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Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.
Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.
PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
Building new capacity isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds.
CoreWeave signed a deal for a new facility in New Jersey, behind-the-meter power on the side.
The cloud computing company CoreWeave announced Monday that it is leasing a former medical research facility and turning it into a data center. Along with it comes a 25-megawatt power plant that once provided power and steam directly to the former Merck headquarters in Kenilworth, New Jersey, but began to sell more and more power to the grid, the plant’s owner said in a filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In 2023, the facility was purchased by Onyx, a real estate firm, and Machine Investment Group, with the intention to market the site to another life sciences or biotechnology company.
Then the AI revolution happened.
CoreWeave, which started as a miner of cryptocurrency, is now raising and spending billions of dollars to acquire and install the chips necessary to train and run artificial intelligence systems for companies that rent out access to them. According to the deal announcement, the company plans to pour $1.2 billion of investment into the 280,000 square foot facility, along with electrical upgrades from the utility PSE&G and investments from Onyx. The power plant will stop serving the grid and go “behind the meter,” the plant’s owner Atlantic Power said in a letter to PJM Interconnection, the regional electricity market, in September.
The deal confirms that when it comes to power, data centers will take what they can get — and that the long timelines necessary to bring on new power in much of the country may end up benefiting existing owners of generation, especially natural gas.
Data centers require both large amounts of power — sometimes 100 megawatts or more — and the ability to surge up and down quickly. “Renewable power generation is well placed to capture mounting demand from data centers and AI in the long term,” analysts at BNEF wrote in a report in September, “but time constraints for grid interconnection and intermittency issues could support natural gas-fired output.”
Goldman Sachs analysts expect data center power demand to rise from about 3% of the U.S. total to 8% by 2030, with growth running at 15% annually. They assume that capacity will be met mostly by natural gas, but actually finding — let alone building — new natural gas generation is a challenge.
“The hyperscalers are evolving from single data centers dependent on 60 to 100 megawatts to starting to look at multiple gigawatt-size data center parks that support a number of data centers in one location,” GE Vernova chief executive Scott Strazik said on a recent earnings call with analysts.
Building a new natural gas plant on the grid — and especially the transmission infrastructure to serve it — can be a prospect well beyond the build-it-now timelines of big technology companies with a desperate need for computing power.
“Thanks to 10-year delays in permitting for new transmission lines and connecting generation capacity to the grid, the most viable near-term option is behind-the-meter,” Tim Fist and Arnab Datta wrote in a report for the Institute for Progress, a technology and science policy think tank. In other words, one way to get around grid interconnection and intermittency issues is to have your own power plant.
“The economics of developing the power on site don't really hurt the data center economics that much. These things are just really profitable,” Carson Kearl, an analyst at Enverus, told me.
Some data centers have developed their own natural gas generation on site, such as XAi’s cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, which is powered by gas generators.
CoreWeave, meanwhile, is one of the most talked-about and well-funded companies in cloud computing, with access to a huge number of chips made by Nvidia, the leading designer of high-end processors, and which is also an investor in CoreWeave. But the chips can only perform when they’re powered, turning the data center business into a hunt for electricity wherever it can be found.
“Access to reliable power could be a roadblock towards the timely buildout” for a data center, Francois Poirier, the chief executive of TC Energy, the Canadian pipeline company, told analysts on an earnings call in August. “We’re seeing a shift in siting preferences from regions where big telecom infrastructure is in place to regions where energy and supply infrastructure is in place.”
CoreWeave, PSE&G, Onyx, and Atlantic Power’s owner, I Squared Capital, did not respond to requests for comment.
This situation has not come about for lack of effort on the part of the several electricity markets that have been trying to get new natural gas generation on the grid. PJM, for example, has been working to entice new supply, but even following a record auction for power capacity that paid out billions to natural gas plants, few producers have indicated their willingness to make large new investments. Texas has established a multibillion-dollar loan fund to provide low-cost financing to new natural gas plants.
While several large technology companies have announced their intention to buy nuclear power from refurbished or new plants, those deals will take at least several years to actually get any new electrons on the grid.
That leads data center developers like CoreWeave scrambling to find what power they can. In interviews, the company’s chief strategy officer Brian Venturo told Wired that they are avoiding Northern Virginia’s “data center alley” precisely because it’s “a food fight to get power.”
“There's a lot of growing backlash in that market around power usage,” he told Bloomberg. “We're kind of siting our plants and markets where our data centers and markets where we think the grid infrastructure is capable of handling it.”
And what better place than where the power already is.
Inside season 2, episode 5 of Shift Key.
Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you know it too well. But to a certain type of clean energy wonk, it amounts to perhaps the three most dreaded words in climate policy: the interconnection queue.
The queue is the process by which utilities decide which wind and solar farms get to hook up to the power grid in the United States. Across much of the country, it has become so badly broken and clogged that it can take more than a decade for a given project to navigate.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with two experts about how to understand — and how to fix — what is perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid. Tyler Norris is a doctoral student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He was formerly vice president of development at Cypress Creek Renewables, and he served on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper’s Carbon Policy Working Group. Claire Wayner is a senior associate at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program, where she works on the clean and competitive grids team. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Can I interject and just ask why, over the past decade, the interconnection queue got much longer — but also over the past decade, 15 years, the U.S. grid did change in character and in fuel type a lot, right? We went from burning a lot of coal to a lot of natural gas. And that transition is often cited as one of the model transitions, one of the few energy transitions to happen globally that happened at the speed with which we would need to decarbonize. Obviously, switching coal to gas is not decarbonizing, but it is a model — it happened fast enough that it is a good model for what decarbonizing would look like in order to meet climate goals.
Evidently, that did not run into these kind of same interconnection queue problems. Why is that? Is that because we were swapping in within individual power plants? We were just changing the furnace from a coal furnace to a gas furnace? Is that because these were larger projects and so it didn’t back up in the queue in the same way that a lot of smaller solar or wind farms do?
Claire Wayner: I would say all the reasons you just gave are valid, yeah. The coal to gas transition involved, likely, a lot of similar geographic locations. With wind and solar, we’re seeing them wanting to build on the grid and in a lot of cases in new, rather remote locations that are going to require new types of grid upgrades that the coal to gas transition just doesn’t have.
Jesse Jenkins: Maybe it is — to use a metaphor here — it’s a little bit like traffic congestion. If you add a generator to the grid, it’s trying to ship its power through the grid, and that decision to add your power mix to the grid combines with everyone else that’s also generating and consuming power to drive traffic jams or congestion in different parts of the grid, just like your decision to hop in the car and drive to work or to go into the city for the weekend to see a show or whatever you’re doing. It’s not just your decision. It’s everyone’s combined decisions that affects travel times on the grid.
Now, the big difference between the grid and travel on roads or most other forms of networks we’re used to is that you don’t get to choose which path to go down. If you’re sending electricity to the grid, electricity flows with physics down the path of least resistance or impedance, which is the alternating current equivalent of resistance. And so it’s a lot more like rivers flowing downhill from gravity, right? You don’t get to choose which branch of the river you go down. It’s just, you know, gravity will take you. And so you adding your power flows to the grid creates complicated flows based on the physics of this mesh network that spans a continent and interacts with everyone else on the grid.
And so when you’re going from probably a few dozen large natural gas generators added that operate very similarly to the plants that they’re replacing to hundreds of gigawatts across thousands of projects scattered all over the grid with very complicated generation profiles because they’re weather-dependent renewables, it’s just a completely different challenge for the utilities.
So the process that the regional grid operators developed in the 2000s, when they were restructuring and taking over that role of regional grid operator, it’s just not fit for purpose at all for what we face today. And I want to highlight another thing you mentioned, which is the software piece of it, too. These processes, they are using software and corporate processes that were also developed 10 or 20 years ago. And we all know that software and computing techniques have gotten quite a bit better over a decade or two. And rarely have utilities and grid operators really kept pace with those capabilities.
Wayner: Can I just say, I’ve heard that in some regions, interconnection consists of still sending back and forth Excel files. To Tyler’s point earlier that we only just now are getting data on the interconnection queue nationwide and how it stands, that’s one challenge that developers are facing is a lack of data transparency and rapid processing from the transmission providers and the grid operators.
And so, to use an analogy that my colleague Sarah Toth uses a lot, which I really love: Imagine if we had a Domino’s pizza tracker for the interconnection queue, and that developers could just log on and see how their projects are doing in many, if not most regions. They don’t even have that visibility. They don’t know when their pizza is going to get delivered, or if it’s in the oven.
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.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
