Nobody is actively building out nuclear power. Microsoft is turning on a recently decommissioned facility.
New nuclear is too expensive to make sense. At most there are small investments in flash-in-the-pan startups that are failing to deliver plans for small modular reactors.
The real build out that will happen is solar/wind with tons of batteries, which is so commonplace that it doesn't even make the news. Those can be ordered basically off the shelf, are cheap, and can be deployed within a year. New nuclear is a 10-15 year project, at best, with massive financial risk and construction risk. Nobody wants to take those bets, or can really afford to, honestly.
Plenty of bets being placed on nuclear, but they are moonshot style bets.
From where I'm standing, the immediate capital seems to be being deployed at smaller-scale (2-5MW) natural gas turbines co-located on site with the load. I haven't heard a whole lot of battery deployments at the same scale.
Of course turbines are now out at 2029 or something for delivery.
Only marginally at the edge of this space these days though, so what I hear is through the grapevine and not direct any longer.
As far as the grid goes, there's a tiny bit of gas additions, but it's mostly solar, battery, and wind:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
Of course, remember that nameplate capacities from different technologies should be corrected for capacity factor, which is roughly 60% for gas, 40% for wind, and 25% for solar, but pre-correction EIA expects
And then there's an expected retirement of 1.6GW of old gas this year.I'm pretty disconnected from the data center folks, but in general the current political environment is highly disfavorable to solar and batteries, and using them too much could have lots of political blowback that is very expensive.
Of course, small gas also has the benefit that the operating costs are spread over the lifetime, rather than being an up-front cost. So even if solar+batteries is cheaper than gas over the lifetime of the system, gas may seem more expedient if you don't want a lot of capital on the books.
> The real build out that will happen is solar/wind with tons of batteries
That actually sounds awesome, is there a downside I’m not seeing?
If you're a utility, you may not like that solar and batteries are driving down electricity costs and reducing grid expenses. But even with the thumbs against the scale, we are seeing the most nameplate deployment (see caveats in my parallel reply) in decades, and will likely set a record, because of solar, batteries, and wind in that order:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
There are a couple companies doing HTGR and SMRs that seem to be on track.