Data center expansion is a major part of the power industry’s return to demand growth around the country, and the United States Energy Association hosted a webinar June 5 with industry leaders on how the sector’s growth will play out. 

NERC for years forecast flat growth nationally, but that changed last year in part because of data center expansion to meet new computing needs from artificial intelligence. CEO Jim Robb said he expects growth will be even higher in the next long-term assessment. (See NERC: Growing Demand, Shifting Supply Mix Add to Reliability Risks.) 

Growing demand makes ensuring resource adequacy more of an issue, but the scope of specific data centers can lead to challenges for the grid. 

“We’ve seen and heard reports of interconnection requests on the order of 1 to 1.5 GW,” Robb said. “And to put that in perspective, a gigawatt is about the entire load of the city of San Francisco. So, these are very, very large loads that are seeking to interconnect, and they’re not diverse, right? So as load is either on or off, that has potential to create stability issues for the grid.” 

AI uses much more energy than a normal Google search, but over time, the difference should shrink because Nvidia, which manufactures much of the hardware for AI, is expecting its next generation of chips to use less power, Robb said. 

“Algorithms will also get better over time,” Robb said. “We saw this with the internet when the internet was first coming into broad scale adoption in the ’90s and early 2000s. We had similar concerns around electricity demand that largely didn’t actually occur because the chips got better. The algorithms got better. We will see something similar happen with the AI chips as well.” 

Data centers are very important to modern civilization, and while they do consumer a lot of power, they provide major benefits, said Christopher Wellise of Equinix, which builds data centers around the world. 

“They do operate … 24/7/365, supporting a whole wide range of essential services, from the life-saving work in hospitals, to first responders, to powering global financial markets, managing food and pharmaceutical production, and so on,” Wellise said. “Not to mention, of course, entertainment, communication and all the other things … that folks rely upon.” 

Some in the data center industry are putting multiple facilities at one site, and those can get up to 4 or 5 GW of demand, said Daniel Brooks, vice president of integrated grid and energy systems at the Electric Power Research Institute. (See EPRI: Clean Energy, Efficiency Can Meet AI, Data Center Power Demand.) 

“That’s a significant requirement in terms of additional supply and delivery capacity that has to be planned and permitted and constructed,” Brooks said. “And the timelines for the development of the data centers themselves are on the order of … one to two, maybe three years.” 

It takes longer than that to actually get new supply and new power lines sited, permitted and built: three to five years for a new gas turbine. Transmission can take even longer, he added. 

Natural gas is going to be part of the grid for the near term; whether that is defined as five to 10 years or 15 to 20 is anyone’s guess, said Dan Brouillette, president of the Edison Electric Institute. 

“I don’t suggest to you that that’s what utilities want,” Brouillette said. “That’s just what is required by the physics of the problems that we’re facing today. There’s no way to stabilize the grid today without the use of some firm baseload power, and that includes natural gas. So, I think that you know, as I see it here, fully decarbonizing the grid, fully decarbonizing electricity production in the United States, it’s probably not going to happen by 2030.” 

Even getting it done by 2035 is ambitious, but Brouillette said utilities would continue to “make every effort.” 

While demand from data centers is a growing issue, the industry has dealt with huge spikes from specific facilities in the past, especially at the start of the Cold War, when nuclear weapons production was ramping up, Brouillette added. Those manufacturing facilities consumed 10% of the electricity in the country. 

The issue “boils down to a question of political will” and whether the facilities can be permitted, he added.