That’s according to Arshad Mansoor, president and CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, a leading independent, nonprofit energy research and development institute.
Mansoor spoke to The Hill at CERAWeek by S&P Global, a leading energy conference based in Houston.
He said that estimated power needs shot up in the 12 months between November 2021 and November 2022.
During that period, Congress passed three major infrastructure bills — the CHIPS act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act — all of which meant a massive uptick in new American factories, as well as electric demand.
A fourth major development came in November 2022, when OpenAI released its ChatGPT large language model to the public — spawning a gold rush in ‘generative AI’ and the energy-hungry data centers that run them.
Last year, Mansoor warned that the grid was barreling towards a “canyon” in which peak evening electric load overwhelmed the ability of renewables to generate power.
Now, he said at CERAWeek, that possible risk had become a definite one.
“For some of us who have been in this industry for a long time, this feels like mid 1980s in terms of demand growth,” Mansoor said — a time of suddenly rising electricity demand.
But with mass deployment of zero-carbon on-demand energy still far in the future, utilities must resist the urge to simply build big — particularly since the easiest form of on-demand power generation to build is natural gas, which heats the climate when burned.
“We have to leverage the smartness that is continued to be built into the grid — so that we are not just meeting demand growth in a brute force way,” Mansoor said.
That’s a particular concern because in a typical grid, 10 – 20 percent of generation capacity is built to meet demand for just 1 percent of the year.
One possibility that EPRI is considering: cooperative deals between data centers and utilities in which the centers agree to shut off at times of peak demand — shaving off a significant portion of needed power generation.
But while smart grid technologies will help, Mansoor said, they will not be enough.
“We will have to do more wind more solar than we ever done. We will do more batteries than we have ever built. And you will be adding more and more gas — and you will see some coal plants retirement getting delayed there.”
The speed of decarbonization, he argued, has to be tempered by the need to avoid a political backlash against renewables by keeping the lights on.
“Because if we cannot keep the lights on, then ultimately it will actually have a worst impact in the way we are going forward.”
But he emphasized that time was of the essence. “We have got to take one step at a time.
“But you got to take the steps faster, because regardless of your belief — the weather is changing, it’s changing in different parts of the world. And so the faster we can go to that glide path, the better off we are.”
