The Big Energy Story For The Year -- Saudi Arabia -- Back To The Future -- March 11, 2025

Locator: 48492SAUDI.

Long stand-alone post later. 

Saudi crude oil production: everyone follows. Irrelevant. 

Saudi crude oil exports: relevant.

One screenshot for now, from FRED:

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New England

Re-posting as a reminder.

Locator: 48490LDCS.

RBN Energy: tech giants increasingly turning to natural gas to power data centers.  Simply put, New England bet on the wrong horse.

Archived here. Lede here.

The pace of announcements for planned data centers accelerated in 2024 and has continued to gather steam in 2025, with natural gas-fired power plants emerging as a frequent choice, along with nuclear power, to provide the around-the-clock electricity that large-scale data centers want and need. In today’s RBN blog, the first in a series, we’ll detail plans by several well-known energy firms to construct new gas-fired plants that would produce electricity specifically for data centers. 

Let’s start with some data-center basics. As we discussed in Storm Front, a data center (see photo below) is the home for hundreds or even thousands of networked computers that process, store and share data. Data centers — many of them owned and operated by tech giants — are among the most energy-intensive building types, consuming up to 50 times the energy per square foot of a typical commercial office building, with electrical demand at larger facilities ranging from 100 megawatts (MW) to 2,000 MW. (For perspective, as we noted in Just Can’t Get Enough, a city the size of Lubbock, TX, — population 267,000 — only requires about 700 MW.) Demand for data centers has grown exponentially with the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which require far more computational power — and energy — than conventional Google searches.