TEXAS: Demand on the Texas power grid is expected to expand so immensely that it would take the equivalent of adding 30 nuclear plants’ worth of electricity by 2030 to meet the needs.
That’s according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid.
The forecast is based on the addition of new data centres needed to power artificial intelligence.
And it’s raising concerns about whether infrastructure in the state will be able to expand fast enough and at what cost.
Coming out of the pandemic, electricity demand on the Texas grid was already growing faster than anywhere else in the country.
Now that’s being supercharged by artificial intelligence, with the state vying to become the data-centre hub of the country, if not the world.
Individual projects are already starting to request 1GW of power and they pose new risks to maintaining a stable grid, said Agee Springer, Ercot’s senior manager of grid interconnections.
A gigawatt is typically enough to power 250,000 homes in Texas.
The data centres “present a reliability risk to the Ercot system,” said Springer, who spoke on a panel at Infocast’s ERCOT Market Summit in Austin.
“We’ve never existed in a place where large industrial loads can really impact the reliability of the grid, and now we are stepping into that world.”
Risk of Grid Stress Ercot said it’s gotten requests equal to 99GW for new connections to the grid from big power users, including data centers, bitcoin miners and hydrogen producers, according to an internal grid presentation last Thursday.
That’s up from 40.8GW last March. The state grid is projecting that peak power demand will jump by 75% by 2030 from the current record of 85.5GW.
The outlook was recently revised up sharply to factor in data centres on top of strong demand from the electrification of the economy.
“There can’t be any more demand than there is supply,” said Beth Garza, a senior fellow at think tank R Street Institute.
Infrastructure Needs There’s a big question as to whether infrastructure can be built fast enough because of supply chain issues, resulting in long wait times for things like big turbines to produce electricity and other key equipment such as transformers.
Another critical issue is who is going to pay for all of this build out.
Data centres make money until power prices reach about US$2,000 a megawatt-hour, but the price cap from Ercot is US$5,000, Resmi Surendran, vice-president of regulatory policy at Shell Energy North America, said on a panel at the summit in Austin.
It’s unclear whether data centers are willing to be flexible, but she noted that such ability to ramp and down in response to price signals – known as demand response – could help solve significant problems. —Bloomberg
