New EPA Rules Could Dangerously Close Baseload Power Plants
5 hours ago Guest Blogger
By Bernard L. Weinstein
Recent extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Beryl that left more than two million Texas households and business without electricity for days and then went on to flood parts of the Midwest and New England, has drawn renewed attention to the vulnerabilities of America’s power grids. As climate models predict even more severe weather in the future, utilities across the nation are taking measures to “harden the grid” such as replacing wooden poles with steel or concrete, putting more transmission and distribution lines underground, and installing transformer circuit breakers that can work underwater.
But the recent focus on improving grid resiliency may be masking a more serious energy issue—namely, a projected deficit in baseload power generation relative to the expected growth in electricity demand over the next several decades. The U.S. Energy Information Administration sees electricity consumption reaching record highs in 2024 and 2025 and is also projecting that demand will jump from its current level of about 4,100 terawatt hours today to more than 5,200 terawatt hours by 2050, a 27% increase.
This rapid growth in demand will be driven by a number of factors. First is the expansion of power-hungry server farms that are expected to consume more than one-third of new capacity in the years ahead as the incorporation of artificial intelligence requires even more power than traditional data centers. Hydrogen production, which uses huge amounts of electricity, is another factor pushing up power demand as is the overall electrification of the U.S. economy.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/08/06/new-epa-rules-could-dangerously-close-baseload-power-plants/
