Artificial intelligence, data centers and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s aging power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.
Updated: 33 minutes agoVast 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.
“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.”
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 Amazon plans to build a data center on this land it purchased in Warrenton, Va. Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post
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. 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 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.
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.