Horse sense & electron trees: The U.S. energy landscape

Yahoo

28-03-2025

The United States is in an energy quandary, positioning itself to be the global leader in the development of AI and data centers.
While most of the country has cheap and reliable electricity, it will not be enough to stay competitive in the world market given the pace of energy development that is rapidly unfolding in Germany, and yes, China.
Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, addressed a panel Thursday in Washington, D.C., on nuclear energy, demand and the grid at a summit hosted by Broadband Breakfast Community, stressing the need for the United States to get its game face on to be the most competitive and reliable place to grow more energy.
'America's energy grid needs to be preeminent and prominent in every single way, fashion and form in our discussion because we're in a race for time. You're talking about big, huge data centers, you're talking about China building its military, you're talking about a race for space. There's so much involved,' Weber said.
'The rapid rise of AI, the data centers and other digital infrastructure means we are going to need more power than ever before.'
Weber said the United States has enjoyed the luxury of having reliable energy, but that is at risk of being compromised.
The nation's largest power provider, PJM, warned that almost one-third of its generation could retire by 2030 while energy consumption is expected to rise by 40% by 2039, Weber said.
'Let that sink in. Two states with some of the largest increases in data centers — Virginia and Ohio — are in the PJM footprint. If we don't act now, we'll face an energy crisis that will cripple not only these facilities but our entire economy.'
PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia.
'America cannot afford to gamble with this energy future. There's too much at stake, too many people in the world against us. If we want to remain a global leader in technology, in manufacturing and in innovation, we must embrace an energy expansion strategy that prioritizes reliability, affordability and most of all, security,' Weber said.
'That means keeping fossil fuels in the mix, investing in nuclear power, expanding our pipeline and infrastructure and making sure that government policies don't get in the way of what my grandfather called good old fashioned horse sense or common sense.'
Brian Smith, director of nuclear reactor development at Idaho National Laboratory located about two hours of north of Salt Lake City, told the summit participants he carved out his nuclear engineering career with war toys.
Nuclear submarines. Nuclear-powered carriers. Nuclear weapons. Jokingly calling the experience a 'blast,' he said he was inspired to branch out.
'I love subs and aircraft carriers. I love nuclear weapons. I made the move into commercial nuclear, and that roughly coincided with when ChatGPT came out. That was November of 2022 and suddenly everybody's power demand forecast just went up. You all know what the curve looks like, and the curve keeps getting steeper and steeper every time we revisit it.'
But Smith said the outlook for bringing advanced nuclear to commercial scale was such a fledgling proposal it was simply akin to an idea.
'I looked at commercial nuclear, and my apologies to those colleagues of mine, it is kind of like water in a blender, right? It spins around and there's a lot of noise, but at the end, you don't really make anything,' he said.
'Nuclear is important in this country in terms of base load power supply. It supplies almost a fifth of our nation's energy, and about half, almost half of the nation's clean energy. It's a big deal. But I didn't see new advancements in nuclear like what we were doing on the defense nuclear side,' Smith continued.
That is changing, however, with the increasing demand on the grid.
'W're looking at electricity demand growth like we've never seen before, never in the history of electricity. The last 20 or 30 years in the United States, demand has been relatively flat. It's not that our economy hasn't grown, and it's certainly not that the population hasn't grown. It's just that our brilliant engineers and scientists have made us more efficient,' said Christopher Guith, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Global Energy Institute.
'We can produce that same dollar of GDP with fewer electrons every year. But then a funny thing happened about a year and a half, two years ago. Like I said, all of a sudden, enterprising companies started showing up at different power producers around the country, knocking on the door saying, hey, we want to build a manufacturing facility, hey, we want to build a data center, hey we want to build a bunch of charging stations for electric vehicles.'
The reality is the country isn't prepared. Guith pointed to the New England region of the United States that still relies on fuel oil, producing among the most dirtiest type of energy. Costs are often triple that of other areas of the country and pipelines for cheaper, cleaner natural gas are not a reality because New Jersey and New York will not allow any new pipelines to be built, he added.
Chip Pickering, chief executive officer of INCOMPAS, said he has hope with the new administration that permitting will accelerate.
'If we can have shot clocks, and we can have date certainty, and if we can begin to have the possibility of national security waivers — we are in a race with China, a global race, national security race, economic race with our rivals who are not doing the same type of permitting that we do. And it's not going to take them, with a national imperative to build their infrastructure; while we have a have a process that can take sometimes 10 to 15 years for major projects. Now that's just a fiber route.'
Panelists all spoke of the important linkage of AI in deployment of these energy sources, with Smith, for example, working on that component at INL with nuclear energy.
At the same time as these big-scale users of energy come online such as data centers, they warned of the people in the middle of the provider and the huge load consumer — the average ratepayer who should not be expected to bear the costs.
'It's a peculiar issue and I say peculiar because it's becoming extremely bipartisan, and it's because of the national security angle of it; there's a growing consensus amongst liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that we cannot allow this technology to be developed in China. Frankly, we can't allow it to be developed anywhere else,' Guith said.
'I mean, this is a technology that is going to transform every aspect of our lives in a way that even you who are part of it probably don't fully appreciate. Certainly I don't and I'm an energy wonk. As a matter of national security, this can't happen anywhere else. So that's the challenge. The other challenge is electrons don't grow on trees.'