NewsNTech
A bidding war over a West Virginia coal plant has set a utility and a data center developer against each other, with the utility securing the facility after what was described as an aggressive campaign to outbid its rival.
The contest makes the economics of AI's power demand unusually concrete: operators of compute infrastructure are now bidding directly against regulated utilities for generation assets.
The constraint behind the contest Coal's value in this context comes down to dispatchability.
Unlike wind or solar, a coal plant generates at full capacity on demand, around the clock, indifferent to weather or grid conditions.
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