America Needs More Gas Power, Not Wind, AEP!
China’s Useful Idiot is peddling his fake news again!
From the Telegraph:
The US is in danger of losing the global AI race for the most banal and careless of reasons: it is critically short of electricity.
The country is sitting on a neglected pre-modern grid that cannot meet surging power demand for data centres, cryptocurrencies, the reshoring of semiconductor plants and the proclaimed revival of the American industrial base.
Nor can it meet the needs for air conditioning through hotter and more humid summers. While we all talk about AI, the chief cause of rising electricity use last year was for cooling.
Full story here.
The article itself is hopelessly confused, talking one minute about the lack of grid transmission capacity, and then the next of available generation.
It is, of course, all Donald Trump’s fault, despite the fact that the nation’s regional grids have been neglected and underinvested for decades.
But AEP’s answer to all of this is to build more wind and solar farms – “because that is what China is doing”!
As usual, AEP tries to paint China in a glowing but false light. The data shows that the share of wind and solar in the electricity mix in the two countries is very similar – 18% in China versus 17% in the US.
And building a big offshore wind farm off the New York coast, as he suggests, would not help Texas in the slightest, as there is no national grid to move the power around the country.
But America’s real problem lies in the gradual phasing out in the last few years of reliable dispatchable generation – coal and gas – partly by design and partly because of competition from subsidised renewables. Nor has there been any market incentive to build new gas power plants for the same reasons.
AI datacentres need reliable 24/7 power, which they certainly won’t get from intermittent renewables.
In the last seven days, wind power has fluctuated between 12 and 64 GW, against peak demand of 588 GW.
Meanwhile although solar power peaks at 95 GW, it drops away to nothing for 12 hours at a time in autumn.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48
Coal and nuclear provide about a quarter of demand as a reliable baseload. But it is only the availability of gas power that keeps the grid going at all during those times when wind and solar power fail to do the job.
But according to Grok, coal and gas power capacity have declined from 723 GW in 2010, to 685 GW in 2023:
Not a huge drop, except that demand for electricity has increased by 6% over the same period, an average of 27 GW. We therefore have in effect a shortfall of 65 GW.
Currently the grid can just about cope, but extra demand from datacentres can only be met by a rapid and massive rollout of new gas power stations around the country.
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