Over the past two months, the country’s biggest tech companies have announced a flurry of deals with advanced and conventional nuclear companies. At the same time, Democratic candidates running for federal office — including Kamala Harris and a handful of Senate candidates — have touted their support of building new nuclear power plants. Has nuclear’s moment finally arrived?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we have
Josh Freed, the senior vice president of Third Way’s climate and energy program, discussing why nuclear might be about to boom, why Democrats are embracing nuclear, and whether a Trump administration could derail the investments. This episode of Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jillian Goodman, Heatmap’s deputy editor.
Shift Key co-host Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, is out this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There’s a set of conflicting facts, or slightly contradicting pieces of analysis about this that I believe can all be accommodated together, but I’m still trying to understand how they all fit together. Which is at this point, when we look at the sources of power demand growth in the U.S., as we’ve covered on Shift Key, demand for electricity in the U. S. is rising now for the first time in 20 years. It’s a big deal.
When you look at where that demand growth is coming from, very little of it — or not a ton of it — is actually coming from data centers. It’s coming from EVs, it’s coming from new factories, it’s coming from electrification, it’s coming from air conditioning, it’s coming from all these more typical sources of demand growth in the economy — lots of places, by the way, where we want demand to grow. Because part of how we’re going to transition is that we’re going to move people from combusting fossil fuels to using electricity.
The IEA also just said in a report — it’s big global wrap of energy — last week that it was not very concerned about data centers for AI driving energy scarcity because data centers ultimately are only going to use, even in a high-growth situation, they’ll only use as much electricity as desalination plants. And, yeah, these tech companies are acting as if … Microsoft is seemingly acting as if it’s ready to pay between four and five times the market cost for electricity for the next 20 years because of how much it anticipates its power needs going up.
So on the one hand, data centers are not driving electricity demand growth. On the other hand, they do seem to be driving this new set of deals. How do we work that out?
Josh Freed: Yeah, look, I think the first thing: My approach to all of these issues is the reality — having worked in the energy and climate space since 2009 — is that it is a very humbling sector. And whatever assumptions we’re operating under today are going to be proven wildly wrong in a year or two or five years. So the simplest answer is, we just don’t know. And I think that companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon are looking at the potential need for a significant amount of clean, firm electricity in specific parts of the grid, and saying, Let’s get ahead of this and ensure that as we’re planning, we have clean electricity in the right places, built at roughly the timeframe we expect need to escalate significantly, so that we have certainty for planning purposes.
And in some cases there’s, I think, also the expectation that there is enough electricity demand growth, both domestically and in other advanced or rapidly modernizing economies, that being a partner with an advanced nuclear company or another company that is going to be able to provide a lot more electricity is a win-win for them.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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