Power Plant Campus Scope

The 1.35 GW power plant campus consists of two systems: Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), and a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) system. The 1.35 GW system is optimized to deliver at lease 1.20 GW of power and is slightly oversized due to the use of standard BESS and SMR modules, i.e., there's no exact combination that achieves 1.20 GW. In our scenario, both plants are developed, owned and operated by separate independent power producers (IPPs) offering the data center with power on an exclusive power purchase agreement (PPA) basis. The power plants are interconnected to the grid enabling the IPPs and can sell excess power to ERCOT. The campus requires 200 acres for the BESS and 30 acres for the SMR plant (total of 230 acres). The power station acreage includes substations, roads, cooling systems and setbacks.

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The BESS system is set up to provide six hours of power at full load during peak operating hours while the SMR system provides steady baseload power on a 24/7 basis. This approach supports the wide fluctuations in AI inference workloads and nominally steady state training workloads.

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The data center campus is constructed in five phases staggered by six months with total time to complete of 5.8 years. The SMR system requires about 4.5 years to build while the BESS system requires about 2.0 years to reach full operation.  In summary, the total project is a multi-year development in which the first data hall that can reach operational readiness as soon as the BESS system is energized. 

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Design, Permitting & Grid Interconnection

We assume that obtaining full interconnection for BESS and SMR with the grid can be achieved in time to support the first data hall phase (six months of time to permit both systems through State of Texas fast tracking). State and local permitting (environmental, zoning, conditional use, building) is expected to take about six months. We assume that design is underway for the data center, BESS and SMR and that INFRAoutreach® would be engaged during the design, permitting and interconnection phase.​

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Community Impact

The data center and power plant campuses require nearly 500 acres of land.  The community may push back on a project of this scale and complexity which is why INFRAoutreach® will work proactively with each development team to anticipate and help establish and sustain a positive relationship of the multi-decade lifecycle of the project.​