US power grids aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with the sudden rise in electricity demand from AI. Data center developers are forging ahead anyway, adding their own gas turbines and fuel cells.
[The Wall Street Journal]
It’s supporting new solar and wind farms across Greece, Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Romania that are supposed to add 650 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to local power grids.
The company also shared that its suppliers jointly launched a new $150 million investment fund to support renewable energy infrastructure in China.
That’s according to a recent Bloomberg analysis of wholesale electricity prices across the US, which has more data centers than any other country.
There are other factors aside from speculative electricity demand from data centers that are pushing up prices. Updating aging grids with new power lines and recovering from climate disasters is also costly.
A federal judge lifted the stop-work order the Trump administration issued in August for the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. The project was already permitted and 80 percent complete, but Trump hates wind turbines and his administration claims it’s concerned about potential national security risks with the project.
Both Trump and Biden have sought to build up a domestic supply chain for uranium to lessen dependency on Russian imports and meet growing data center electricity demand with nuclear energy.
Along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Wright previously sat on the board of a company called Oklo that’s developing advanced nuclear reactors.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other polluting sites. The proposed rule change comes as the Trump administration attempts to get rid of the agency’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution at all.
[The New York Times]
It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated Jon Batiste’s hometown of New Orleans. We now know that climate change made warm ocean temperatures that fueled the storm more likely and increased its maximum sustained wind speed.
“The weather patterns are shifting. Nobody wants that. And we know what the solution is. There’s an overwhelming majority of people that believe in clean energy,” Batiste says in an interview about his new song Petrichor.
There’s plenty of disinformation trying to blame the nascent offshore wind industry for whale deaths without evidence. Not only is that misleading, it also takes the focus away from solutions that might actually address the leading causes of death — vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear.
Trump’s tariffs on solar panels — with 80-plus percent coming from China — are complicating the affordability equation in the US, but record low prices due to overproduction is good news for the rest of world bent on switching to clean energies.
Solar panels’ price dropped to 8.7 cents per watt on July 2, the lowest level based on comparable data going back to 2011.
So it’s no surprise Meta is supporting a new solar farm in South Carolina that’ll provide power for the first data center the tech company is building in the state. Developers also have to race to take advantage of Biden-era tax credits for renewables before they expire, a victim of Republicans’ big spending bill.
In local battles over who foots the bill for new energy infrastructure, it’s about “power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense,” Ivan Penn and Karen Weise write for the The New York Times.
[The New York Times]
A small city in Kentucky is ground zero for plans to bring uranium enrichment back to the US so nuclear energy can power AI.
The agency was already working on designing a reactor that might one day provide people with electricity on the moon. The Trump administration wants to try to speed things up and build a bigger reactor, Politico reports.
[politico.com]
The Trump administration wants to build data center projects on Superfund sites, and with as little oversight as possible.
Big Tech has turned to everything from nuclear reactors to coal mines to get enough power to run new data centers demanded by the pivot to AI, but utility companies want to make sure they’re not stuck footing the bill.
They’re increasingly demanding that tech giants sign longer electricity contracts and commit to paying for surplus power regardless of whether they use it, to avoid the extra infrastructure costs ending up on consumers’ energy bills.
Plans are in place to revive a shuttered plant in Kentucky. The Trump administration and Big Tech are trying to revitalize the nuclear energy industry to meet growing electricity demand from AI data centers.
It’s part of the company’s new push to support the development of technologies that can store renewable energy for longer periods of time than lithium-ion batteries. It’s the kind of thing that might be able to help Google meet growing data center energy demands and maybe even stop its fossil fuel emissions from continuing to rise.
Google is partnering with the company Energy Dome that uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy in the form of pressure and heat.
[energy-storage.news]
It saw a 6 percent rise in planet-heating pollution last year, according to the company’s latest sustainability report. As it expands data centers for AI, Amazon is moving further away from a goal it set in 2019 to reach net zero carbon emissions.
“One of the biggest challenges with scaling AI is increased energy demands for data centers,” Amazon’s sustainability report says.
Stats released Monday showed that in 2023, the state’s estimated annual clean energy percentage (energy produced from nuclear, large hydro, and renewable sources like solar or wind) crossed the two-thirds mark, exceeding the previous record of 64 percent in 2019 and 61 percent in 2022.
The state has also been on a record pace of adding more clean energy capacity over the last few years, although Trump’s recently passed budget bill is adding some hurdles for future projects.
The bill quickly sunsets incentives that Congress approved in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that was expected to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent from peak levels by 2030. On top of more pollution, wholesale electricity prices could also increase by 25 percent by 2030 as a result of the bill, according to one initial analysis
The bill now heads to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
The US is rich with oil and gas so that’s how the Trump administration sees the world. China, lacking those same resources, now dominates solar and battery production. The New York Times explores the winners and losers of these competing strategies, but I think you can guess which country is best positioned to capitalize on future demand.
