Part of the demand is due to an increasing number of data centers across the country, along with the rise of artificial intelligence.If AI continues to grow at the current rate the grid won’t be able to keep up, and the let’s face it, the grid capacity isn’t expanding anywhere near fast enough. This is particularly true of ‘renewables’ – solar and wind – because they can’t possibly meet the demand and they are too weather weather dependent, too variable. What’s needed is more nuclear, particularly modular designs that can be built quickly and installed just as quickly. It could be one reason Bill Gates has invested billions in one such company – TerraPower – to build small modular reactors (SMRs) to power all of these new data centers.
The nation's roughly 2,700 data centers are mostly run by big tech firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, and consumed more than 4% of all electricity in the U.S. in 2022. It's projected to more than double to 9% by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a research organization and nonprofit focused on energy. It is not affiliated with any companies or type of technology.
But it's already taxing the U.S.' aging power grid, and the demands of AI are just beginning to grow. A ChatGPT query, for example, uses nearly 10 times the electricity of a typical internet search.
The nice thing is that SMRs and be built and installed almost anywhere, either clustered together like the traditional One Big Nuclear Power Station or spread out for a more distributed power generation architecture. The OBNPS design requires a lot of high capacity transmission lines to get all that power, 900MW or more, from Point A to Points B, C, D, E to Z. With the distributed design many of the SMRs would be located at or near Points A thru Z. There would still be a need for transmission lines, but they wouldn’t need to be the big heavy-duty lines like the ones used for the OBNPS configurations.
There’s one more thing to consider when it comes to electrical demand, that being EVs. SloJoe wants to force us into EVs against our will and all of those EVs will need electricity to recharge. So it will take even more expansion of the grid capacity to meet both demands. We know that’s not going to happen.
Of course the EV demand may not grow as the market for EVs has fallen off considerably and a number of automakers have stopped production on their EVs altogether. As one wag put it on one of the Disqus threads, those who want an EV already have one...or two. It appears no one else really wants them since they really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, are too expensive to buy, own, repair, and insure. They also don’t hold their value like ICE vehicles. But that’s a story for another time.