Oh Well!! Southern Company Was At Least Talking About Retiring Coal Plants - But Holy AI, Sacred Crypto Got In The Way!
Three years ago, one of the country’s largest electric utilities, Southern Company, made a splash when it announced it would retire most of its coal-fired power plants in the coming years, a major step toward the company’s stated goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Southern’s subsidiary utilities — the companies that actually run the coal plants to provide electricity to homes and businesses — backed up the announcement by seeking and obtaining approval to close coal plants from the powerful state regulators who oversee them.
But now the utilities are backtracking. They say they need to meet an extraordinary spike in demand for electricity, mostly from the large facilities packed with computer servers that enable intensive online activity like generative AI and cryptocurrency, known as data centers.
In its latest integrated resource plan, or IRP, Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power forecasts that demand will go up by 8,200 megawatts (MW) by the winter of 2030-31, more than three times the output of the new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, the first new nuclear reactors in the U.S. in decades, which Georgia Power and other utilities just spent more than $30 billion to build. To meet that growth, the company is requesting a range of resources, including upgrades to existing nuclear plants, more renewable energy, and improvements to the overall power grid — but it’s also asking to extend the life of heavily-polluting coal plants that were previously slated for retirement.
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Policymakers elsewhere are indeed grappling with these same concerns. In Virginia, the state leading the data center boom, lawmakers have introduced a litany of bills on data centers this year, aiming to track their energy and water use, ensure residents and other businesses aren’t subsidizing their energy needs, and assess the impact of new data centers before they’re approved. Legislators in New York and Oregon are working on similar measures. Even as lawmakers and regulators reconsider the impacts, data center companies enjoy tax breaks in many states just as they do in Georgia. Data centers receive subsidies of some form in 22 states, according to a recent report by Frontier Group, Environment America, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. This move is part of a national trend. The data center industry is booming all over, from Virginia to Texas to Oregon, and utilities across the country are responding by building new fossil fuel resources or delaying retirements, all at a time when scientists agree that cutting fossil fuel emissions is more urgent than ever. More than 9,000 MW of fossil fuel generation slated for closure has been delayed or is at risk of delay, and more than 10,800 MW of new fossil fuel generation has been planned, according to the sustainability research and policy center Frontier Group.
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https://grist.org/energy/georgia-was-about-to-retire-coal-plants-then-came-the-data-cen/