What this is

An illustrative decision model of thermal continuity for a 5 GW-class AI campus with dedicated gas generation, using the Richland Parish buildout as the reference setting. It exists to make the main trade-offs visible and adjustable. It is not project engineering, not an OEM guarantee, not a tariff or interconnection analysis, and not a representation of any company's actual design, plans, or endorsement.

Verified public facts behind the setting [DESK, verified 2026-06-11]

• Announced ~5 GW AI campus, Richland Parish, LA; >4M sq ft; construction 2025–2030 (company and state announcements, Dec 2024–Jul 2025).
• Three combined-cycle plants, 2,260 MW, approved by the Louisiana PSC Aug 20, 2025; expansion reported Mar 2026 to ten plants ≈ 7.7 GW under the agreement.
• Current announced design path includes lithium battery energy storage and solar commitments; no thermal continuity layer (TES / inlet-air chilling / multi-hour cooling autonomy) appears in the public plans reviewed.

Key assumptions [EST / DOCTRINE / DESK — every one adjustable or documented]

• Cooling load ≈ IT electrical load at first order; campus phases (1,000 / 2,500 / 5,000 MW thermal) are an illustrative ramp, not a disclosed schedule.
• GPU density 375–545 GPUs per MW (GB200-class rack basis); rack value $2–3M; GPU-hour value $3–10.50 (default $7).
• Chiller displacement 0.171–0.227 MW per MW of cooling (284.3 tons/MW at 0.6–0.8 kW/ton), less a 7.5% auxiliary allowance for pumps, CDUs, and controls (auxiliary power remains required during discharge).
• Hot-weather output at risk 8–20% of gas-fleet capacity (ASHRAE / NREL / Texas A&M ranges); combined-cycle specifics need project modeling.
• Inlet-air chilling cooling duty ≈ 1.5 MW thermal per MW of generation recovered (EST, humid-climate latent-load basis), drawn from the same finite stored-cooling reserve — so a deep derate or a short autonomy window only partly averts the loss; flagged for engineering.
• Recovery tail anchored to the Google London July 2022 incident (4h08m cooling impact; 18h23m service restoration; 35h15m long tail).
• Installed-cost anchor $425–450M per 750 MW-thermal module, scaled linearly — a proof-of-concept assumption flagged for engineering.
• Event probability is deliberately user-owned; no public actuarial basis exists.

Mechanism honesty

• The thermal battery stores and discharges cooling, not electricity. "Demand handed back" is displaced chiller load — demand reduction, not export. Engineer-affirmed scenario (SEGI engineering, Jun 2026): ~100 MW handed back for ~4 hours during a utility peak, with TES carrying the cooling load — mechanics-level confirmation, not a committed offering.
• The reserve provides cooling autonomy, not compute runtime; compute continuity follows from avoided forced shutdown. "Minutes" of ride-through is the operational response window, not a universal damage clock.
• Stored cooling is finite, and the model enforces it. If an event moderately outlasts the window, the protected campus sheds load and paces the discharge so the reserve lasts to restoration; if the event far outlasts it, the campus goes through an orderly shutdown — offline, but checkpointed and without thermal excursion, so restart is a short managed ramp rather than the multi-hour recovery tail that follows an emergency power-down. The reserve never carries load it has no stored cooling to support. Window length is a sizing decision (2.5–4 h doctrine range; a ~2 h bridge is engineer-affirmed feasible).
• Value lenses are never summed. Loss meters in the theater integrate the modeled capacity curve; lens bars show the documented per-event formula ranges.

Deliberately excluded

Fuel and dispatch economics, LCOE, OEM performance curves, hourly weather data, tariff/DR program design, O&M, financing structure, water, CO₂ accounting, construction schedule. A production version would add project-specific engineering in each of these lanes.

Reproducibility

All formulas, sources, and defaults are documented in the companion files hyperion_example_case.md and simulation_plan.md. This file is self-contained and works offline.