PORTLAND — The Pacific Northwest’s power grid could be pushed beyond its limits in just five years by the staggering electricity demands of the booming data center industry, regional power planners recently reported.
A forecast by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council highlights a looming conflict between an increasingly digital world and utilities’ capacity to meet surging power demand. The forecast cautioned that data centers could consume as much as 4,000 average megawatts of electricity by 2029 — enough to power the entire city of Seattle five times over.
In that scenario, the region would need to find more sources of power to avoid a shortfall. Otherwise, the Northwest will struggle to keep lights on while also phasing out fossil fuels and meeting environmental mandates to protect salmon, according to a council report presented Tuesday in Portland.
“It’s big and it’s uncertain,” said Jennifer Light, the council’s director of power planning. “But we’re kind of prepared to think through strategies on how to figure this out.” …
The data center industry has particularly boomed in Washington and Oregon, which offer cheap hydroelectric power for an industry that requires steady, round-the-clock power. Washington’s data centers began popping up in the mid-2000s, when tech companies began building massive warehouses in Central Washington’s agricultural counties with the help of tax incentives designed to bring tech jobs to rural areas.
Data centers draw vast amounts of power to cool computer servers that run continuously to feed the demand for search, video streaming and audio.
The demands of data centers only exacerbate the need for electricity as the region weans its vehicles, appliances and industries off oil and natural gas. The need for reliable power also becomes more important as extreme weather events become more common.
Meanwhile, past forecasts have underestimated the surge in data center power use, Light said. …
How the region will accommodate such significant growth is something that energy planners will have to address in the coming years.
“I think it’s weighing fairly heavily” on utilities, Morrissey said. “It’s a question we’re gonna have to grapple with a lot in the next power plan.”
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