Data centers

18Aug

Hidden in Plain Sight: Existing Coal Plants offer the Generation that Today Demands

Thanks to this new age of electricity demand and power-hungry data centers, the U.S. currently has record amounts of electricity generation in development. But that build out is getting both harder and more expensive, in the face of demand that waits for no one. What’s the holdup? Baseload power projects requiring natural gas turbines are […]
05Aug

The Race for Power Leads Back to Coal

As demand for electricity from AI data centers soars, the data center industry has already indirectly been relying on the coal fleet to meet their soaring power needs. Now, data companies are getting directly into the game, contracting for power from coal plants and even trying to buy coal units. Utilities too aren’t just delaying […]
15Apr

PJM’s Power Crunch: Why Coal Is Critical to Closing a 60-Gigawatt Gap

As the data center boom advances, electricity grids across the country are scrambling to find new generation. While a growing number of data centers are turning to behind the meter solutions – proposing to generate their own power on site – regional grids are also facing a tsunami of new demand. Nowhere is that truer […]
01Apr

Today’s Gas Glut, Tomorrow’s Price Shock

Despite the U.S. emerging as the world’s largest oil producer and a net exporter, consumers are finding out record U.S. production is little buffer against a global oil shock. U.S. oil, gasoline and diesel prices are surging from the conflict in the Middle East. Surprisingly, domestic natural gas prices have not jumped. In fact, they’ve […]
18Mar

New U.S. Coal Capacity is Coming

The U.S. hasn’t opened a new coal power plant since 2013. That’s about to change. This week, the proposed 1.25-gigawatt Terra Energy Center in southeast Alaska announced it has secured an agreement with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries Power Systems for roughly $1 billion in utility-scale boilers. It’s the first such order for a U.S. […]
14Jan

An AI Power Tipping Point

The AI and data center boom is now driving the electricity and affordability crisis. Just this week, President Trump took to Truth Social to show he’s focused on the challenge, writing, “I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers.” He added that his team is now working with technology companies […]
17Sep

Can West Virginia Come to the Rescue?

“We must become the indispensable battery of the nation,” West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey said last week when he announced a plan to expand the state’s generating capacity to 50 gigawatts (GW) by 2050 from roughly 15 GW today. Morrisey’s plan, called “50 by 50,” envisions not just an effort to maintain West Virginia’s existing […]
03Sep

Powering the AI Moment

Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers—each with the electricity needs of entire cities or states—to serve AI is rapidly transforming electricity markets and our electricity grid.    As The Wall Street Journal recently observed, utilities are receiving requests for extraordinary amounts of power: “Take American Electric Power, a big utility that serves 11 […]
25Jun

Will the Power Keep Flowing?

What a week for congressional attention on grid reliability. A brutal heatwave is pushing the supply of power to its very limit in grids stretching across much of the country. Outages have already hit parts of New York City, while the PJM Interconnection and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) grids have both issued “maximum generation […]
11Jun

Aligning Energy and Regulatory Policy with the AI Moment

It has become hard to overstate the impact AI and data centers are having on the power sector. This is an industrial revolution on an extraordinary scale. At a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference on grid reliability last week, regulators and grid operators once again sounded the alarm over the challenges they collectively face […]