For the past couple of years, assessments of the national electric grid’s ability to deliver power during peak demand periods, such as heat waves and cold snaps, have shown increasing risk for blackouts.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the nation’s grid watchdog, finds the main cause is retirements of coal plants without enough natural gas plants coming online.
Besides the ability of generation sources to meet demand during peak periods, the general demands on the grid are also increasing. Environmental groups are pushing to transition home heating from natural gas to electricity, and electric vehicles are also adding to the grid’s thirst for power.
Among this mix of increasing electricity needs are data centers. Data centers manage and store the data for streaming services, email applications, e-commerce transitions, online gaming, and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Along with crypto mining and data storage, AI is expected to double the electricity demand from data centers by 2026, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The estimated global energy consumption in 2022 for data centers and crypto mining, as well as the power to transmit that data, was between 600 and 850 terawatt hours, according to the IEA. To keep a 100-watt light bulb running for one hour requires 100 watt hours. So the amount of energy in 2022 consumed by data centers, crypto mining and data transmission networks was enough to power 8.5 trillion 100-watt light bulbs for 1 hour.
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