrass, Black Hills Energy, Related Digital, AEP and Bloom Energy are forming a community council after more than 200 residents raised concerns about how data center growth is changing Cheyenne. TNW points out that the announcement came two days after US voters rejected data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures.
Earlier local reporting on the site, known as Project Tembo, described about 716 acres, around 2.7 GW of capacity including reserves, first operation in the second half of 2028 and completion in the first half of 2031. Google's own post gives no schedule.
The part nobody has described yet
None of the material we read says anything about standby generation. On a campus whose main supply is its own gas-fed plant, that is the question for whoever equips it: what carries the critical load when a fuel cell block trips or the gas supply is interrupted, and on which fuel. A project that sells itself on carbon capture and low water use will not want a large diesel fleet in its air permit, so the backup discussion here will be about fuel, run hours and permit conditions as much as about megawatts, whether the answer ends up as a building or as rows of containerized generator sets.