Gridlocked: AI's power needs could short-circuit US infrastructure Power required by AI datacenters in the US may be more than 30 times greater in a decade, with 5 GW facilities already in the pipeline.. A Deloitte Insights report, "Can US infrastructure keep up with the AI economy?" paints a picture of ever larger datacenters burning ever more energy, while the grid infrastructure and new …
A power infrastructure problem in the US? We know how they solve that.
Look at how the infrastructure problems with tap water were solved in the US. They simply didn't. Many Americans don't have access to clean tap water.
I have a strong feeling the power infrastructure problems will be solved in the same way, by moving some people out of the system. The 2021 Texas Freeze was a perfect example of such a policy with a Texas GOP mayor telling us that in no uncertain terms:
The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn hand out! If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.
In the end, the AI plants will get their power, the rest of America maybe not so much.
But think about the alternative. Investing hectobillions (trillions) in expanding the power infrastructure? You must be kidding? Think of the Billionaires!
It reminds me of those (perhaps apocryphal) late Victorian predictions that London would be 9 feet deep in horse manure by 1950. In fact motor vehicles replaced the horse (and we had smog instead).
If you ask me* what will happen, I'd say some crackpot economist will realise instead of converting work to AI and paying people to do nothing, it might be better to make the work more agreeable for the people to do.
* I know, you didn't. Coat icon!
We still have “smog”, just that it is largely invisible now (due in part to no longer burning low grade coal) and doesn’t contain anywhere as much sulphur (resulting in the formation of acid, which caused the respiratory damage).
One of the benefits of lockdown was the massive reduction in emissions which was noticeable by the decline in the orange-yellow haze just above the horizon. I note that whilst the band has returned, it still isn’t as pronounced as it was pre-lockdown.
In one way he's right. Distributed power generation is the way to go. "If" you have enough money, then for a single family. Otherwise community based. But a little help from government should be expected, not an angry declaration it's all your fault - I assume that some US taxes go towards power? Maybe not.
Taxes and regs and power - oh there AREtaxes, ON ELECTRICITY!
According to grok, avg electricity cost is 17.45 cents / kWh. California? 31.77 cents / kWh. That's right, DOUBLE!!!
This is ENTIRELY due to regulations and taxes. 31.77– (14.73 to 19.64) = 12.13 to 17.04¢/kWh where estimated reg+tax cost is:
IGFC: 4.23¢ Public Purpose Programs: 3.18–4.77¢ Wildfire Mitigation: 4–6¢ Renewable Energy Mandates: 3–5¢ Local Taxes: 0.32–0.64¢
Total: 14.73–19.64¢/kWh
"In the end, the AI plants will get their power, the rest of America maybe not so much."
Most people will still get the power they need, but they'll pay a whole lot more per kWh for it. That will likely push the rate of inflation up and it will discourage electrification of heating and transportation. But yeah, you're going to see more people disconnected for non-payment and more people going without HVAC in order to afford their electric bills.
And that's before you bring the huge job losses and reshuffling of the economy that AI will bring. Going to be difficult to afford that $500/mo electric bill for that McMansion you bought when you're unemployed and can't find work because you're over 40 and nobody wants to hire you in the "new economy".
it's actually very simple: Have the investors in the data centers build a power plant next to it. If they're smart it will be some kind of co-generation system where exhaust heat is recovered for got water, building heat, and A/C via absorption chillers [usually Lithium Bromide units]. A gas turbine system would DEFINITELY do it. Just need a good supply of fuel. That's usually less of a problem, as long as you can get a pipeline in place. Otherwise, Nuclear.
What the Feds can do is "declare an emergency" to SHUT UP the SUE-ERS and bypass ridiculous state regulations. Those LAST TWO THINGS stop MORE PROJECTS than ANYTHING!!! And, if it's on Federal land, even easier!
123GW certainly sounds like a lot, and I wondered how it compares to the US' overall industrial energy usage. So I tried the US Energy Information Administration. It turns out they think a sensible unit to measure such things is quadrillions of BTU. At that point I lost interest in my own question.
(When I regained the will to live, I worked out it's the equivalent of 100 million typical US homes.)
123GW is alot. As I write this, just the TX grid (which is almost all of TX, but not quite all) is consuming 74GW with expectation of 77GW later today. If it was necessary, the TX grid could come up with around 100GW today, with wind/solar producing around 33GW, again as I write this.
About how EVs were going to overstress the grid in the near future (ridiculously based on power needs for 100% of cars converted to EVs) were apparently worrying about the wrong thing - but their worries about the near future may accidentally been right.
I guess the good thing is if AI turns out to be a bubble/mirage, or they manage to reduce its computational needs by an order of magnitude or two ala Deepseek, all the additional electrical infrastructure built to serve it might still have a purpose.
Boosting grid capacity so the working class can charge their sad little EVs? Too difficult, too expensive, too slow. But fire it all up for AI? Now that gets the brown envelopes moving, planning permissions granted, and steel in the ground - all so the rich can generate PowerPoints glorifying their own genius and bask in the illusion of having an edge over their peers.
Most EV’s will charge overnight. Esp. If there in incentivisation like tariff/fates to drive this and other high-energy behaviour like laundry.
Also subsidies for Home Batteries with smoothing out usage profiles- esp. when partnered with solar.
A wholesale return of Economy 7 - for all electricity tariffs - is needed in the UK. All generation sources of electricity - self evidently apart from solar - are 24x365.
> Most EV’s will charge overnight.
Possibly.
Having a solar-battery system changes things so that, once the battery is full, charging the EV is the next best use for the surplus production, rather than get paid a poor daytime rate by selling to the grid.
Obviously, not everyone can do that and in winter with less solar energy, the balance will be different.
Also the large scale charging of EVs at home requires a grid upgrade, a cheaper and simpler option is to create fast charging hubs. Recently a read a piece by a US journalist who had switched from home charging to hub charging because it was cheaper, ie. his utility was charging a premium for home charging. Hence given how many people in the UK lack the facilities to have home charging (and solar panels), I would not be surprised if market forces here follow the US.
Shame self-driving cars are for practical purposes still in the future, as locating a charging hub next to the village pub, would seem to be a sound business proposition…
> Also subsidies for Home Batteries with smoothing out usage profiles- esp. when partnered with solar.
Lesson learnt from laptops and EV’s: battery management is the game changer, the more intelligent the better. Trouble is there are few installers offering anything other than a basic management system.
Aside: another lesson is home battery systems are line interactive, with a distinct break and cut over when the mains fails totally, so still, need the online UPS for the desktop.
The simple fix - prohibit datacentres from being powered from the grid - require them to use on site generation.
But as this would add to the capital cost of each datacentre you can be certain that the US lawmakers would never make such a rule (instead they will pocket backhanders to not make such a rule).
Careful what you wish for. Musk did this for his TN datacenter because he could not get grid power fast enough. He got away with violating emissions standards because it was an "emergency". I thought I saw something recently where the area close to the temporary generators were exceeding NOx limits, since no scrubbers were required. And how temporary will they be is another question.
> how temporary will they be
The school I worked at was an old army base. Large in 1917. Many of those "temporary" buildings are still in use. Some as warehouse space, but others refurbed as pretty nice offices. So "temporary" can be over a century.
When Bitcoin mining consumed vast amounts of energy, it was called environmental vandalism. When AI does the same, it’s apparently “national security” and “economic competitiveness.” Turns out, all you need is a few PowerPoints and the right buzzwords to make a resource crisis look like innovation.
Deloitte’s report lays out a scenario where AI datacenters go from 4 GW to 123 GW in just over a decade - and treats that like a natural evolution, not a choice. The proposed solutions? Tech miracles, deregulation, and - surprise - more funding. No questions asked about whether any of this is necessary or efficient.
We’re being sold a future where AI consumes more power than most countries, to deliver what? Incrementally better chatbots? Infinite ad variants? Management reports written by machines for other machines?
The real danger isn’t that the grid won’t keep up - it’s that no one’s asking whether what we’re powering is worth the burn.
If this is digital progress, it’s running on borrowed energy and borrowed time - a gold rush driven less by public good than by wealthy speculators chasing buzzwords with the capital they extracted from everyone else.
Makes you wonder what the people efficiencied out of employment by A.I., warehouse robotics, self-driving vehicles (or off-shoring*) are going to do??? … Tesco.com/Walmart Curbside cart-pushing/Uber Eatsing or Universal Basic Income won’t cover costs of rent, food, energy etc ….
*Noted even (doing very well financially) Primark intend outsourcing to Accenture (India) Finance, HR and procurement roles. Corporate greed.knows no bounds. Eliminating UK, Eire and USA Head-Office roles).
Exactly as I've been saying.
What is the actual benefit to the average person? Nothing. Not one damn thing beyond novelty. Cure for cancer? So what if the average person can't afford it.
Even worse, we know what its ultimate use will be: oppression. Just like we turned the Internet into a gild cage of bread and circuses and pay-to-learn with biased searched results combined with the goodness(/s) of cyberwar, theft and fraud in a sewer full of shouty Dunning-Krugers.
So the green madness to electrify everything runs into the problem of generating electricity! Tell me it aint so. It like the amusing stupidity of the complaint in the UK, the net zero costs in our expensive energy stop people from adopting the glorious utopian green nutter technologies. Almost as though it needs cheap, reliable and plentiful energy! The exact opposite to government policy for is it 2 decades now (UK)?
Strategies-
> technological innovation: hope and a prayer. Same as praying for a magic technology to be invented to make wind (and solar) work.
> regulatory changes: the realistic answer. Why does it take so long to do anything? Regulations.
> more funding: forever the proposed solution but only sometimes the actual solution.
"Do we have a definitive answer to the Spanish blackout yet?"
Yes it was the non-renewable power plants not doing the job they were paid and contracted to do, I.e. ramp up output when doing power surges.
Quote
"Both the government and Redeia are adamant: renewable energy was not the culprit. In fact, at the moment the grid crashed, renewables were supplying a massive 59% of Spain’s electricity. As Redeia’s own operations chief put it, “Had conventional power plants done their job, there would have been no blackout.”
https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/18/spains-blackout-cause-finally-revealed/
"According to the Spanish government"
Sounds like arse covering by both the govt and the power company.
https://gridradar.net/en/blog/post/blackout-iberian-peninsula
The graph of voltage there shows a horrific oscillation! It is something like 0.6Hz. It was also Europe wide and appears to be a known issue.
The report from the grid operator is here: https://www.ree.es/en/operation
https://d1n1o4zeyfu21r.cloudfront.net/WEB_Incident_%2028A_SpanishPeninsularElectricalSystem_18june25.pdf
This paints a different picture to the article you posted. Figure 4 is quite impressive.
From a quick scan there was a PV plant inducing some oscillations, transformers could not change taps fast enough to respond to the voltage fluctuations so tripped offline, something like 2GW of renewable generation was lost. Frequency sync with France was lost so that tripped the AC interconnect, more renewables dropped offline followed by the CCGT and nuclear tripping to save themselves from damage and the grid is dark.
Sounds like the conventional generation held on until the last seconds. It does read like a case of operator induced oscillation (disconnecting shunts when the voltage dropped) along with a known issue where in Spain the only active voltage regulation is done by the conventional power generators.
For those interested in lots of detail I found this paper on a 2016 oscillation event across Europe.
https://eepublicdownloads.entsoe.eu/clean-documents/SOC%20documents/Regional_Groups_Continental_Europe/2017/CE_inter-area_oscillations_Dec_1st_2016_PUBLIC_V7.pdf
TL;DR
One of the France/Spain interconnects tripped off causing an undamped oscillation in the grid right across Europe for 5 minutes until load on the remaining France/Spain interconnects was drastically reduced.
It looks like the Iberian grid has been prone to issues for a while.
>” renewables were supplying a massive 59% of Spain’s electricity”
According to which dashboard?
From what has been reported and speculated, I’m not interested in the half-hourly average but at the thyristor switching level, ie. 1~4 μsec resolution.
Namely it seems with the wrong type of cloud the panels were switching on and off faster than the base load producers could react and so balance things.
With the push to renewables and here in the UK to solar panel farms also being directly connected to the grid rather than through on-line batteries, I expect this sort of thing to become more common. Naturally, vested interests will ensure TPTB won’t admit to this and expose the greenwash, as solar farms are a good money maker (for their owners) due to the generous feed in tariffs…
Dallas Morning News 06/24/2025
Texas’ risk of power blackouts reduced as 100-degree days near, officials say Solar energy and large-scale batteries are shoring up the state’s grid and shrinking the risk of summer power outages, ERCOT officials said.
AUSTIN — Buttressed by capacity increases in solar and large-scale batteries, ERCOT officials predict the lowest chance of power supply emergencies in years.
You were saying?
@Gary Stewart
"Texas’ risk of power blackouts reduced as 100-degree days near, officials say Solar energy and large-scale batteries are shoring up the state’s grid and shrinking the risk of summer power outages, ERCOT officials said."
Large scale batteries still being overly expensive and under capable but the place you choose to discuss solar is... Texas. My guess is it is one of those places where solar actually can work (they get sun) compared to say the UK and similar less reliably sunny places.
This great blog post compares coding with AI to a cocaine addiction. The stinger at the end is great: 'try replacing “ai” with “cocaine” in all the posts you read about it. it’s pretty funny'
In short, the tech companies are building these massive data centers and power plants to continue supplying an addiction which they've created,
I tried coding with AI and have backed away. It's useful to show other's ideas for certain blocks but letting it produce new code didn't work so well for me and I had so many corrections and re-prompts to do. But I love it as a search engine for ideas. Maybe on a big project where it justified a lot of setup and tuning.
Currently, in the vast majority of areas (if not all), the power in play in the USA can't handle everyone getting an EV and charging at the same time. Especially not fast charging. So, just a thought, if AI is pretty widespread and requires some huge infrastructure build out, even if is mostly dissipates (which I think it might, longer term), the "build out", may give EV proponents the power actually required for "everyone" to hook up and charge and EV at the same time.
Just thinking out loud.
One of the barriers to "everyone must buy an EV" is the fact that our power networks can't handle it (even though back when it was to be forced on free Americans, those in leadership were blind to that). So, maybe a (possibly) temporal AI power overshoot, could create the EV for everyone requirement infrastructure?? Should "the forced mandate" return (which is possible).
> if AI is pretty widespread and requires some huge infrastructure build out, even if is mostly dissipates..., the "build out", may give EV proponents the power actually required for "everyone" to hook up and charge and EV at the same time.
Where I sit, in Maine, that won't happen. I'm an hour from nowhere. Nobody is going to build an AI factory here. It would be better to site outside Boston and pass the AI gibberish over optic fiber, than to build not just generators but fuel supply-lines (was coal, now tank-gas, maybe fission?) to power computers. I suspect there are many other nice (low smog and crowds) places to live with similar situation.
An electric car makes some sense here; 99% of my trips are under an hour. But I can't do laundry and charge a car without dropping voltage below 100V.
@ChrisElvidge
"Is there any reason that grass will not grow underneath and between solar panels raised on stilts and following the sun?"
I envision some sort of solar panel on huge stilts to get above the clouds to find some sun, or running on stilts to chase it wherever it has gone.
What does 2GW mean in the real world. From this WIKI article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations#List_of_largest_power_stations_and_units_within_each_country, that would be a similar size to the largest power stations in most counties.
If only I could figure out the right colour so I can start selling my Mr. Fusion
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