> 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat.

For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.

I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).

To generate that 9 GW of electrical energy typically about twice that amount in heat will be generated at the thermal engines converting the fuel chemical energy to electicity. Has anyone studied this 18 GW heat load at the site of electricity generation?

The total head load for consuming electrical energy of 9 GW is thus approximately 3*9 GW = 27 GW = 9 GW at the GPU's and 18 GW at the electricity generation plant.

They mention a gas plant would have to be about 7.5 x 40 acres = 300 acres.

By your calculation its 1 GW / 1000 acres of natural incident solar power; so natural solar power on 300 acres would be just 0.3 GW on the would-be plant.

Instead its dissipating 18 GW (!) 60 x higher!

That is ignoring the 9 GW on the GPU site.

Poor nations desiring developed nation level energy per capita consumption combined with developed nation exploding energy consumption for the AI rat race means humanity ogles consuming energy at such power levels that mere prompt heating approaches similar power levels and densities as GHG radiation forcing did!

In other words, even if we succeeded in phasing out all fossil fuel energy use and replace them with renewables, and even if we somehow extracted all the excess CO2 back out, we will relatively quickly replace the cause of global warming from GHG emissions to prompt heating for generating and dissipating our electric energy use.

2 Exceptions: wind energy and hopefully someday exploiting the temperature difference at ground level versus the tropopause.

Humans have made aerostats (balloons with a tether), humans have made aerostats that went much higher than the tropopause, although only in acceptable weather.

At the tropopause the temperature is about 60 degrees C colder (up to about 100 degrees C in tropical regions).

Imagine a heat loop or huge inflatable levitating heat pipe (using phase transition). The new access at ground level to a cold bath in addition to the environmental warm bath can be used to drive a thermal engine and generate electricity (day and night, winter and summer). It behaves more like baseload energy, and it helps cool the planet: the heat transported from surface level if released at the tropopause level is above about ~70% of the CO2 of the atmosphere, so there it can more quickly escape to the CMB's low temperature bath.

We could be cooling the planet while generating useful electrical energy. The first prototypes should avoid any inhabited areas by a distance at least equal to the structure height (so it doesn't cause damage to population residences). Most humans live "close" to a coast line, so place the first such structures about 15 km into the sea. Another advantage is that the sea water has a high heat capacity, is pumpable, and can provide as a very stable reference thermal hot side bath. I.e. the system shouldn't stall because it has depleted local heat in the environment, you can always pump lukewarm seawater into the device, which can also be used to freeze seawater (desalinating it, see freeze desalination). The frozen seawater can be brought to conventional energy plants to lower their cold side bath temperatures, increasing the efficiency of solar but also gas / fuel / nuclear energy plants.

None of this contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, its an engineering problem: how do we build an inflatable structure that withstands the wind shear forces, dampens structure resonances, identifying the ideal carrier for transporting the heat (a pure substance? a mixture?, ...), a group of specialists should comb through the space of options to get a rough first overview of which directions would be more or less promising than alternatives.