data centers

The Dark Clouds on America’s Housing and Electricity Horizon

April 19, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Not as dark as an eclipse, but two dark clouds, under-mentioned by politicians, are forming on America’s horizon. They are the housing crisis and the growing threat of electricity shortages.

The housing crisis hasn’t caught fire as the issue one would have expected it to be among politicians. Electricity shortages are awkward for President Biden because he has staked his reputation on electrifying the country with alternative energy.

Neither the housing crisis nor the electricity challenge has garnered high recognition in the presidential election. Biden has touched on the housing crisis, and former president Donald Trump has denigrated alternative energy. Both are complex issues and need urgent attention. And both defy simple, declarative political statements, which may be why they are lying there, untouched but with lethality.

Housing hurts in obvious ways, including homelessness, a reduction in the birthrate and a freeze on the mobility of labor, once one of the great economic strengths of the United States. Where there was work, workers went.

Less so during the current housing crunch: When Americans cannot find housing where the work is, they won’t move. The consequence: European-type labor immobility.

Another consequence is that if the free movement of workers and their families stops, it contributes to the splintering of America: The New South goes back to being the Old South, and the rigidity of elitism in the North hardens. The East Coast and the West Coast start to think differently: the East Coast looking to Europe and the West Coast looking to Asia. Those developments aren’t good for the body politic. Intra-nationalism is a challenge to a country of continental dimension.

For those lucky enough to have shelter, nothing delivered to it is more important than electricity. We can do without pizza delivery, mail delivery and telephone service, but we can’t survive without electricity.

If it is extremely hot for months, as it was last summer in some regions, people die. Around Phoenix, according to Arizona data, more than 500 people died of heat-related causes.

In Texas, during Ice Storm Uri in 2021, 246 people froze to death by official count. Try to imagine those people, including children, freezing to death in their homes in America!

The homeless die all the time from exposure.

A chorus of voices, led by the American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, has been sounding the electricity alarm for several years. However, the crisis continues to form because there is no quick fix for electricity generation and transmission any more than for housing development.

Demand is rising because of a national movement to electrify everything, especially transportation, and the growth of data centers. Rudy Garza, president of CPS Energy, the municipally owned natural gas and electric utility in San Antonio, said eight data centers are planned there and “20 more waiting in the wings.”

Utilities don’t say no. They have a history of planning for demand, but the end of that may be in sight if the data center demand, fed by artificial intelligence, continues to grow. While national electricity growth is about 2 percent annually, it is 3 percent in high-growth areas like San Antonio and around Dallas.

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, northeast of Dallas, said his area is experiencing explosive growth in demand of 3 percent or more yearly without yet accommodating data-center growth, although that is coming.

Technology will help solve the future of housing with better construction techniques. Also, while national standards would give new housing a boost, the core of the problem remains local ordinances and resistance in the suburbs and other “desirable” areas.

Some of the same not-where-we-live attitude frustrates utilities in moving renewable energy from the sunny and windy areas — mainly in the West — to where it is needed.

The not-where-we-live syndrome is stunting America’s future growth. In housing, the crunch is here. In electricity, it is coming.

Texas Utility Exemplifies Struggle With Surging Demand

April 13, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Electric utilities are doing something that is equivalent to a person changing clothes without ever getting naked.

They can’t shut down while they switch out old plants for new; they can’t turn off the lights while they retool. They must try to modernize without the communities they serve being affected by so much as a flicker.

What is called “the world’s largest machine” — the coordinated operation of the nation’s 3,000 electric utilities — must hum 24/7 while replacing old polluting plants with new less-polluting plants and adding tranches of renewable power, primarily wind and solar.

I have been watching this feat of changing in place at CPS Energy, the municipally owned electric and natural gas utility in San Antonio. And, I have been following its president and CEO, Rudy D. Garza.

It is a utility with all the stresses now faced by utilities: growing demand, pressure to retire fossil fuel plants and preparing for the onslaught of demand from data centers, driven by the need for more computing for artificial intelligence and other computing needs.

Underlying all of these challenges in San Antonio, as elsewhere, is the need to control the increase in consumer bills. Garza told me with pride that despite the pressures, CPS Energy still has among the lowest electricity rates in the country.

Some in the environmental community may have balked at the company’s recent announcement that the utility was buying two large gas turbine plants in Corpus Christi and one smaller unit used for peaking in Laredo from Talen Energy, which is emerging from bankruptcy. The deal is worth $785 million and will provide CPS Energy with a whopping 1,710 megawatts of power.

Garza told me that CPS Energy will spend additional money on bringing the purchased plants up to its operating standards and preparing them for continuous use. Talen Energy, a power merchant, used them intermittently.

The purchases will enable the utility to shut down so-called steam gas plants. These older gas-fired units don’t use modern, super-efficient turbines but operate like coal-fired plants with a boiler and a lot of wasted heat. Garza said this would reduce air pollution in San Antonio. CPS Energy is also planning to retire coal generation on an accelerated schedule.

Although CPS Energy may not be able to get off of gas entirely, it is a leader in clean energy. It is, Garza said, the largest solar generator in Texas and the second-largest wind user. It has added 50 MW of battery storage and is seeking up to 500 MW of new storage.

Out with the old and in with the new.

This includes the rising electricity demand, which is growing at a rate of 3 percent, and the looming need of data centers. The demand, fed by artificial intelligence, is incalculable and growing exponentially.

Garza said, “The wild card is how quickly these larger loads that are coming to the area get connected to the system. We’ve got eight of these (data centers) on the ground right now in San Antonio with 20 more waiting in the wings.”

Some data centers, Garza said, will need their own backup generation. Although outages are rare on the CPS Energy system, he said the 24/7 needs of the centers are such that the larger ones will have to have their own emergency backup.

CPS Energy isn’t alone in dealing with data centers. It is a challenge faced by utilities nationwide. Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, the UK chip development company, part of Japan’s SoftBank, has described the need for electricity by AI as “insatiable.” A former U.S. secretary of energy told me it is scary and underestimated.

CPS Energy is looking at ways of accommodating the data centers and is at the forefront of new ways of generating. It is collaborating with Joint Base San Antonio — the giant military installation that sits in the center of the CPS Energy service area — to explore the potential for carbon-free solutions. CPS Energy is also looking into geothermal, particularly efficiencies that can be attained with fracking technology, which has changed the oil and gas outlook.

This creativity, which is part of the electric evolution in San Antonio, is taking place across the country. Like changing clothes without getting naked, it is a challenge.

The Dark Ahead: Crisis Building in the U.S. Electricity System

March 23, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

There is a gathering storm over the nation’s electric supply.

What has been described as the world’s biggest machine, the U.S. electricity system, is stressed — and that stress will increasingly affect reliability. That means sporadic blackouts, some extensive. While the nation won’t be plunged into total darkness, regional difficulties will occur, according to the industry’s own watchdog group, the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

There are nearly 3,000 electric utilities in the United States, and what is known as the grid is, in fact, three grids: the Eastern, the Western and Texas. The first two interconnect and flow power back and forth where possible, but Texas is separate — and not subject to the regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

There are three classifications of electric utilities: the big investor-owned companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, ConEd and the operating units of the giant Southern Co.; the 2,000 public power companies, usually municipally owned, and a few, like TVA, federal government-owned; and the rural electric cooperatives, which can be quite large or very small. Together, they operate the grids in surprising harmony and collegial cooperation.

The price of electricity is rising faster than inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration — a sure sign of building pressure on the companies. The causes of this stress are many. First, there is more demand for electricity across the board. That demand is rising about 2 percent a year, and the increase may accelerate after 2026.

Contributing to the demand is the proliferation of data centers and their huge appetite for electricity — an appetite now fed by artificial intelligence and its increasing use everywhere.

Then there is the effect of environmentally driven demand: switching heavy industry from using fossil fuels to using electricity for high-energy uses like steel-making. This is set to grow.

In the same way, the use of electrified transportation is upping its share of electricity demand: It isn’t just Priuses and similar personal vehicles but big fleets, particularly for in-city deliveries. The Postal Service, Amazon and other fleet users are converting to electricity. Burns & McDonnell, the Kansas City-based engineering, architecture, construction, environmental and consulting solutions firm, estimates half of intracity deliveries will be with electric vehicles by the decade’s end.

Increasingly, new homes will be all-electric as the future of natural gas supplies is compromised by public policy.

Exacerbating instability in the electric sector has been the swing from fossil-fuel generation — primarily coal and natural gas — to renewables. Those simply aren’t always available. The race is on for better batteries and storage to smooth the variability of wind and solar, especially wind.

Nonetheless, the pressure is constant to close coal and gas plants, which have always available generation, known in utility parlance as “dispatchable,” and account for 19 percent and 38 percent of generation, respectively. It adds to the difficulties of keeping the lights on.

The dilemma was set out for me by Duane Highley, CEO of Tri-State Generation & Transmission, in Westminster, Colorado. It provides power to 42 rural co-ops in four states.

Highley explained the new instability in the industry this way: “The rapid rate of retirement of dispatchable generators has raised concerns among our membership about the reliability of the greater grid.”

He said the industry can and is achieving rapid rates of emissions reduction but will still need “an appropriate amount of cost-effective dispatchable generation.” Today, Highley noted, this is provided by coal and natural gas. This power will be needed to ensure a reliable and resilient grid as the demand for electricity increases.

“The traditional metrics utilities have used to model reliability can no longer demonstrate grid resilience as we rely more on intermittent weather-dependent resources.”

Tri-State, Highley said, is “working with its members on new reliability methodology to assure we have sufficient capacity, even with high levels of renewable generation.”

Electricity loss is a lethal matter.

In Texas, 254 people, by official count, died when some of the grid went down during the blackout caused by Ice Storm Uri in 2021. And in last year’s heat dome over Arizona, the state estimates 654 people died of heat-related causes in Maricopa County.

Clearly, job one is to keep the lights on before we retire the tried-and-true generating plant of yesterday. Life depends on it.