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Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said the
revised forecast for power needs in Georgia showed power use in the state increasing 17 times. New demand, not total demand, is projected to
increase 17 times. The article also misspelled the name of the agency that advocates for Maryland ratepayers. It is the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel. The article has been corrected.
Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with
the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times
what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in
that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power
plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction.
Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice
out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their
own power plants.
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw,
chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates
electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in
this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large
warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more
power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft
are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-
known firms are also on the hunt.
The proliferation of crypto-mining, in which currencies like bitcoin are transacted and minted, is also driving data center growth. It is all
putting new pressures on an overtaxed grid - the network of transmission
lines and power stations that move electricity around the country.
Bottlenecks are mounting, leaving both new generators of energy,
particularly clean energy, and large consumers facing growing wait times
for hookups.
The situation is sparking battles across the nation over who will pay for
new power supplies, with regulators worrying that residential ratepayers
could be stuck with the bill for costly upgrades. It also threatens to
stifle the transition to cleaner energy, as utility executives lobby to
delay the retirement of fossil fuel plants and bring more online. The
power crunch imperils their ability to supply the energy that will be
needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.
The nation’s 2,700 data centers sapped more than 4 percent of the
country’s total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and
smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.
Data center operators are clamoring to hook up to regional electricity
grids at the same time the Biden administration’s industrial policy is
luring companies to build factories in the United States at a pace not
seen in decades. That includes manufacturers of “clean tech,” such as
solar panels and electric car batteries, which are being enticed by
lucrative federal incentives. Companies announced plans to build or expand
more than 155 factories in this country during the first half of the Biden administration, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a
research and development organization. Not since the early 1990s has factory-building accounted for such a large share of U.S. construction spending, according to the group.
Utility projections for the amount of power they will need over the next
five years have nearly doubled and are expected to grow, according to a
review of regulatory filings by the research firm Grid Strategies.
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Chasing power
In the past, companies tried to site their data centers in areas with
major internet infrastructure, a large pool of tech talent, and attractive government incentives. But these locations are getting tapped out.
Communities that had little connection to the computing industry now find themselves in the middle of a land rush, with data center developers
flooding their markets with requests for grid hookups. Officials in
Columbus, Ohio; Altoona, Iowa; and Fort Wayne, Ind. are being aggressively courted by data center developers. But power supply in some of these second-choice markets is already running low, pushing developers ever
farther out, in some cases into cornfields, according to JLL, a commercial
real estate firm that serves the tech industry.
Grid Strategies warns in its report that “there are real risks some
regions may miss out on economic development opportunities because the
grid can’t keep up.”
“Across the board, we are seeing power companies say, ‘We don’t know if we
can handle this; we have to audit our system; we’ve never dealt with this
kind of influx before,’” said Andy Cvengros, managing director of data
center markets at JLL. “Everyone is now chasing power. They are willing to
look everywhere for it.”
“We saw a quadrupling of land values in some parts of Columbus, and a
tripling in areas of Chicago,” he said. “It’s not about the land. It is
about access to power.” Some developers, he said, have had to sell the
property they bought at inflated prices at a loss, after utilities became overwhelmed by the rush for grid hookups.
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Rethinking incentives
It is all happening at the same time the energy transition is steering
large numbers of Americans to rely on the power grid to fuel vehicles,
heat pumps, induction stoves and all manner of other household appliances
that previously ran on fossil fuels. A huge amount of clean energy is also needed to create the green hydrogen championed by the White House, as developers rush to build plants that can produce the powerful zero-
emissions fuel, lured by generous federal subsidies.
Planners are increasingly concerned that the grid won’t be green enough or powerful enough to meet these demands.
Already, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in
Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina.
In Georgia, the state’s major power company, Georgia Power, stunned
regulators when it revealed recently how wildly off its projections were, pointing to data centers as the main culprit.
The demand has Georgia officials rethinking the state’s policy of offering incentives to lure computing operations, which generate few jobs but can
boost community budgets through the hefty property taxes they pay. The top leaders of Georgia’s House and Senate, both Republicans, are championing a pause in data center incentives.
Georgia regulators, meanwhile, are exploring how to protect ratepayers
while ensuring there is enough power to meet the needs of the state’s most-prized new tenants: clean-technology companies. Factories supplying
the electric vehicle and green-energy markets have been rushing to locate
in Georgia in large part on promises of cheap, reliable electricity.
When the data center industry began looking for new hubs, “Atlanta was
like, ‘Bring it on,’” said Pat Lynch, who leads the Data Center Solutions
team at real estate giant CBRE. “Now Georgia Power is warning of
limitations. ... Utility shortages in the face of these data center
demands are happening in almost every market.”
A similar dynamic is playing out in a very different region: the Pacific Northwest. In Oregon, Portland General Electric recently doubled its
forecast for new electricity demand over the next five years, citing data centers and “rapid industrial growth” as the drivers.
That power crunch threw a wrench into the plans of Michael Halaburda and
Arman Khalili, longtime data center developers whose latest project
involves converting a mothballed tile factory in the Portland area. The
two were under the impression only a couple of months ago that they would
have no problem getting the electricity they needed to run the place. Then
the power company alerted them that it would need to do a “line and load
study” to assess whether it could supply the facility with 60 megawatts of electricity - roughly the amount needed to power 45,000 homes.
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Going off the grid
The Portland project Halaburda and Khalili are developing will now be
powered in large part by off-the-grid, high-tech fuel cells that convert natural gas into low-emissions electricity. The technology will be
supplemented by whatever power can be secured from the grid. The partners decided that on their next project, in South Texas, they’re not going to
take their chances with the grid at all. Instead, they will drill
thousands of feet into the ground to draw geothermal energy.
Halaburda sees the growth as good for the country and the economy. “But no
one took into consideration where this is all going,” he said. “In the
next couple of years, unless there is a real focus on expanding the grid
and making it more robust, we are going to see opportunities fall by the wayside because we can’t get power to where it is needed.”
Companies are increasingly turning to such off-the-grid experiments as
their frustration with the logjam in the nation’s traditional electricity network mounts. Microsoft and Google are among the firms hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site, with Microsoft even putting AI to work trying to streamline the burdensome process of getting plants approved. Microsoft
has also inked a deal to buy power from a company trying to develop zero- emissions fusion power. But going off the grid brings its own big
regulatory and land acquisition challenges. The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United
States. Fusion power does not yet exist.
The big tech companies are also exploring ways AI can help make the grid operate more efficiently. And they are developing platforms that during
times of peak power demand “can shift compute tasks and their associated
energy consumption to the times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid,” according to Google. But meeting both their zero- emissions pledges and their AI innovation ambitions is becoming
increasingly complicated as the energy needs of their data centers grow.
“These problems are not going to go away,” said Michael Ortiz, CEO of
Layer 9 Data Centers, a U.S. company that is looking to avoid the logjam
here by building in Mexico. “Data centers are going to have to become more efficient, and we need to be using more clean sources of efficient energy,
like nuclear.”
Officials at Equinix, one of the world’s largest data center companies,
said they have been experimenting with fuel cells as backup power, but
they remain hopeful they can keep the power grid as their main source of electricity for new projects.
The logjam is already pushing officials overseeing the clean-energy
transition at some of the nation’s largest airports to look beyond the
grid. The amount of energy they will need to charge fleets of electric
rental vehicles and ground maintenance trucks alone is immense. An
analysis shows electricity demand doubling by 2030 at both the Denver and Minneapolis airports. By 2040, they will need more than triple the
electricity they are using now, according to the study, commissioned by
car rental giant Enterprise, Xcel Energy and Jacobs, a consulting firm.
“Utilities are not going to be able to move quickly enough to provide all
this capacity,” said Christine Weydig, vice president of transportation at AlphaStruxure, which designs and operates clean-energy projects. “The infrastructure is not there. Different solutions will be needed.”
Airports, she said, are looking into dramatically expanding the use of clean-power “microgrids” they can build on-site.
The Biden administration has made easing the grid bottleneck a priority,
but it is a politically fraught process, and federal powers are limited. Building the transmission lines and transfer stations needed involves huge
land acquisitions, exhaustive environmental reviews and negotiations to determine who should pay what costs.
The process runs through state regulatory agencies, and fights between
states over who gets stuck with the bill and where power lines should go routinely sink and delay proposed projects. The amount of new transmission
line installed in the United States has dropped sharply since 2013, when
4,000 miles were added. Now, the nation struggles to bring online even
1,000 new miles a year. The slowdown has real consequences not just for companies but for the climate. A group of scientists led by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins warned in a report that by 2030 the
United States risks losing out on 80 percent of the potential emission reductions from President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, if the pace of transmission construction does not pick up dramatically now.
While the proliferation of data centers puts more pressure on states to
approve new transmission lines, it also complicates the task. Officials in Maryland, for example, are protesting a plan for $5.2 billion in
infrastructure that would transmit power to huge data centers in Loudoun County, Va. The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, a government agency
that advocates for ratepayers, called grid operator PJM’s plan
“fundamentally unfair,” arguing it could leave Maryland utility customers paying for power transmission to data centers that Virginia aggressively courted and is leveraging for a windfall in tax revenue.
Tensions over who gets power from the grid and how it gets to them are
only going to intensify as the supply becomes scarcer.
In Texas, a dramatic increase in data centers for crypto mining is
touching off a debate over whether they are a costly drain on an overtaxed grid. An analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the
energy needed by crypto operations aiming to link to the grid would equal
a quarter of the electricity used in the state at peak demand. Unlike data centers operated by big tech companies such as Google and Meta, crypto
miners generally don’t build renewable-energy projects with the aim of supplying enough zero-emissions energy to the grid to cover their
operations.
The result, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who authored the Wood Mackenzie
analysis, is that crypto’s drain on the grid threatens to inhibit the
ability of Texas to power other energy-hungry operations that could drive innovation and economic growth, such as factories that produce zero-
emissions green hydrogen fuel or industrial charging depots that enable electrification of truck and bus fleets.
But after decades in which power was readily available, regulators and
utility executives across the country generally are not empowered to
prioritize which projects get connected. It is first come, first served.
And the line is growing longer. To answer the call, some states have
passed laws to protect crypto mining’s access to huge amounts of power.
“Lawmakers need to think about this,” Hertz-Shargel said of allocating an increasingly limited supply of power. “There is a risk that strategic industries they want in their states are going to have a challenging time setting up in those places.
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Graphics:
https://washingtonpost.com/documents/2ac97e07-243d-4a1a-9d52-
f66469ea65c1.pdf
https://washingtonpost.com/documents/c55e319a-da69-475f-88b9-
dcd4408fec99.pdf
https://washingtonpost.com/documents/c7d03a95-032e-41bf-9a86-
c22f37c24630.pdf
https://washingtonpost.com/documents/26bfcb07-baba-47d2-b9ab-
503da39b0678.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-centers-power/
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