America's Largest Power Grid Is Struggling To Meet Demand From AI (reuters.com) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: America's largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built. Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection's territory, which covers 13 states -- from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey -- serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world. The governor of Pennsylvania is threatening to abandon the grid, the CEO has announced his departure and the chair of PJM's board of managers and another board member were voted out.
The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills. Now PJM is barreling towards its next capacity auction on Wednesday, when prices may rise even further. The auction aims to avoid blackouts by establishing a rate at which generators agree to pump out electricity during the most extreme periods of stress on the grid, usually the hottest and coldest days of the year. High prices out of the auction should spur new power plant construction, but that hasn't happened quickly enough in PJM's region as aging power plants continue to retire and data center demand explodes. PJM has made the situation worse by delaying auctions and pausing the application process for new plants, according to more than a dozen power developers, regulators, energy attorneys and other experts interviewed by Reuters.
PJM says the supply and demand crunch has been caused largely by factors outside of its control, including state energy policies that closed fossil-fuel fired power plants prematurely and data center growth in "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia and other burgeoning hubs in the Mid-Atlantic. "Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply -- this is a basic economic policy," said PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields. "Right now, we need every megawatt we can get." New projects totaling about 46 gigawatts -- enough capacity to power 40 million homes -- have been cleared in recent years, "but are not getting built because of local opposition, supply chain backups or financing issues that have nothing to do with PJM," Shields said.
PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.
The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills. Now PJM is barreling towards its next capacity auction on Wednesday, when prices may rise even further. The auction aims to avoid blackouts by establishing a rate at which generators agree to pump out electricity during the most extreme periods of stress on the grid, usually the hottest and coldest days of the year. High prices out of the auction should spur new power plant construction, but that hasn't happened quickly enough in PJM's region as aging power plants continue to retire and data center demand explodes. PJM has made the situation worse by delaying auctions and pausing the application process for new plants, according to more than a dozen power developers, regulators, energy attorneys and other experts interviewed by Reuters.
PJM says the supply and demand crunch has been caused largely by factors outside of its control, including state energy policies that closed fossil-fuel fired power plants prematurely and data center growth in "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia and other burgeoning hubs in the Mid-Atlantic. "Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply -- this is a basic economic policy," said PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields. "Right now, we need every megawatt we can get." New projects totaling about 46 gigawatts -- enough capacity to power 40 million homes -- have been cleared in recent years, "but are not getting built because of local opposition, supply chain backups or financing issues that have nothing to do with PJM," Shields said.
PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.
Re: Oh no! (Score:2)
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It makes you look and sound like a white rapper.
Clearly we need more PV+storage (Score:2)
Clearly the lowest cost and fastest to deploy option needs to be added to the PJM grid, solar PV and battery storage. Considering anything else borders on insanity.
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The capacity factor for winter is too low for PV to be a major solution in that region, but it is a start. Nuclear takes too long, so that is out. Additional interconnects are just a band-aid. I would expect data centers to add combined cycle gas-fired turbines for on-site primary power as the lowest hanging fruit.
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Gas + wind is the fastest deployment to increase winter production.
As wind is not warranted, you need to deploy full gas power, BUT wind helps to lower the gas consumption by a lot. Solar helps a lot in the other seasons, sometimes making gas unnecessary.
So gas + wind + solar is the usual new power. Later batteries can lower the gas need even more.
Still, AI is growing incredible fast. Network managers will need to stop/delay some projects to ensure the network integrity is not compromised.
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Re:Clearly we need more PV+storage (Score:5, Interesting)
No new nuclear just prolongs coal and oil use (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear takes too long ...
That's due to politics. And renewables are increasing coming under the same harassing, delaying tactics, that we have seen with nuclear for so long. NIMBY, environmentalists, ... same old story as renewable move from experimental to scaling up.
That said, we should still be in an all-of-the-above mode that includes nuclear. The only sources off the table should be coal and oil. Displace the dirtiest first. If you don't include nuclear you are just prolonging coal and oil usage.
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Wow, that author is an idiot .
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Oh, right, it's because "they got popular" that gas and nuclear are disliked. What an absurd conclusion.
It couldnt be the fact that while gas is cleaner than coal it's still a major hindrance to net zero and that the cost of renewables have come down so much nuclear no longer makes anywhere near as much sense as it used to, right?
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Oh, right, it's because "they got popular" that gas and nuclear are disliked. What an absurd conclusion.
It's not just that they got popular, it was that once something moved from the theoretical to the real that the flaws came into focus. So long as something is a theory so many good things can be promoted and the bad things downplayed or simply ignored.
It couldnt be the fact that while gas is cleaner than coal it's still a major hindrance to net zero and that the cost of renewables have come down so much nuclear no longer makes anywhere near as much sense as it used to, right?
If nuclear power no longer makes sense then how is it that California wrote a big check to Diablo Canyon as a guaranteed loan to remain in operation? Why are states like Illinois and New York looking to build new nuclear power plants? There's plans for new
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If nuclear power no longer makes sense then how is it that California wrote a big check to Diablo Canyon as a guaranteed loan to remain in operation?
I did not say "no longer makes sense" I said "...no longer makes anywhere near as much sense as it used to...". Particularly as batteries continue to improve but even now nuclear shouldnt be what we're leading with due to cost. Anywhere where a proper renewable can be used in its place we should be doing so as we get far more bang for our buck with renewables. A couple of decades ago this wasnt really the case as wind and especially solar was much more expensive relative to electricity generated.
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Unless we're talking prepackaged SMRs, bespoke nuke plants are always going to take longer to build and bring online than installing solar. Setting up panels just doesn't take that long.
Solar isn't always going to be appropriate, but it could help cut demand during peak demand hours during the summer. It doesn't have to be a 100% solution for all datacenters.
Nukes will require a longer-term commitment, not to speak of regulatory hurdles.
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Setting up enough solar panels for a data center does take time. If you want 500 MW of peak output, at 18 W/sq ft, you need about a square mile of panels. But this site [nenpower.com] says one acre of land only gets you about 0.15 acres of solar panels, and other sites say a 25% average production capacity is typical. So you need about 27 square miles of land, and something like 9 GWh of storage, to generate a steady 500 MW of output from solar. For scale, the five biggest grid storage faculties in the world combined
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Unless we're talking prepackaged SMRs, bespoke nuke plants are always going to take longer to build and bring online than installing solar.
Not when the environmentalist file a lawsuit that the solar farm is going to destroy the habitat of some endangered critter. Or that the proper environment impact studies have not been performed. Etc.
As I said, the same tactics to slow nuclear are increasing being applied to wind and solar.
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I'll just add one more thought to this. For a residential or light industrial customer, putting rooftop PV plus a battery in should be a very attractive investment. This is one of those cases where the little guy has an easier solution to the problem than the big guy. The battery just needs to be big enough to cover loads for ~12 hours and you are good, bigger being better almost always though.
The problem for the grid operator is that getting GW and GWh via rooftop solar is a slow process.
Re: Clearly we need more PV+storage (Score:2)
If you live in a desert on the equator. Other places get almost no sun for months at a time.
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It is an attractive investment. I know a few people who have done it. And still others who have installed just PV with reverse-metering so they can sell excess to the grid (although that's no longer available in my state because our lawmakers are stupid.) It made sense for both groups of my acquaintances once they did their ROI calculations. The trick was, the ROI was something on the order of 5-15 years depending on deployment. A lot, LOT, of people including home owners live close to or at paycheck-t
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Indeed. Nothing else comes even close on speed and cost.
It's all right (Score:3, Interesting)
Building new electrical infrastructure will be cheap and easy now that Trump slapped tariffs on copper.
Copper tariffs (Re:It's all right) (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't long haul wires for electrical infrastructure made of steel reinforced aluminum?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Why bring up copper tariffs?
Re: Copper tariffs (Re:It's all right) (Score:5, Informative)
Good thing steel plants like Cleveland cliffs in Pennsylvania are shutting down and steel from Canada come with a 50% tax/tariff.
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The cables are aluminium, but copper is still used extensively in the other infrastructure. Especially stuff like HVDC electronics.
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Aren't long haul wires for electrical infrastructure made of steel reinforced aluminum? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Why bring up copper tariffs?
Um - on a geek site I would expect that readers would be familiar with the huge role copper plays in the grid. If you don't know this, jfgi.
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I suspect the windings on the gazillion-dollar turbines is (are?) copper.
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Alumininium (aluminum, by the time it arrives) has also got tariffs on it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/0... [cnbc.com]
Re:Copper tariffs (Re:It's all right) (Score:5, Insightful)
Your questions aren’t serious. They read like the kind of softballs lobbed by an ONN intern at a White House press briefing—preloaded to let Trump justify another half-baked tariff with a grin and a grunt. It’s less inquiry, more performance art.
Aren't long haul wires for electrical infrastructure made of steel reinforced aluminum?
Yes, they are—and congratulations on skimming the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article. But unless you’re stringing a single high-voltage line from Hoover Dam to your cousin’s Bitcoin farm, you’re missing 90% of the build. Grid expansion isn't just about transmission—it’s also about substations, transformers, switchgear, and distribution lines, all of which are copper-intensive. Pretending “long haul wires = infrastructure” is like saying a road is just Botts dots.
Why bring up copper tariffs?
Because this isn’t amateur hour. Every part of modern power expansion—especially those supporting hyperscale data centers—relies on copper. Tariffs drive up costs for the entire electrical ecosystem except the one narrow slice you cherry-picked. It's almost impressive how confidently wrong this question is.
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Transmission lines are not the whole story. They're an important component, but not the only one. But also, Trump has imposed steel and aluminum tariffs as well, so even transmission lines will be affected.
And the stupid thing is that aluminum requires a ton of electricity to produce. Quebec has ample electricity and can produce a lot of aluminum, but that's tariffed. For the US to produce more aluminum, it needs more electrical capacity... so... yeah...
Re: Copper tariffs (Re:It's all right) (Score:2)
He has also tariffed steel and aluminum. But copper is used extensively in the plants and electronics
Conservation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Conservation (Score:2)
By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.
first off, thats insane. Second, the rules only apply to us plebs, not big tech and its dork squad. Big balls 4 life!
Make them pay (Score:5, Interesting)
>"The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills."
And it shouldn't and don't have to. This situation is being caused by giant data centers with AI junk, so THEY should pay in THEIR rates for being the cause, not home consumers.
>"Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply"
Then assign the costs to the AI datacenter customers, not the home consumers. "Externalize" the problem to them so it better reflects the economic reality of what they are doing.
Re:Make them pay (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make them pay (Score:4, Informative)
That sounds good in theory, but in practice most states are doing everything they can to attract data centers in order to increase jobs and tax revenue.
Tax revenue makes sense, but jobs? DCs don't provide many ongoing jobs, so they're limited to construction, and pushing for construction booms means promoting construction busts as growth is not infinite.
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Re: Make them pay (Score:2)
Data centers don't do that, especially when you're talking about crap loads of servers clustered to perform a task, because the owners can wait for individual servers to be serviced when there are problems. See, the way the network works is that you can access the servers remotely...
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DCs create jobs in power generation: Installing solar panels, wind turbines, and maintaining the grid.
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Capitalism in practice. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.
Don't worry, you get some vague and undefined benefits from "attracting business to the state" and "boosting growth". I'm sure those will make up for the higher electricity bills.
Actually the best response is to opt out of the system and install solar/battery if you can.
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>"Capitalism in practice. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits."
There is no free market in utilities, at least not from the consumer perspective. I have no choice where I get my power. There is one power company and the rates are set by government control/approval. So try again.
>"Actually the best response is to opt out of the system and install solar/battery if you can."
Unless you can't. And the more people opt out, the fewer are left to pay for the connected infrastructure. Then that beco
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That sounds like a broken market, just the way the energy suppliers like it.
In Europe most people have a choice of energy supplier, because the infrastructure and the generation have been separated. In the UK we have a choice of dozens of national suppliers. They all have their own tariffs.
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Europe has the kind of choice where everything comes with spam. Yes also a Europe citizen.
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Energy prices in the UK are high because we are still using too much gas and nuclear, but we do have a genuine choice of very different energy suppliers. They aren't all the same, and some of them offer some quite interesting products like spot price trackers, or EVs on lease with Vehicle to Grid under their control.
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What do you say to the people who claim that we need gas because it is flexible and fast enough to cope with the high variability of renewables and we need nuclear because we're always going to need base load in quantities that are hard to get otherwise?
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It was a decade ago now that the head of the National Grid said that base load wasn't really a thing anymore.
Gas for short term demand can be replaced with batteries and other kinds of storage. For longer term it's all predictable. Demand is forecast a couple of days in advance, with longer range forecasts at lower detail level too. Then you have some standby in case something goes offline suddenly. Therefore you might keep a few gas plants around for occasional use, but most of the time you don't need them
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It was a decade ago now that the head of the National Grid said that base load wasn't really a thing anymore.
Is that why millions of Europeans lost power earlier this year? Because the concept of "base load" isn't a thing anymore? Sure, it is arbitrary, but it is better than waving your hands in the air and expecting energy to flow.
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You mean in Spain? That had nothing to do with renewables or base load.
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Energy prices in the UK are high because we are still using too much gas and nuclear
You realize the vast majority of cost in nuclear is in the construction, yes? The idea that "energy costs are high because we are still using nuclear" is absurd. Decommissioning nuclear plants will increase your costs.
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The way we do nuclear, we give them all the usual mega subsidies to get it built, and then guarantee a way above market rate price for every joule of energy produced. In other words, once built we are forced to pay high prices for every watt they make, regardless of if it is needed, regardless of if there are cheaper sources.
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Sorry, you were talking about prices today and "still using" nuclear. Your comment re: subsidies suggests you are talking about Hinkley Point, which is not yet generating power and no subsidies for said power generation are being paid.
Existing nuclear is probably the cheapest energy in your grid. The "good news" at least for you is that almost all of it is scheduled for decommissioning by the end of the decade, so you will be able to see just how "expensive" it was when your rates go up as a result.
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We are already paying towards the cost of Hinkley Point C.
All nuclear in the UK is way more expensive than wind, hydro, and solar.
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[citation needed]
The idea that new build anything is cheaper than nuclear that has been operating for three decades or more is ridiculous on its face. If I'm wrong, please, by all means, direct me to the evidence thereof.
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Remember that we are on the hook for the clean up costs too. Also the usual subsidies, free insurance, nuclear safety, the whole fuel cycle.
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So no citation then?
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Energy prices in the UK are high because we are still using too much gas and nuclear
You realize the vast majority of cost in nuclear is in the construction, yes?
ROFLMAO. Yeah, the UK is paying high prices because they have been building so many nuclear plants. Do you even hear yourself?
"The last nuclear power plant completed in the UK was Sizewell B, which began operating in 1995. It was the only Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) plant built out of a planned series of four. Construction on Sizewell B started in 1987 and it was synchronized with the national grid in February 1995, according to Wikipedia."
So one small nuclear plant build almost 40 years ago is raising
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You should have been replying to the other guy. Something screwed up with my quote block so it looks like the ignorant statement was written by me, but I was trying to quote him. Agreed it's a pretty dumb take, which was my point.
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In all cases though, EU and US, the energy supplier 'market' is a bit of an oddball because it's substantially synthetic.
Unless you are such a big account that you literally get a direct line from the generator to yo
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The way the UK market works is that there is the grid operator that ensures there is enough generation and standby, and there are the energy suppliers who buy enough for their customer's needs. The suppliers contribute to the running costs of the grid operator, as well as buying their own power.
It works okay because demand is quite predictable for the most part. Some of the suppliers are now getting into making money from the contingency supply and by load shedding their own customers with stuff like home b
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And the more people opt out, the fewer are left to pay for the connected infrastructure.
So what? If society is too expensive to live in, then society absolutely should (will) fall/fail. Are you afraid of Reality or something? You don't like living with hard truths? The only other option is suffering and death.
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I have no choice where I get my power.
I do.
I choose to pay slightly more for wind power rather than the default gas turbine power.
The diff is about a penny per kwh.
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>"I do. I choose to pay slightly more for wind power rather than the default gas turbine power."
That isn't real competition like I can buy a Honda or a Nissan or a Chevy kind of control, from different companies, with different features and prices and service. Or I can get Internet from my cable provider, or a fiber provider, or from a 5G provider, or from a satellite provider.
Of course, I am not proposing we have different competing grids/poles/connections to the home. I am just pointing out there ar
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And it shouldn't and don't have to. This situation is being caused by giant data centers with AI junk, so THEY should pay in THEIR rates for being the cause, not home consumers.
The capitalist theory of economy of scale and bulk discounts only applies when it is you doing the buying? That's not a sane solution. That is a continuation of the "I'm important screw everyone else", after all they as a customer have the exact opposite opinion on how much they should pay. The decision can't be left up to simply customers in a supply and demand equations.
Which leaves us only with the evil R word as a solution.
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The big AI companies need to pay the power companies. This is doable by charging the datac enters higher rates for increasing demand. They'll pass that cost on to OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and other customers as they should. Those companies will pass the costs back on to the consumers. Companies that lean hard in to AI to reduce the costs of having human employees should see their costs increase.
There needs to be steady federal and state investment in renewable energy. There's no reason not to build a resilie
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People are getting measurably dumber in the US. It happened in the UK too. I live in what used to be one of the best school districts. It's now almost bankrupt, and the property taxes that fund them are steadily going up.
Crypto is part of the same scam as gen AI. The people who are pumping it are also preventing anyone from regulating it, or trying to. Unions, labor organizations are the only people with the power to put any guardrails in place, and there are not enough of them in the US. Programmers need t
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>"They'll pass that cost on to OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and other customers as they should. Those companies will pass the costs back on to the consumers."
It gets passed on to consumers who use THOSE products, yes. But not ALL consumers, like it does now when these AI companies effectively raise power pricing for everyone right now.
I know quite a few people who don't use anything Microsoft, Meta, or OpenAI. Now, some of the costs will still get passed through in a lesser way for consumers using different
Which countries have figured out leccy pricing? (Score:2)
Electricity pricing in both the US and the UK does not appear to work very well: prices are high in the UK without sending really meaningful pricing signals to either users or producers, for example. No UK electricity supplier is able to offer lower prices by altering their mix of generation types, which ought to be straightforward. The government is just about to reject zonal pricing as a replacement mechanism, but it’s unclear what it might use instead.
So I’m interested in knowing whether this
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Finland and Sweden have similar pricing like they have in the UK and they have cheapest electricity in the world (about 5 eurocents per kWh on average). Note that the system in Sweden and Finland relays heavily on the large amount of water power in Sweden and Norway which balances
I don't see any problem with the pricing system in itself. For example in Finland they are constantly building new battery systems and many heat plants have converted into using electricity when it is cheap and burning stuff only w
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Lol, are you sure Finland and Sweden have this insane way to determine the price?
https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/why-does-the-price-of-gas-drive-electricity-prices/
Prices in the UK are based on the most expensive kW to make, not the average. This creates a perverse incentive to delay building cheaper renewables because you want to always run out of them so you can charge a higher price.
thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:thank god (Score:5, Funny)
make images of chicks with 5 tits.
Interesting because on my bird feeder have tits with 5 chicks.
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NIMBY-ism created this (Score:3)
One can be certain that US NIMBY-ists said "yes" to more data centres and "no" to more electricity plants: Creating this exact problem. With Trump/GOP protecting billionaires, the only electricity plants getting approval in the next few years, will be coal/gas-driven ones. Homer City, Pennsylvania, is learning the true cost of that toxic relationship
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the only electricity plants getting approval in the next few years, will be coal/gas-driven ones.
Darth Cheeto is not going to permit any coal plants--not because of anything related to him, but because no one has any plants to permit. Anything currently being discussed is a pencil exercise at best (and will almost certainly never come to fruition).
I work for a company that provides equipment for fossil power plants. There is a shit ton of gas coming in the next five years but no coal at all. New coal power is dead in the US.
It's clearly the renewables' fault (Score:2)
Let's not get ahead of ourselves (Score:1)
Has anybody seen if this AI demand is based on profitable endeavors or just companies chasing market share using excess investor cash?
Deny data centers from being built.... (Score:2)
Fucking MBAs (Score:2)
If the MBA program had also included infrastructure investment as a key tenet, rather than profit at any cost, this shit wouldn't be happening.
Ignoring infrastructure has doomed us.
Rolling blackouts of data centers (Score:4, Insightful)
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When power on the grid gets tight, start cutting off data centers until the load improves.
Man, I wish I lived in your fantasy world. It sounds rational and awesome. A shame that it is just a fantasy.
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When power on the grid gets tight, raise the price, and let the market determine who drops out.
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Auctions? (Score:2)
Why are there "auctions" for large users? Why don't they pay for kw/h the same way I do? If their demand is so variable, then they should build their own power plants or pay someone else to do so.
Why is society structured so that I pay all the externalized costs for big business? Why are businesses even allowed to externalize such a cost? Where is the benefit for society with a structure like that?
Why? (Score:1)
AI has promise, but the marketing guys got ahold of a vague description of what it can do and saw nothing but dollar signs.
One way to fix it (Score:2)
Force big box store developers to cover the roofs with solar panels. Easy source of renewable energy. Malls, shopping centers, office buildings, etc. make it mandatory per the building code.
So shut the AI down (Score:2)
It's not as though utilities don't have dedicated switches and monitoring on the lines that go to major data centres. So serve notice to the data centres - keep your power consumption below X, or risk losing it altogether at times of peak demand and/or low production.
How about... (Score:3)
RAISING the rates on the largest users of power? I mean, my rates go up during the hours of most draw on the grid, so why not charge data centers *higher* rates?
then the peasants will just have to pay more (Score:2)
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The only place with a serious water issue is California
Thanks for making it clear that you're a fucking ignoramus and that everything you say can safely be ignored.
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I swear on my child's eyes, "they" are not out to get you. "They" are not trying to kill you or do anything else to you.
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice".
- Comment posted on Slashdot by Pig Hogger (10379).
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You are a moron. You do not even exist in their world. If you are destroyed, it is not personal. You don't fucking matter.
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Water? wtf? The only place with a serious water issue is California
I guess you forgot about Arizona. But of course you did since you are just flapping your gums. Ever hear of the Central Arizona Project?
Many of the western states are having issues, including Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, etc.