Artificial Intelligence (AI)

17Sep

Can West Virginia Come to the Rescue?

“We must become the indispensable battery of the nation,” West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey said last week when he announced a plan to expand the state’s generating capacity to 50 gigawatts (GW) by 2050 from roughly 15 GW today. Morrisey’s plan, called “50 by 50,” envisions not just an effort to maintain West Virginia’s existing […]
10Sep

Can We Win the AI Race and Shield Consumers from Rising Power Prices?

Every week brings more news about surging power demand, rising electricity prices and the need for more dispatchable power. Political frustration with rising prices is beginning to collide with the desire to win the AI race and build the data center infrastructure needed to support this remarkable technological moment. In the latest sign of the […]
03Sep

Powering the AI Moment

Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers—each with the electricity needs of entire cities or states—to serve AI is rapidly transforming electricity markets and our electricity grid.    As The Wall Street Journal recently observed, utilities are receiving requests for extraordinary amounts of power: “Take American Electric Power, a big utility that serves 11 […]
24Jul

The AI Power Surge is Here and Coal is Essential to Meeting It

Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers to serve AI has become the electricity elephant in the room. Across the country, power demand is soaring, and data centers with the energy needs of entire cities – and even states – are driving the surge. Meeting this new demand will require new generation but also […]
08Jul

A Novel Idea: Fact-based Energy Policy

The Department of Energy (DOE) is finally doing something almost unheard of in government in recent years: policymaking based on reality and facts. This week, DOE released a new “Resource Adequacy Report,” evaluating the reliability and security of the U.S. grid. The report is a direct response to President Trump’s Executive Order, “Strengthening the Reliability […]
11Jun

Aligning Energy and Regulatory Policy with the AI Moment

It has become hard to overstate the impact AI and data centers are having on the power sector. This is an industrial revolution on an extraordinary scale. At a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference on grid reliability last week, regulators and grid operators once again sounded the alarm over the challenges they collectively face […]
02Apr

Grid Operators Tell Congress They Face a “Generational Challenge”

Last week, a congressional hearing, titled “Keeping the Lights On: Examining the State of Regional Grid Reliability,” brought together executives from the seven U.S. wholesale power markets that manage the supply and flow electricity in two-thirds of the country. Their message to all listening was crystal clear: power shortfalls and soaring prices for consumers are […]
26Mar

Confronting the AI Electricity Bottleneck

The CEO of NVIDIA, a global leader in AI, recently observed, “Every single data center in the future will be power limited… We are now a power limited industry.” What he was saying is that electricity is now the key constraint on the development of data centers, the uptake of AI and the economic potential […]