The U.S. is on track to add a record 86 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and battery storage capacity this year—roughly the size of the U.K.’s entire grid. And there’s far more clean energy in the pipeline, with low-cost proposed projects that could help meet the surging demand from data centers. So why are data centers increasingly turning to polluting gas plants instead of clean energy?

A startup called Firma Power says that the issue isn’t cost, speed, or reliability, but the difficulty of assembling enough clean energy from a patchwork of projects—a problem that it is trying to solve.

Securing enough reliable, clean electricity for a massive new data center is complex. But Firma’s software calculates what a proposed data center needs, and then automatically searches through proposed clean energy projects to suggest a portfolio that could support it. An analysis that might otherwise take a team months can now take minutes. Firma then does the hard work of pulling all of the clean energy projects together, and data center developers can sign a single contract.

The company says that the process can get data centers power faster than building new gas-fired power plants—and it can compete on cost. And at a time when Americans really don’t like data centers, using clean power could make it more feasible for some projects to be greenlit by communities.

“We started the company with the hypothesis that despite the fact that 98% of what’s in the queue is wind, solar and storage, that’s not getting tapped as the default path to power for large loads—so there’s got to be some market frictions and barriers there,” says Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer and associate professor at Princeton University who cofounded Firma Power and serves as CTO.

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