① As demand for electricity soars in the AI era, Americans are now suddenly discovering one thing: it's not easy to “quit” coal-fired power plants. ② Concerns about grid reliability and expectations of soaring electricity demand are forcing many coal-fired power plant operators to maintain power generation capacity. The decommissioning dates for these old coal-fired power plants have been continuously delayed...
Finance Association, May 31 (Editor: Xiaoxiang) As demand for electricity soars in the AI era, Americans are now suddenly discovering one thing: it may not be easy to “quit” coal-fired power plants.
Concerns about grid reliability and expectations of soaring electricity demand are forcing many coal-fired power plant operators to maintain power generation capacity. The decommissioning dates for these old coal-fired power plants have been continuously delayed...
According to estimates by the International Energy Agency, the AI application ChatGPT uses almost 10 times more electricity than Google searches, and the increase in electricity demand caused by the AI wave is almost inevitable.
Consulting firm Grid Strategies predicts that electricity demand in the US will grow 4.7% over the next five years, nearly double the forecast a year ago. This increase in demand comes from new manufacturing and industrial capacity, as well as data center consumption to power everything from AI to cryptocurrency mining to cloud computing.
Data centers will account for 9% of US electricity demand by 2030, more than double the current level, according to a study released by the American Electric Power Research Institute on Wednesday.
However, with America's leading position in AI and manufacturing, driving an unprecedented increase in electricity demand, renewable energy output will inevitably not be able to keep up with this pace in a short period of time. This undoubtedly also indicates that more polluting traditional energy sources will probably not leave the stage of history so soon. Ultimately, this will also conflict with the US Biden administration's goal of decarbonization.
According to the latest report from Standard & Poor's Global Commodity Insights, the US is expected to have about 54 GW of coal power generation capacity decommissioned by the end of this decade (accounting for about 4% of total US power generation). This figure is about 40% lower than last year's estimate due to concerns about reliability.
In response, Joe Craft, CEO of Alliant Resource Partners, one of the largest coal producers in the US, said, “If we want to meet demand, people can't replace fossil power plants fast enough. To be a pioneer in AI, we need to champion maintaining everything we have.”
Recently, Alliant Energy is on the list of operators that have announced that they will slow down decommissioning coal-fired power plants. Last week, the company delayed plans to convert its coal-fired power plant in Wisconsin to natural gas from 2025 to 2028.
Earlier this year, FirstEnergy also announced that it was abandoning its goal of phasing out coal by 2030, citing “resource sufficiency issues.”
It's worth mentioning that last month the US Environmental Protection Agency just finalized a controversial regulation requiring the phasing out of coal-fired power plants starting in 2032, unless they install expensive carbon capture systems.
In response, Indiana has led a group of 25 states to file a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency's regulations. “We need more energy, not less. As Americans, we must not lose this war on artificial intelligence,” Indiana Republican Governor Eric Holcomb said in a recent interview.