Artificial intelligence puts the US electrical grid at risk

The utility industry watchdog says the increase in electricity demand could pose a problem for grid reliability across the United States and Canada as utilities have been slow to make needed improvements. The North American Electricity Reliability Foundation said in a new report that demand for electricity is growing faster than ever over the past two decades at the same time that more than 115 gigawatts of coal-burning capacity is scheduled to be retired in the next 10 years. . the Financial Times Firstly Covered Report.

“We are witnessing a period of profound change,” said John Mora, director of reliability evaluation at NERC. The report estimates that peak summer demand will rise by 15%, or 132 gigawatts, in the next decade. This is a significant increase compared to the 80 gigawatts that NERC estimated in last year’s report, which the organization of course attributes to the rapid construction of data centers to power artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining, as well as the emergence of electric cars and heat pumps. Peak winter demand is expected to rise by 149 GW in the next decade, or 18%, versus the previous estimate of 92 GW.

As everyone knows, infrastructure projects in the United States move at a very slow pace, and it is no surprise then that the current electrical grid was not designed to handle a world where everything runs on batteries. Peak demand may have previously meant the times of day when everyone was home, with some lights and the TV on. But now when many people return home, they will plug in their cars to charge their huge battery pack. Or they may have a heat pump that can draw a lot of energy to heat and cool the home, a recent estimate from Energy Sage A typical heat pump in a typical home was found to use 5,475 kilowatt-hours per year. They estimate that this is enough electricity to power nine full-sized refrigerators over the course of a year, or to power a Tesla Model 3 for 15,000 miles. In order to accommodate all this demand pressing on the grid, power generation must increase, but power lines and transformers must also be modernized.

Although tech companies like Meta and OpenAI have been investing Widely used in new AI data centers While it still has a ways to go to prove its utility, one potential benefit of this boom is that there is renewed interest in bringing back nuclear power. Currently, solar and wind capacity is insufficient to meet requirements, and most grids do not have battery packs to store energy for later use. There is hope among those in technology that it is time to return to nuclear power as a clean, abundant source of energy. They also suggested locating data centers next to nuclear plants to avoid stress on the grid.

However, nuclear power is not ideal, as the waste must be stored somewhere, usually deep underground, and it can take a very long time to decompose. It is also still unclear whether the general population has forgotten past disasters and is willing to have nuclear reactors near their homes.

In the past, a potential solution offered to the grid problem was to use electric cars themselves to power homes when the grid experienced peak demand, or to send power from the car to the grid itself. However, two-way systems have not been widely adopted by automakers or electric utilities.

Impulse Labs, a startup developing a new induction cooktop, has built a battery into the product that can help quickly reach high temperatures using electricity (i.e. to cook pizza) and can also be used for Store a temporary buffer of energy So that not all families are trying to access the network at the same time. The idea is that the battery will be slowly charged by the grid over the course of a day, and then households will draw electricity from that battery as needed. Impulse Labs believes Tesla’s Powerwall, a stationary home battery, has not been widely adopted because it is expensive and appeals largely to doomsday preppers. By building a battery into a standard home appliance, Impulse believes it has found a back-end way to address the network issue.

The National Center for Energy Research warns that under current conditions, shortages in energy capacity could cause reserve supply to fall below required levels in nearly every jurisdiction across the United States within the decade. “Most of the North American (bulk power system) faces increasing resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years as demand continues to grow and thermal generators announce plans to retire.”