Project Jupiter power permit deadline waived in New Mexico

Yucca Growth Infrastructure, the firm building the power infrastructure for Oracle’s Project Jupiter data centre campus near Santa Teresa in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, has agreed to waive its right to a decision by November 23 on an air quality permit for the site’s on-site generation, Bloomberg reported. The waiver gives the New Mexico Environment Department more time to assess technical details, including updated emissions projections, and a public hearing on the permit is scheduled for early December.

The permit is required for the power generation that would run the campus through an on-site microgrid of Bloom Energy fuel cells, supplied in part by a natural gas pipeline being built by Energy Transfer. Without it, construction of the power infrastructure cannot proceed, while work on the data centre buildings themselves, which do not need the same permit, continues. In mid-October Oracle and Yucca proposed changes to the application, including an enforceable cap on fuel cell output that the companies said would cut permitted emissions by about 35 percent without changing the planned computing capacity.