Big Tech's Soaring Energy Demands Are Making Coal-fired Power Plant Sites Attractive

Coal-fired power plants, long an increasingly money-losing proposition in the U.S., are becoming more valuable now that the suddenly strong demand for electricity to run Big Tech's cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications has set off a full-on sprint to find new energy sources.

President Donald Trump - who has pushed for U.S. "energy dominance" in the global market and suggested that coal can help meet surging power demand - is wielding his emergency authority to entice utilities to keep older coal-fired plants online and producing electricity .

While some utilities were already delaying the retirement of coal-fired plants, the scores of coal-fired plants that have been shut down the past couple years - or will be shut down in the next couple years - are the object of growing interest from tech companies , venture capitalists, states and others competing for electricity.

That's because they have a very attractive quality: high-voltage lines connecting to the electricity grid that they aren't using anymore and that a new power plant could use.

That ready-to-go connection could enable a new generation of power plants - gas , nuclear , wind, solar or even battery storage - to help meet the demand for new power sources more quickly.