Data centers must “bring your own power” to curtail the economic impact, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during a Monday event with Breitbart News.
Addressing concerns about the economic impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of energy, Burgum acknowledged, “When you bring in AI, the rates go up because they use so much power.” However, he said he fully embraces BYOP – bring your own power.
Pointing to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, Burgum said it is a fairly simple concept.
“If you’re one of the hyperscalers, and if you want to build out a data center, then you have to, like, you know, say BYOP. You’ve got to bring your own power,” the Interior Secretary said.
And in the instances they do not want to bring their own power, they have to at least be willing to allow themselves to be “curtailed.”
“You have to be willing during those peak moments, hours, days of the year, to say, yeah, you can shut my center off. And you say, well, that’s not possible. It’s not possible in some forms of AI, but if you’re just doing a training model, then you could say, yeah, we’re, you know, we’re willing, over a course of 365 days to be shut down 24 hours,” he explained. “We can be curtailed.”
“If somebody says yes to that, there’s a lot of places you go in the country where we actually have excess power in the spring and the fall – we generate, you know, hundreds of gigawatts more power than what we use,” Burgum said.
“All the grid of operators are trying to, you know, trying to make sure that on those peak cold days and peak warm days that we can still keep everything running and not have the, you know, the cascading collapse on this giant machine called the grid,” he said. “So there’s that.”
But ultimately, Burgum said these data centers have the option to “build your own power.”
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