Massive AI Center Requirements Bring Could Bring a Harsh Reality to Green Energy Platitudes and Hallucinations
Don’t place your bets on a green energy cartel fighting climate change with subsidies for anemic and intermittent windmills and sunbeams winning out over AI data center pragmatists willing to commit enormous expenditures essential for colossal expansion of weather-independent 24/7 power in competition with China dominance.
Electrical power demands to support proposed new data centers will compete head-on with growing baseload grid needs and pricing budgets of current domestic and business users including residential air conditioning, electric vehicle recharging, and industrial manufacturing.
As warned by Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, the independent watchdog for PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator and a hub for new data centers, “there is simply no new capacity to meet new loads” from AI “hyper-scalers.”
Blame much of this energy paucity on Biden administration EPA rules forcing premature shutdowns of coal plants along with federal and state renewable mandates making it inordinately expensive to build new natural gas plants in favor of subsidizing costly solar and wind power which has additionally undercut nuclear cost competitiveness in wholesale markets.
Prompted in part by concerns that China will overtake America in global AI military and economic leadership, the Trump administration proposes to bulldoze feckless Obama and Biden era green energy-hyped climate alarm-premised policy impediments to release growing backlogs of investment-backed data center proposals by reforming “power markets to align financial incentives with the goal of grid stability.”
Included are recommendations by the Federal Trade Commission to drop investigations begun under Biden Chair Lina Khan which “advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation” and have federal agencies establish exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act for data centers that reduce project permitting delays.
The Trump White House will also seek friendly congressional legislation to help prevent project delays and plan cancellations caused by endless environmental litigation and antitrust conflicts between OpenAI and Microsoft.
Corporate data center competition is already enormous, with Alphabet planning to spend some $75 billion this year, Meta investing between $64 billion and $72 billion, and OpenAI working with SoftBank and others on plans for a $500 billion project in the next four years.
Although it’s presently impossible to scale the amount of electricity needed to power America’s artificial-intelligence race, collective requests equal or surpass existing demands of many regional service baseload utility capacities my multiples.
American Electric Power (AEP), a big utility serving 11 U.S. states, sees an increase equivalent of enough to power at least 48 million homes, while Sempra’s Texas utility Oncor with a previous average data center interconnect request rate which required less than 100 megawatts of electricity is now up closer to 700 megawatts.
Oncor, which serves a swath of the Dallas-Fort Worth area including major markets for data centers and highly electrified West Texas oil field operations, had 552 requests from large customers in its queue by the end of June, up 30% from the end of March.
Together, American Electric Power and Oncor have received requests to connect data centers requiring nearly 400 gigawatts of electricity, amounting to more than half of the demand in the lower 48 states on two hot July days.
CenterPoint Energy, a utility serving the Houston area including a large industrial and medical base, has seen a huge electricity demand increase with interconnection requests for about 53 gigawatts of power, roughly 25 gigawatts of which are from data centers.
Another explosion of new hyperscale data centers in Northern Virginia will consume enormous amounts of power, some using as much as currently used to supply the city of Seattle.
Referred to as “Data Center Alley,” the area is home to about 150 data warehouses which support about 70% of global internet traffic through a spider web of crisscrossing power lines.
Amazon has reportedly enabled 19 solar farms in Virginia and is the world’s largest corporate renewable energy buyer.
Dominion Energy, which supplies electricity to most of the Virginia data centers, projects their power requirements to quadruple over the next 15 years, representing 40% of the utility’s demand in the entire state.
Utility companies face realities that not all these requests will pan out, thereby running risks that building too many power plants or transmission lines will leave other customers getting stuck with paying tabs for those infrastructure costs.
According to Labor department data, electricity prices across the county increased a whopping 5.5% over the past year, outpacing inflation.
Whereas U.S. electricity demand was flat for two decades until around 2020, its current rise of about 2% a year is largely attributable to AI operating power demands which can cause a search on a generative AI platform like ChatGPT to use huge amounts of computing power, at least 10 times the amount of energy as a Google search.
Meanwhile, as electricity demand by power data centers is projected to increase by 13% to 15%, compounded annually through 2030, an energy shortage is already delaying new centers by two to six years.
As Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie has warned, “The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down.”
We don’t have to rely on supersmart AI to warn us that this has been dumb policy that the Trump administration is finally changing.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read Larry Bell’s Reports — More Here.
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