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Saturday, March 9th, 2024

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

Author:     Evan Halper
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     March 7, 2024 | 6:05 a.m. EST
 Link: Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power
Stephan:  

What most Americans don’t seem to realize and politicians rarely talk about is that what most of us think of as America was created in the forty years from 1920 to 1960. That’s when the roads, bridges, dams, electrical systems, and middle-class families came into being. But, beginning with the Reagan administration, we shifted from being a nation that was grounded in creating wellbeing to a nation structured on greed, profit, and power. That is what made 735  billionaires and almost 22 million millionaires and the middle class became increasingly stressed. At the same time as this was happening, America stopped looking after its infrastructure. Now that failure has created the stress tearing our country apart and has left us unprepared for our future needs.

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as […]

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