The Fix Is the Problem

In February 2026, the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federally owned utility created during the New Deal to electrify the rural South — voted unanimously to keep two coal-fired plants burning past their scheduled retirement dates. The Kingston and Cumberland facilities were slated to close in 2027 and 2028. The board also scrapped a planned solar component at Kingston and approved selling 150 megawatts to Elon Musk's xAI facility in Memphis. The reason was explicit. ^[1]

As power demand grows, TVA is looking at every option to bolster our generating fleet to continue providing affordable, reliable electricity to our 10 million customers, create jobs and help communities thrive. — Tennessee Valley Authority

The solar component did not survive the math.

Without even a public meeting, TVA is telling the people who live near these coal plants that they will breathe in toxic pollution from not one, but two major power plants for the foreseeable future. — Appalachian Voices

That vote, taken in a single afternoon, reversed a decarbonization plan the TVA had adopted in 2019. It was not an outlier. In July, during a heat wave that pushed grid demand to 168,158 megawatts across 13 states, the Department of Energy granted emergency authorization for PJM Interconnection to require data centers to switch to backup diesel generators. The goal was preventing residential blackouts. The Sierra Club's Pennsylvania director called diesel generators "even worse than coal." ^[2]

Currently, there are tens of gigawatts of readily available backup generation that have remained largely untapped. — U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office

In Texas, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Diamondback Energy are building private gas-fired power plants adjacent to data centers — "power islands" that bypass a grid whose interconnection queue cannot move fast enough. ERCOT projects 24 gigawatts of new data center demand by 2031, roughly the peak load of Houston. ^[3] In El Paso, Meta's $1.5 billion data center was originally promised to run on renewables. It is now served by a proposed 366-megawatt natural gas plant. The reason, stated plainly by the utility, was that gas is "the fastest available option." El Paso's city government intervened, arguing the plant contradicts its 50-percent-by-2030 emissions reduction target. ^[4]

In this case, the customer requested and is funding a natural gas resource as the fastest available option to meet a large, time-sensitive power need. — El Paso Electric

The mechanism uniting these decisions is not ideology. It is time. One utility quoted Google a 12-year wait for a grid interconnection study. ^[5]

We had one utility who told us 12 years to study the interconnection timeline, which is sort of wild, but that's what we're seeing — Marsden Hanna

When a data center needs power in months and the grid needs years, the fastest fuel becomes the only fuel. And the fastest fuel is fossil. Australia's CSIRO confirmed in its 2026 GenCost report that AI data center construction has made the United States the second-largest consumer of gas turbines globally, driving up gas technology costs worldwide. Solar and onshore wind remain cheaper per megawatt-hour. They just cannot be built in time. ^[6]

Something we had to take into account when we were doing our short-term projections for gas turbines is the US strategy of building data centres, big data centres, trying to build them quick, and often deciding to build dedicated gas turbines. — Paul Graham

Now consider what these choices are accelerating toward. Two separate risk-analytics firms — First Street and XDI — have found that roughly 80 percent of existing data centers are already exposed to climate hazards: wildfires, flooding, extreme winds. ^[7]

The results we’ve gotten previously on built infrastructure and now with planned infrastructure suggest we aren’t adequately preparing for climate change. — Karl Mallon

The Center for Biological Diversity projects that AI data centers could account for 10 percent of economy-wide U.S. emissions and 44 percent of allowed power-sector emissions by 2035. ^[8]

Trump is determined to feed the voracious AI vortex with more dirty fossil fuels that harm the whole world. — Center for Biological Diversity

The circle closes cleanly. Coal plants are kept open to serve AI load. Diesel generators burn during a heat wave. Gas turbines multiply because they are the fastest thing to build. Each workaround raises the emissions that intensify the heat waves, wildfires, and floods that already threaten four out of five data centers. The adaptation is the mechanism deepening the sector's exposure to the hazard that forced the adaptation. The fix is the problem.