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A new report finds that utilities are spending more than fossil fuel companies to keep up with data center electricity demand.
The transition to clean energy is largely a shift from molecules to electrons — gasoline in the tank is out, electricity stored in a battery cell is in. It follows, then, that as the transition progresses, the balance of power in the energy industry will shift from oil and gas production to electricity generation.
We may look back on 2024 as the year the scales tipped. Among the top 260 publicly listed energy companies, utilities’ capital expenditures around the globe were slightly higher this year than oil and gas spending, according to a recent analysis from Boston Consulting Group, and the authors expect the trend to grow through the end of the decade. But it wasn’t a sudden spike in EV adoption or home electrification or some other climate solution that put utility spending in the lead. It was the rise in data centers.
“When we went through all the data, all the 260 companies, it was the data centers that were having the biggest impact, most definitely,” Rebecca Fitz, a partner and director at Boston Consulting Group and lead author of the report, told me. “I’ve been in this sector for a long time, and to have such a rapid change in demand outlook, coupled with quick changes to capex, is a big story.”
Boston Consulting Group Center For Energy Impact
The finding was the surprise headline of an annual report that Fitz’ group has completed for the past three years called “Follow the Capital,” an analysis of what’s driving changes in capital supply and demand in the energy sector using data culled from publicly available sources. Data for prior years comes from regulatory and investor fillings. Future years are modeled using public announcements, plans filed with regulators, and a few conservative assumptions, Fitz told me.
Surging demand for electricity from data centers was perhaps the biggest energy story of 2024, and the trend seemed to accelerate as the year went on. In just the past few months, almost every major tech company has signed an agreement to buy power from a nuclear plant, either reviving formerly shuttered reactors or helping to build new ones. GE Vernova, which manufactures energy generation equipment, reported last week that it had secured contracts for 9 gigawatts’ worth of new gas turbines since its previous quarterly report in October, “tied to both load growth in the U.S and … serving the hyperscaler demand associated with AI.” As the “Follow the Capital” authors were wrapping up this year’s edition in November, they found that U.S. utilities had added $50 billion in planned capex during the third quarter alone, mostly due to data center demand growth.
Data center demand isn’t the only factor playing into the above chart. Though utility spending is definitely up, oil and gas companies are also reining in capex growth in favor of shareholder returns, Fitz told me. But oil and gas also sees the winds changing and is making moves to get into the power business. Two weeks ago, during a panel hosted by the Atlantic Council, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said the company was “looking at possible solutions to build large-scale power generation” that would serve data centers directly, rather than feed into the grid, so that regular electricity ratepayers would not shoulder the costs. “There’s sensitivity to increasing electricity rates for the average person just for the benefit of a few of these tech companies,” he said.
Beating Chevron to the punch, last week ExxonMobil announced that it was “moving fast” on this exact type of project, designing a natural gas plant that would “use carbon capture to remove more than 90% of the associated CO2 emissions” and directly power data centers without connecting to the grid.
“I have no doubt that most of the oil and gas sector is looking at opportunities in this area,” said Fitz.
Though the report covers global companies and spending, the data center demand signal is hyperlocal. Among the 30 largest North American utilities, 65% of demand growth is concentrated within just six of them, the report says. Though the report does not name the companies, Fitz told me that Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio were seeing the most aggressive plans.
Artificial intelligence boosters often argue that this demand pull is a boon for the energy transition. By ushering in the age of electrons, the logic goes, tech companies with deep pockets can drive the first deployments of new clean energy technologies like advanced nuclear and geothermal power plants. These early deployments would then help lower costs and give rise to cheaper, cleaner electricity for the rest of us average energy consumers and our future electric cars, stoves, and water heaters.
But that’s not the only potential outcome. “Follow the Capital” found that when the six utilities most affected by demand growth recently revised their integrated resource plans, they increased the amount of natural gas generation they planned to add from 26% of total new generation to 31%. As GE Vernova reported, orders for gas generators are skyrocketing. “I can’t think of a time that the gas business has had more fun than they’re having right now,” the company’s CEO Scott Strazik said during a recent investor update.
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, the industry is turning to natural gas plants because they can run 24/7 and they are not as dependent on transmission lines as renewables are, so they can be built faster and more cheaply. Renewables paired with energy storage are only competitive with gas if there’s infrastructure to support it, sources told him.
The age of electrons may be nigh, but whether it helps to stop climate change is a separate question altogether.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.