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Adani issue, Manipur strife, Delhi air: Oppn gears up for Winter SessionThe Northwest will soon not have enough electricity to meet an explosion in demand from the tech industry as companies inject power-hungry artificial intelligence into every facet of life. That was the sobering message a panel of tech and electricity industry experts delivered to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council earlier this month. Panelists also said the council’s current data center demand forecasts significantly undershoot what’s coming, increases in technology’s efficiency will only drive further demand and people will die in blackouts if capacity isn’t expanded. The council is responsible for creating 20-year power plans to guarantee that Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana have enough electricity. That task has grown increasingly challenging as technology giants’ newest creations use increasingly more power, threatening the region’s ability to meet its fast-approaching climate law standards. The power council convened the panel after hearing dramatic data center demand projections, Chairman Jeffery Allen said as he kicked off the three-hour conversation. “(Accurately forecasting demand) is certainly something we’ve got to get right as we start working on the next power plan,” Allen said. “As an organization that sprung up from the hubris of a massive over-forecast in the past, it’s very obvious (data center demand) will be a key part of our next power plan,” he added, referring to high 1960s demand forecasts that never materialized, leading to a $2 billion loss that still haunts regional power managers. The goal of the event, Vice Chairman KC Golden said, was to understand the coming demand, because most conversations about the issue have been held behind closed doors and limited to tech companies and utility providers. Workers talk outside Amazon Web Services data center that is under construction in Boardman, Ore., in August. Industry experts say the data centers' hunger for power is insatiable. “There is no question in my mind that the demand for computation and AI and the demand to plug in (graphics processing units) exceeds the available power that we have by 2030,” expert Brian Janous said. After working as Microsoft’s vice president of energy, Janous started Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a company that finds locations for data center developments and works with utilities to upgrade power infrastructure. Janous said the tech industry will use every bit of power it can. Contrary to the tech industry’s public-facing talking points, Janous also cautioned that even the largest advances in technological efficiency would not lower demand for power because increased efficiency simply drives more use. “We have an almost unlimited capacity at this point for consuming data,” he said. “We’re continuing to rapidly climb that curve of data consumption — and every advancement in terms of efficiency just moves us up that curve faster.” Both other panelists — Sarah Smith of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Robert Cromwell, the former vice president of Power Supply at Umatilla Electric Cooperative — and council member Mike Milburn singled out Janous’ point as particularly important. Smith said her team authored a late-2016 report to Congress that found data centers’ demand for power had tapered off in the 2010s after growing through the 2000s. That decline, she said, is now over. And that increasing demand — compounded by growth in other industries, the electrification of things like cars and broader regional population gains — has created a giant stress test for the region’s grid, said Cromwell, who now works as a consultant. Torrie Griggs, Boardman Chamber of Commerce CEO, gives a tour of AWS Think Big Space at the Sage Center on Aug. 23 in Boardman, Ore. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council is trying to anticipate how much electricity data center will demand in the coming year. During periods of extreme cold, like what the Pacific Northwest experienced last January, the region’s grid is strained to its limits, he said. “It’s almost a miracle that we didn’t have (rolling blackouts) around the region,” Cromwell said of that deep freeze. “The entire energy ecosystem needs to respond to that.” He said that will require increasing the number of skilled trade workers needed to build new infrastructure, adjusting planning and modeling approaches, and streamlining permitting processes for new projects. “There’s a lot of big industrial (power demand) loads out there looking for energy and looking for a place they can land and a utility that’s able to meet their needs,” Cromwell said. “They’re all going to land somewhere, and the region needs to be ready for that.” As a result, the Northwest needs to build transmission infrastructure more quickly than at any time in the past 70 years, he said. “Everything needs to start happening on a much faster cadence than anyone is going to be comfortable with,” Cromwell said. Part of that is because power demand from data centers is both high and inflexible. That means once they’re built, they need nearly 100 percent of the power they can handle — and, unlike a lot of other consumers, they need it nearly all the time, as opposed to only during the day. Cromwell said the Northwest needs to get ahead of demand to avoid the direct consequences of outages, as well as rushed policy Band-Aid-style fixes. “Start having elected officials attend funerals because we let the lights go out,” he said. “Nothing will change public policy faster than elected officials going to constituents’ funerals — and it won’t be for the better, because it’ll be reactionary and less than fully thought out.” Global data center electricity demand is projected to grow by more than 21⁄2 times by 2030, driven in part by each ChatGPT query consuming nearly 10 times as much power as a basic Google search would have. That growth has hit the region especially hard, leaving local power providers like Clark Public Utilities struggling to plan. But the seeds of the region’s demand were planted decades ago when early tech giants like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google raced to break ground east of the Cascades, motivated by their own needs and sweetheart deals made with local public utility districts. By 2008, the aptly named Data Center Map showed Washington had 14 facilities. Today, that number is 93. Other firms report more still, with data center researcher Baxtel locating 112. And power demand from that growth has consistently outpaced the council’s projections. The council’s 2010 power plan forecast that regional data center consumption — then an average of 300 megawatts a year — would increase by 3 percent a year in the lead-up to 2030. But by the time the council released its 2021 power plan, data center consumption had already exceeded the projected number, landing instead at an average of 657 annual megawatts — about enough power for 424,000 Northwest homes. That pattern is set to repeat, Cromwell cautioned. “Your medium case is not high enough, and your high case is probably pretty close to spot on,” he said in reference to load forecasts the council released earlier this year. The Murrow News Fellowship is a state-funded journalism project managed by Washington State University. Local partners are The Daily News and The Columbian. For more information, visit news-fellowship.murrow.wsu.edu . Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.
