MANY MINDEDA planned Nevada solar project asks federal regulators to become a gas plant and data center
Renew Development HoldCo, an entity created by Clearway Energy Group, asked the Bureau of Land Management in April to amend a 2021 application for the Amber project, a planned 500-megawatt solar facility on federal land in the Nevada desert. The requested change would remove the solar facility and replace it with a data center and a natural gas facility. The letter, dated April 3 and signed by Clearway's chief development officer, cited a Trump Day 1 executive order encouraging energy projects on federal lands as justification.
Clearway is owned by Global Infrastructure Partners and TotalEnergies. The company told the reporter the solar project is not being killed but moved to private land, and said it is advancing more than 4 GW of solar and battery resources in Nevada. It declined to comment on the gas and data center plan.
Swapping planned clean generation for fossil capacity sets back the buildout of cheap, low-carbon power. The reporter notes a similar earlier swap by a joint venture that received BLM permission to switch from a solar farm to a data center, suggesting a pattern where federal solar stalls and gas fills the gap.
The story rests on a letter and documents the reporter obtained, and the company statement came from an unnamed spokesperson. Much remains unclear: whether any gas plant would serve the data center, the grid, or both, and whether Clearway would even build it. The data center is described as in exploratory early stages, and some of the reporter's reasoning is labeled as a hunch.
Source: Heatmap