How to Fill a Gigawatt

Seven projects want more power than The Dalles Dam can make. Some will get built. What matters next is whether those megawatts do real work or answer queries nobody needed.

Yesterday's piece, Seven Projects, 5,450 Megawatts, and the Machines That Didn't Need to Be On, counted the load lined up along the Columbia: 5,296 MW proposed on the Washington side, nearly three times what The Dalles Dam can generate, with Google's existing campus across the river in Oregon.

Airbrx took the same story further in How to fill a gigawatt, with a video to go with it.

A few things it adds to the picture:

The dams can't keep up. The Dalles Dam makes roughly 800 MW on an average day. The proposed load runs around the clock and is bigger than all four lower Columbia dams produce in a typical year, about 3,780 MW.
The region is already short. Before any of these projects are counted, the Northwest is projected to be roughly 770 MW short by 2029 and about 3,500 MW short by 2036 in a low-water year.
One query, 21 times. It follows a single Monday dashboard refresh: the same SQL query computed and billed 21 times as people and AI agents looked at the same numbers, with nothing in the underlying data changed.

That last one is the whole argument in miniature. Every repeat is real power draw. It shows up on a cloud bill, then in a demand forecast, then as a reason to break ground on the next building. Fill a gigawatt with real work and it earns the land, the water, and the grid the community gave up for it. Fill it with repeats and the next building gets justified on waste.

Read the full Airbrx article, and the original Seven Projects piece for the project-by-project numbers and sources.