Power-hungry data centers and Democrats’ broad electrification agenda are teaming up to keep more coal-fired capacity online for longer than initially projected, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Tech companies’ data centers, policies pushing adoption of products like electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps and manufacturing activity are quickly driving up electricity demand projections, forcing some utility companies to keep coal-fired power plants operational for longer than anticipated, according to the WSJ. In 2023, S&P Global Commodity Insights projected that the U.S. would retire about 133,000 megawatts of remaining coal capacity by 2035, but the organization’s 2024 outlook now anticipates that roughly 105,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation will be retired by that year.
“Utilities around the country are kind of going into panic mode” because they are finding themselves unprepared for surging power demand, Michelle Solomon, a senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation, told the WSJ. Nearly every regional power market in the U.S. increased their projections for five-year annualized electricity demand growth between 2022 and 2023, with the rate doubling in some instances.
Coal-fired power plants are also benefiting from the fact that green energy generation is not coming online fast enough to replace retiring fossil fuel capacity, according to the WSJ. Coal is a dirtier fuel source than alternatives like natural gas, but the artificial intelligence (AI) boom and Democrats’ push for electrification — an effort intended to counter climate change —are prolonging its use.
“The existing fleet [of fossil-fuel generators] needs to stick around longer and run harder,” Patrick Finn, an analyst at the energy-focused consultancy Wood Mackenzie, told the WSJ. This dynamic will likely be a headwind for cutting emissions, which has been a top domestic and international priority for the Biden administration.
The Biden administration has pursued policies that will drive up long-term electricity demand while making it more difficult to build reliable, cheap fossil fuel-fired capacity.
On the demand side, the administration has pushed policies that will substantially increase the number of EVs on the road and issued regulations that often favor electric appliances, in addition to incentivizing power-intensive manufacturingwhile the AI boom takes shape. In terms of supply, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has moved to reshape the American power grid by effectively mandating the installation of costly carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology for coal plants, requiring that these plants control 90% of their emissions by 2032 if they are to operate past 2039, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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