Dan Cook

speaker

357 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 9 Jun

Dan Cook’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Not Your Father’s Data Center · Solar Power's Role in the Future of Digital and Energy Infrastructure · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

Well, and in some ways, the data center folks are dealing with what we just dealt with or what we're still dealing with on the generation side is having speculative projects, having an incredible amount of incentives offered to the industry.

Three years ago, four years ago, when the IRA came out, and I'm still obviously pro incentives for my own industry and my own technologies that we develop.

But-

everybody and their cousin who had a backyard 40 acres with a transmission line on it said, great, we're doing solar.

And I suspect at least what we've seen or heard in the data center world is that it's similar.

You get a lot of the real estate folks that hear these elevated valuations on a dollar per acre basis, and they say, great, I want a piece of that.

What do I have to do?

Well,

you know, just because you might have a potential interconnect and some land, uh, doesn't mean you're going to be able to drop a data center down there.

Uh, you know, the, from at least what I've seen in, in interfacing with this industry is there's really only so many bonafide data center developers that are actually going to go soup to nuts and, and deliver what the end user needs or what the hyperscalers and, you know, these newer builds are looking for.

Uh,

Everyone else is effectively just a broker.

Definitely.

And I'll sort of bifurcate this because there's – given the oversupply of renewables projects and how many of them are on the grid –

It makes sense that, you know, the average data center is going to be technology agnostic, right?

I mean, that's, at the end of the day, those clients have their own, those users have their own requirements.

And, you know, they don't always have the leeway to be preferencing certain technologies, apart from maybe a few that are...

trying to sort of virtually offset their exposure or manage their carbon and emissions.

But there's two ways to think about this.

When we look at the average solar project, obviously we're not able to ourselves power a full data center for 24-7 or high up times, which is my understanding of what these facilities require.

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