In a report published by the US Energy Information Administration in March, it was observed that California is experiencing an increase in the curtailment of solar and wind power. In 2024, the grid operator responsible for most of California curtailed over 3.4 million megawatt hours of utility-scale wind and solar production, marking a 29 percent increase from the previous year’s curtailed energy.
IREN purchases electricity from the wholesale market of the state grid when there is an excess of supply, as detailed by Kent Draper, the company’s chief commercial officer. They lower their energy consumption during peak-price periods by shutting down computers and minimizing power usage in their data centers.
“Wherever extensive utility-scale renewable energy development takes place, curtailment will be a factor,” noted Belizaire.
Belizaire mentioned that energy curtailment is a global challenge, occurring in different locations from Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, California, and Arizona in the US to Northern Ireland, Germany, Portugal, and Australia.
“The decision-making process for the location of data centers has seen a significant shift in the past six months,” Joshi highlighted. “Now, the availability of power plays a critical role in determining the optimal sites,” he added. “The growing demands of AI have surpassed the capacity of the grid, leading the industry to produce power on-site.”
Like other data center developers embracing renewable energy sources, Soluna purchases surplus power from wind, hydro, and solar plants that cannot be fed back into the grid. By the end of this year, Soluna will operate three facilities totaling 123 megawatts in Kentucky and Texas, with seven more projects underway, boasting a combined capacity exceeding 800 megawatts.
A company in Texas that harnesses unused renewable energy is IREN, which operates facilities dedicated to Bitcoin mining and AI processing. They recently finished constructing a 7.5-gigawatt facility in Childress and started building a 1.4-gigawatt data center in Sweetwater.
Belizaire and I had a discussion about the surplus of unused energy from wind and solar farms in Texas, where I am currently located, due to the region’s limited transmission capacity. In West Texas, other data center developers are also tapping into this excess wind energy located far from major hubs like Dallas and Houston by establishing their large data warehouses equipped with state-of-the-art computers and high-capacity cooling systems nearby.
