Powerstack: Oracle's ‘force majeure’ is a power play

Before we jump in this week. A shoutout. A nerdout. I started in geothermal in 2007, and admittedly, never really thought I’d see today – where an actual commercial-scale EGS project syncs to the grid and starts delivering power. But as we’ve written about so many times in the past, today is the day we’ve been watching for. Huge shoutout and congrats to Tim, Jack, Sarah, and the whole Fervo team!

And for Currence clients, keep a lookout in your inbox over the next couple days as we’re sending out what this all means in our geothermal outlook. 

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Oracle sent a force majeure notice on 24 September to STACK Infrastructure, the Blue Owl developer building Project Jupiter, the data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico that's part of OpenAI's Stargate initiative. 

The company is seeking to protect itself if the campus doesn’t get powered by its planned operational date. Initially using gas turbines and diesel generators, Oracle and its partners swapped that for an on-site microgrid of up to 2.45GW of Bloom Energy fuel cells this April. And in September, Oracle asked developers to propose 2GW of new renewable projects elsewhere in New Mexico to match the campus's electricity use with carbon-free energy by 2031. 

Even though the company says that construction is on schedule, and Currence satellite imagery shows the buildings going up, there’s no sign of power yet. The gap between the build schedule and the power schedule comes down to two approvals. The Environment Department has set 23 November as its deadline to decide on the microgrid's air permit. However, the original officer stepped aside, and the 14 September hearing never took place. The gas side is further behind. The Green Chile lateral, a roughly 18-mile pipeline off the El Paso Natural Gas system, still needs FERC approval, due by 3 December, and permission to cross 0.63 miles of state trust land, which the State Land Office has refused twice. The lateral's in-service date has already slipped from August 2026 to February 2027, months after the Q4 2026 start that the county still lists for the campus's initial operations.

Now, the force majeure notice would allow Oracle to delay full rent by up to three years. Oracle would still owe the full lease term once rent starts, so the delay shifts the timing of payments, not the total, on a schedule that was already ambitious.

This has broader implications across the data center buildout, that the answer might not be as simple as just do gas, or just do BTM gas. To move forward, these projects still need connections to gas supply and permission to operate, which we can see here is not always a sure thing, at least on the timelines companies plan for.

Clients can get a case study on this project on our platform here, with a combination of satellite imagery and permitting documents, and a view of what to look for next with this project.

Oracle's gas problem actually looks fixable.

But its community problem is looking harder, and for good reason.

In the past six months, Oracle has rewritten Jupiter's power plan twice – something my colleague, Holly, said looks very much like throwing spaghetti at the wall. First, it swapped gas turbines for Bloom fuel cells, then it came out with that RFP for 2GW of renewables. Now it's sent the landlord a force majeure notice.

Why is it doing all this? On the outside, it looks desperate, that the project is in trouble. But looking at it, gah, I think it’s noise. 

As our analyst Declan points out in this piece, what's actually keeping gas from reaching the campus is 0.63mi of state trust land and one official, New Mexico's land commissioner, who has said no twice. Like we’ve said so many times before, so much of this data center buildout will be decided by commissioners in state agencies. Here, this seat is term-limited, and it’s on the ballot on 3 November. The Republican running says blocking the crossing goes against the commissioner's duty to make money for schools, and that if they do block it on state land "all they're going to do is go around it" on federal land. The Democrat has heard a reroute is "a strong possibility," and says that's a reason to get back to the table. So either way, it looks like Oracle is getting a friendlier commissioner, open to a chat. And if the new commissioner still says no, there’s a world where STACK gets permission to route the gas line on federal land – a longer line, a longer timeline, but it still gets done.

Of course, the gas connection isn’t the only thing – the air permit and FERC approval still have to come through.

But from this angle, the force majeure seems like Oracle is just buying time. Oracle now has three years, but probably won’t even need them. That is, unless there’s a long term moratorium with teeth that finally makes it and does not grandfather-in existing projects, but we haven’t seen any signs of that yet.  

The hangup will be with the neighbors. A campus like this runs gas around the clock, and even though it’s fuel cells, Oracle's air permit application requests to emit about 10mtCO2/yr in Doña Ana County. Come again? That’s in the ballpark of the 1.5GW Four Corners coal plant and roughly equivalent to 20% of the emissions of New Mexico. I mean come on. What are we doing here? And renewables bought elsewhere in the state don't change local air quality – or, the air actual people around there breathe.

My take – the pipeline gets built. But I’m really not sure the neighbors will let them turn the thing on.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

33MW // Fervo brought the first GeoBlock at Cape Station online in Beaver County, Utah, a huge milestone. That's one of three blocks in the roughly 100MW Phase I, with contractual COD by 1 Oct and the other two due by 1 Jan 2027. Another 400MW is under construction for 2028. This is the first execution proof point since Fervo's IPO and its 396MW Google PPA on 1 Sep, and it moves the goalpost from whether EGS works to whether Fervo can ramp flow rates and hit COD on schedule.

$3.36bn // Nscale raised a pre-IPO convertible led by Third Point, with Apollo, Citadel, ADIC, and $1bn from Nvidia joining. The cash funds Nscale's 8GW Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, running off-grid on gas, with only 55MW energized against $103bn in contracted compute. Nvidia has now backed two of its own customers' funding rounds in two weeks, showing the gap between contracted compute, energized megawatts, and balance sheet risk.

750MW // FERC denied Oklo's complaint to reinstate its Virginia project, a 150MW advanced nuclear, 300MW fuel cell, and 300MW gas hybrid dropped from PJM's Cycle 1 study after Oklo missed an inverter ride-through deficiency deadline. FERC ruled PJM followed its tariff, though it urged better developer communication. PJM's reformed queue isn't bending for marquee names, and a missed deficiency now costs a full cycle regardless of brand recognition.

73GW // UK data centers proportion of the country's 125GW grid connection queue, as PM Andy Burnham unveiled the Great British Grid, a publicly owned entity inside Great British Energy with up to £4bn to invest in connection infrastructure and let businesses build their own. It's the UK's version of the colocation and self-build fights playing out at PJM and ERCOT, except here the state is entering as a competing builder rather than a regulator setting rules.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Senate strikes a permitting deal. Sens. Capito, Whitehouse, Lee, and Heinrich announced a bipartisan bill that limits NEPA legal challenges, eases interstate transmission siting, and strengthens FERC's authority to review major projects alongside state reviews. The White House was involved in negotiations, but a vote won't happen until after the November midterms.

Xcel's large load tariff reaches Texas. Southwestern Public Service, which sits in SPP rather than ERCOT, filed Docket 60332 with the PUCT for customers above 75MW, with 15-year minimum commitments, an 80% billing demand floor, and exit fees tied to remaining bills. The PUCT now runs two separate large-load frameworks at once, ERCOT's SB 6 regime and this one. Xcel says New Mexico is next.

Anthropic's IPO math. A confidential S-1 reviewed by Reuters shows the AI lab spent $7.33bn on compute in 2025 against $4.6bn in revenue, while locking in $518bn more, $161.2bn to Broadcom, $111.1bn to Google, $110bn to Amazon, and $31.4bn to Microsoft, mostly non-cancellable. Public investors will be pricing a company whose biggest cloud providers are also its investors and competitors, a structure the filing itself flags.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

2H26 SMR Leaderboard. Currence's semiannual ranking scores 25 reactor vendors across technology, deployment, finance, and supply chain. GE-Hitachi and TerraPower both moved into nuclear construction this cycle, and Rolls-Royce posted the biggest gain on new orders in Sweden, the UK, and Czechia. Read the full leaderboard here.

Oracle's Project Jupiter Skips the Queue, But Not the Permits. Using satellite imagery, Currence tracks a year of construction at Oracle's Stargate campus in New Mexico against its stalled power approvals. The buildings are 26% complete, but the air permit for Bloom Energy's 2.45GW fuel cell microgrid and FERC approval for the Green Chile gas lateral are both still pending, prompting Oracle to file a force majeure notice. What it means in the case study here.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 TechCrunch Disrupt // San Francisco, Oct 13-15 // The startup world's biggest fall gathering, with tracks on AI, climate tech, and infrastructure. We’ll be speaking, so give us a shout if you’ll be there!

📅 Norrsken Impact/Week // Barcelona, Oct 14-15 // Founders, funders, and policymakers gathering on climate, energy, and impact investing. 

📅 RE+ // Las Vegas, Nov 16-19 // North America's largest clean energy event, covering solar, storage, hydrogen, and grid edge tech.

I’m in Colorado this week for NLR’s Innovation Showcase 2026, hearing about the incredible advancements coming out of the lab and the companies it supports. For real, mind blown. And such fantastic people at this event. Huge thanks to NLR for putting it on.

I used to think it was Al Gore that got me thinking about conservation, climate, power, renewables (and my first love, geothermal) and all of that. But really, it wasn’t. Thinking about it further – it was John Denver. Specifically this album – a benefit concert for wildlife conservation. I listened to it all the time in high school (I know, I was really cool).

So this week, in honor of Colorado and all of that, we’ve got Rocky Mountain High.

Full Powerstack B-Sides on Spotify.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.