US regulators reject amended agreement on interconnect for Amazon Data Center

A filing on Friday showed that U.S. Energy regulators had rejected an amended agreement to interconnect an Amazon datacenter directly with a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission members said that the agreement to increase capacity of the Talen Energy Susquehanna nuclear generating plant's data center could affect grid reliability and raise electricity bills for consumers.

As Big Tech race to expand its data centers to support technologies such as generative artificial Intelligence, the option of locating these centers on power plant sites is becoming more attractive.

In the order, FERC commissioner Mark Christie stated that "co-location arrangements such as those presented here raise a number of complex, nuanced, and multifaceted issues which could collectively have enormous ramifications on both grid reliability and costs to consumers."

The Talen agreement would, however, divert large quantities of power that are currently supplying to the regional grid. FERC expressed concern about how this loss of supply could affect power bills and reliability. The payment for transmission and distribution upgrades was not clear.

Willie Phillips, the chairman of the FERC, dissented in the vote. He said that this could reduce the dominance of the U.S. over the world when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Phillips stated that the move was a setback for national security and electric reliability. (Reporting and editing by Sandra Maler, Diane Craft and Laila Kearney)

(source: Reuters)