Nevada regulators have signed off on a 510-megawatt natural gas power plant that Switch plans to build and use near the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, clearing the way for construction to begin as early as the first quarter of 2027. The approval, handed down during a regular agenda meeting on Tuesday, makes Switch the latest data-center operator in the state to pursue its own natural-gas generation; the proposed plant is front-of-meter.
The Public Utilities Commission’s sign-off confirms what Switch disclosed last month: that the company is the intended off-taker and ultimate owner of the plant, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The plant will sit on roughly 20 acres at the former Sierra Biofuels Refinery in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, running nine gas turbines with Switch as the facility’s primary user. Construction is expected to wrap in 2029, per the same report.
Water use has emerged as one of the more striking figures tied to the project. The plant is expected to draw between 10,000 and 20,000 gallons per day during construction and as much as 145 acre-feet of water annually once it’s running — equivalent to roughly 47 million gallons a year over its life cycle, the station’s report notes. Emissions estimates from the underlying application, reviewed separately by Nevada Current, put the plant’s potential output at up to 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly equal to the emissions from 453,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for a year.
Why Data Centers Are Building Their Own Power Plants
Why Data Centers Are Building Their Own Power Plants Switch’s project is part of a broader pattern across northern Nevada, where data center developers are increasingly proposing power plants to address long waits tied to connecting to the regional grid. Getting connected through conventional channels can take two to three years or longer if new utility infrastructure has to be built, and gas turbines have become the fastest — though not the cheapest or cleanest — option for operators racing to get online, per the Review-Journal’s reporting. Solar, wind and batteries remain the cheapest way to generate bulk power, but they can’t always be built fast enough to meet the immediate demand data centers are creating…