If you've been following this newsletter, then the information in the Washington Post Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up. (3/7/2024) is unsurprising. Let's go over what they've said and fill in any gaps. Note that Substack does not enable me to indent past the first-level quote. Excerpts from previous posts will be highlighted with horizontal lines and a smaller header font.
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Data Centers
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.
This is the opening paragraph of the article. Two months ago, in Quick takes and random stuff, January 4, 2024 I had this to say:
More data centers, more energy
In Microsoft wants to acquire 200+ acres in Hebron and Union Township, Ohio (1/2/2024), we learn that this “Will bring company's total landholdings in Licking County close to 1,000 acres” and
According to Hebron's outgoing Mayor Jim Layton, Microsoft intends to develop six data center buildings on the parcels, each with between 50 and 75 employees and phased over around 10 years.
Data centers use a lot of energy. For example (6/8/2023),
According to a report released by Forbes back in 2017, data centers based in the United States alone utilized more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity that year. That much energy would require 34 massive coal-powered plants to generate at least 500 megawatts each to meet the power demands of said data centers. However, this figure pales compared to the amount of power needed to run data centers on a global scale, which amounts to 416 terawatts, or approximately 3% of all electricity generated on Earth. That is already a massive amount of power, and with the number of data centers in operation growing each year, power demands are only increasing as time goes on.
I keep bringing this up as a good example of our increasing demand for energy. It isn’t just that we want to move to wind and solar for our current energy needs; we also need to meet increasing demand. This is a tall order that will take longer than climate activists will acknowledge.
Data center energy demands are not new, and I frequently discuss new data center site purchases in Quick Takes. Although the Washington Post story focuses on the United States, the remark above emphasizes that this is a worldwide issue.
Energy transition and electric cars
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.
There appears to be a significant misperception about this so-called energy shift. Last week's piece, World energy consumption, revealed that, while solar and wind power have increased, coal, oil, and natural gas are being used more frequently. Here's the coal graph from that post.
In the U.S., we have set records for oil production, which you will find in the Peak oil and U.S. oil production (2/6/2024) post. Here is the oil production graph from that post. Note that the increases since 2010 are all due to shale oil.
The Washington Post article says more about cars with this statement.
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.
In What will it take to run the U.S. on electricity? (11/21/2023) I did a rough estimate of the electricity demands to move our fleet to all electric vehicles. Here is the key graph from that post.
Yes, cars will need a lot of extra electricity (red section on the right). We have some airports already concerned about charging their rental cars, while moving trucks to all electric is far worse.
Transmission line issues
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.
In Quick takes and random stuff, February 29, 2024 I reported on work from Robert Bryce concerning transmission lines. It isn’t just that we need more transmission lines; they are also more expensive to build. Here is the section from February 29.
Transmission lines
In order to move all of our energy to electricity, there seems to be good evidence that we need to invest a whole lot of money into transmission lines. We aren’t doing enough right now, so this is a limitation for wind and solar. Robert Bryce is worth reading, and he goes into detail on this issue.
Here is an excerpt from this post:
The math here is so simple even a Ph.D. could do it. Jenkins claims the U.S. must build 75,000 miles of transmission in 10 years, or 7,500 miles per year. But there’s no precedent — none — for adding that much capacity. Indeed, constructing that much new transmission would require a four-fold increase in the average number of line miles built annually since 2008. Furthermore, that pace of new capacity would have to be sustained for a decade.
The hard truth about the alt-energy/net-zero/energy transition hype is that almost no one — including Doerr, DOE, Jenkins, reporters at big media outlets, pundits, and others — has bothered to do the math. They did not calculate how much transmission we are building every year or how long it may take to achieve significant expansions of the power grid. In other words, it’s easy to talk about adding transmission capacity. But building high-power lines is hard. Really hard. And the cost of building them is soaring.
Always remember that reality doesn’t care much about one’s beliefs. Electrifying everything isn’t happening any time soon or possibly ever, no matter how much the media hypes electric cars or the last wind installment.
Manufacturing
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.
Again, from my article, What will it take to run the U.S. on electricity? (11/21/2023)
Commercial building and manufacturing
From EIA 2018 data we find that (table B19) there are 5.9 million commercial building in the U.S. In the sample of 4,901 buildings, 83% used a form of fossil fuel for heating. We would need to convert about 4.9 million commercial buildings, of various sizes, to eclectic heating. We’ll be generous and use the 5,474 kWh for home heat pumps to get another 26,806,178,000. This 27 billion kWh has to be a large underestimate. Beyond heating, their is manufacturing in general.
Here is an example of a new semiconductor plant to be built in Syracuse, NY. From Syracuse.com
When fully built, the complex of four chip fabs would use 640 million kilowatt-hours a month, more than enough for 1 million average New York homes.
In other words, this one plant will require about 7.7 billion kWh per year. From IBIS World (because that is what I found easily), there were 628,334 manufacturing businesses in the U.S. in 2022. I’m guessing that they all don’t use 7.7 billion kWh per year. I’m not sure how to estimate this, but we must be talking about values in the trillion kWh per year range.
This isn’t an issue of just new electricity needs but also converting current manufacturing to electricity.
Conclusions
The report concentrates on data centers, cryptocurrency mining, and minor issues like new manufacturing, transmission line construction, and airport auto charging, but it appears to miss the majority of the overall picture. The mainstream media and climate activists aren't ready to accept that electrifying everything would require three to four times more electricity in the United States, assuming little extra demand. According to the Washington Post, we are already struggling to fulfill new data center electrical demands. This is only for the United States; electrifying the entire world is much more difficult. Meanwhile, the globe continues to consume more fossil fuels.
Net zero won't happen anytime soon. In fact, it is hard to see how the world can reduce CO2 emissions by 50% without a serious reduction in energy consumption, which would mean a lower standard of living. This brings me back to the need for adaptation. That does not mean we should abandon efforts to cut emissions, but it does acknowledge that it is considerably more difficult than most people want to realize.
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Disagreeing and using comments
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