From The New York Times:
We Can Get the Electricity We Need Without Frying the Planet (or Our Pocketbooks)
We need utilities to succeed now more than ever before. But the definition of success needs to evolve.
Electric utilities from Georgia to Wisconsin to Virginia are predicting a dizzying surge in power demand from new industrial facilities, electric vehicles and, most of all, the data centers that store our digital photos and will enable large-language models for artificial intelligence. For months now, they have been signaling that they won't be able to keep up.
To keep the lights on, many utility companies are proposing to build dozens of new power plants that burn natural gas. North Carolina-based Duke Energy alone wants to add 8.9 gigawatts of new gas-fired capacity — more than the entire country added in 2023. Using their own projections of soaring energy demands as justification, these companies are also pushing back on the climate targets set by their states and the Biden administration.
If state regulators sign off on these plans, they will be gambling with our country's future. We need to electrify everything from cars to appliances to slow climate change, but we won't be able to reach our climate goals if we power all of those machines with dirty energy.
There is a better way. But to get there, legislators will need to overhaul the incentives driving utilities to double down on natural gas, so that they can turn a profit without cooking the planet...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/opinion/electricity-demand-surging.html?smid=em-share
We Can Get the Electricity We Need Without Frying the Planet (or Our Pocketbooks)
We need utilities to succeed now more than ever before. But the definition of success needs to evolve.
Electric utilities from Georgia to Wisconsin to Virginia are predicting a dizzying surge in power demand from new industrial facilities, electric vehicles and, most of all, the data centers that store our digital photos and will enable large-language models for artificial intelligence. For months now, they have been signaling that they won't be able to keep up.
To keep the lights on, many utility companies are proposing to build dozens of new power plants that burn natural gas. North Carolina-based Duke Energy alone wants to add 8.9 gigawatts of new gas-fired capacity — more than the entire country added in 2023. Using their own projections of soaring energy demands as justification, these companies are also pushing back on the climate targets set by their states and the Biden administration.
If state regulators sign off on these plans, they will be gambling with our country's future. We need to electrify everything from cars to appliances to slow climate change, but we won't be able to reach our climate goals if we power all of those machines with dirty energy.
There is a better way. But to get there, legislators will need to overhaul the incentives driving utilities to double down on natural gas, so that they can turn a profit without cooking the planet...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/opinion/electricity-demand-surging.html?smid=em-share
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