The Future Demands
Reliable Energy
From AI to EVs, the demand on our electrical grid is breaking it. Lawmakers can ensure the special interests breaking it, buy it.
you break it, you buy it
a project of Heartland Impact
The Issue
Big Tech Pushing NetZero and Decarbonization
As part of its push to decarbonize their own operations and the economy as a whole, Big Tech and the financial institutions that support them have supported the massive expansion of renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and battery power facilities.
290
coal plants closed between 2010 and 2019
43.5
acres needed to generate 1 MW by wind turbine
$100 trillion
cost to create battery capacity to meet 25% of US energy consumption
“this will mean every email you send through Gmail, every question you ask Google Search, every YouTube video you watch, and every route you take using Google Maps, is supplied by clean energy every hour of every day[.]”
-Google CEO, Sundar Pichai
What They Said Then...
Policy Solutions
Something Has To Give
Reliable, dispatchable, baseload power is needed to continue the high-tech revolution, yet it comes at a time when tech and ideological interests and utilities are making the power grid less reliable by taking coal plant prematurely offline to be replaced with weather and time of day dependent intermittent renewable power sources.
In short, if you break it, you buy it.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
To cover the cost to provide sufficient additional dispatchable power, a fee could be placed on all new Electric Vehicle (EV) and Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) charging stations connected to the electric grid and all new electric or plug in hybrid electric vehicles sold or licensed to operate in a state. The fee would be separate and apart from any fee levied on EV or PHEV’s for infrastructure construction and maintenance, and rather is dedicated to the construction of new dispatchable power supplies to meet expected demand, without socializing the cost across all ratepayers.
DATA CENTERS
New data centers requiring dispatchable power should be responsible for its provision, either by contracting directly with the local utility for the construction of dispatchable power with the approval for new power sources having to go through the usual regulatory process undertaken by the commission, except for the price which could be negotiated between the utility and the source of the new demand, with safeguards so any cost overruns are not borne by ratepayers in general.
RATEPAYER PROTECTION
A utility commission should not authorize or approve the retirement of a firm electric generation facility as proposed in any rate case, integrated resource plan or other submission to the commission, until there is the equal or greater contracted new firm power presently available on the grid, not from prospects in the future, to replace the loss of firm power brought about by the proposed closure.
PRIORITIZING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OVER BIG TECH
In the event that dispatchable power does not increase at least 5% between 2023 and 2028, peak industrial users that begin operations after January 1, 2025 should be the first to experience the impacts of any electricity blackout or brownout.
“It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels?”
Mark Zuckerberg, 2017 Harvard speech
What They Say Now...
"[S]ometimes the wind doesn't blow in Berlin, and the sun doesn't shine in Munich. And during those windless, sunless periods, the country still needs to rely on natural gas for 'dispatchable power,'" … "without an additional 10 gigawatts of dispatchable power, which might need to come partially from natural gas, [Texas] could continue to suffer devastating brownouts."
2024, Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, in letter to CEOs
“But I actually think that, before we run into that, we're going to run into energy constraints." … “Just to put this in perspective, I think a gigawatt would be the size of a meaningful nuclear power plant only going towards training a model."
2024, Mark Zuckerberg
“Data centers need a lot of energy to run, especially the hyperscale ones that AI tends to run on. And they need to have reliable sources of energy. So, often they’re built in places where you have nonrenewable energy sources, like natural gas-generated energy or coal-generated energy, where you flip a switch and the energy is there. It’s harder to do that with solar or wind, because there’s often weather factors and things like that.”
Sasha Luccioni, Lead Climate Researcher at AI company “Hugging Face”
"We recognise training large models can be energy-intensive and is one of the reasons we are constantly working to improve efficiencies. We give considerable thought about the best use of our computing power.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, tells New Scientist
"These AI data centres are going to require more power than anything we could ever have imagined. We at the G7 do not have enough power."
2024, Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, in letter to CEOs
“Data centers need a lot of energy to run, especially the hyperscale ones that AI tends to run on. And they need to have reliable sources of energy. So, often they’re built in places where you have nonrenewable energy sources, like natural gas-generated energy or coal-generated energy, where you flip a switch and the energy is there. It’s harder to do that with solar or wind, because there’s often weather factors and things like that.”
Sasha Luccioni, lead climate researcher at AI company “Hugging Face”
"We recognise training large models can be energy-intensive and is one of the reasons we are constantly working to improve efficiencies. We give considerable thought about the best use of our computing power.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, tells New Scientist
"These AI data centres are going to require more power than anything we could ever have imagined. We at the G7 do not have enough power,"
Larry Fink, 2024 BlackRock Letter to CEO's
