7 ms·

America's largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI

76 points by riffraff 1y ago

davidw 1y ago
Oregon passed a bill during the recent legislative session that aims to make users like those pay their fair share, rather than jacking up prices for everyone https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-cryptocurrency-business-environment-power-electricity/ https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-c...
- dehrmann 1y ago
  > "some of those cost increases [to Oregon electric consumers] came from data centers coming onto our shared grid" Wochele said [citation needed] The article did go on... > According to Oregon CUB, large industrial users, like data centers, that have connected to Portland General Electric’s system pay about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, or kWH, which is the unit of energy used when 1,000 watts of power is used in an hour. Residential customers in the same PGE system pay close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour But that's a disingenuous comparison. Data centers are cheaper to serve because there's ~one massive line going to one place, power use is generally more fixed and predictable, and they might be paying less because they can reduce power use during heat waves.
  - davidw 1y ago
    Be that as it may, they use up a lot of power and are pushing demand ahead of supply, which can only mean higher prices: https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/26/fast-growing-energy-demand-data-centers-pose-challenges-west/ https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/26/fast-growing-energy-d...
    - phil21 1y ago
      This was predicted far before the latest datacenter investment craze. It’s what happens when a generation of people decide to stop building electrical capacity. Writing has been on the wall for decades and the AI craze was the final tipping point. It will be scapegoated of course. I’m highly skeptical that these are great investments overall, but the fact the answer isn’t “use this money to help subsidize rapidly expanding grid capacity” is indicative of the unseriousness of society today. Ideally you use this newfound demand to build out capacity and if the demand goes away due to it being malinvestment - at least you have a bunch of shiny new grid capacity that was half paid for by stupid venture capital money.
  - gusgus01 1y ago
    It doesn't detail it in the articles and it's quite hard to find details without looking at a specific bill or a specific provider, but for my provider in NYS, the cents/kwh for electricity cost does not include transmission costs or the fee for being connected to the grid. Those are separate line items that cover the cost of the lines and infrastructure for the community. On a more arguable note, even if you only use "one big line" to connect, you're stil part of the grid and should be shouldering some of the burden to maintain that grid and not just your line.
  - Retric 1y ago
    It’s not really disingenuous as distribution from a local substation to individual customers is cheap in most cases. When you start talking 10,000+ homes on say 1 acre lots they collectively use a lot of power in a fairly small area. Most of the distribution costs occur on the other side of a substation due to efficiency losses with long distance transmission etc. A data center located next to a power plant has some advantages, but still needs power when that power plant is offline.
  - kolinko 1y ago
    If power use is an issue during heat waves, it means the construction of solar capacity was messed up somewhere in the process. In Poland/EU during summer we have electricity surplus, not deficit.
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      It just depends on how the electricity is spent. If you have lots of electric heaters and no air conditioning in your country, then the demand is high in winter and low in summer. But if it's the other way around then the demand peeks during heat waves.
      - kolinko 1y ago
        Our current solar capacity / peak generation is roughly enough to cover ACs if we had 90% (like US) generation, not 10%. On top of that we have other sources which we need anyway for winter. Oregon was very slow do adapt solar due to poor regulation and other reasons. It even says so in the article.
  - citrin_ru 1y ago
    There is a standing charge which supposed to cover distribution cost and per kWh price which is supposed to cover the energy itself. Almost 50% of my bill is the standing charge (I don’t know how high it’s for PGE though).
- roenxi 1y ago
  How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay. This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.
  - readthenotes1 1y ago
    Point of politics: China is highly motivated to build coal plants until 2030 at which point they have agreed not to raise their CO2 emissions afterwards. Of course that means that they have a perverse incentive to increase them as much as possible and tell then
    - mcintyre1994 1y ago
      Their emissions declined for the first time in the 12 months to May 25. Might be a fluke and you might be right, or they might have motivation to decrease them outside of the agreement you mentioned.
      - metalman 1y ago
        Chine built in a legislative and regulatory allowance for coal, before wind, hydro and solar took off, they have also connected to the russian natural gas pipe line network, with a second major line in the works. The final piece to there grid is a large cappacity ultra high voltage trasmission grid running east west that shipps excess solar ,wind+other, electricity accross multiple time zones, and therefore peak demand is met as one long continious wave, rather than spikes. China is putting in coal plants where there is a local demand that is somehow islanded from the main grid....big country, challenging geographical/topographical conditions, and pragmatic development, so coal(there own and others), American LNG, Irainian Oil, russian nat gas,etc, etc, etc.....but the hidden story is that just 10 years ago they were burning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for power, and met there develoment goals at the cost of the worlds worst air quality, which they have now been able to dramaticaly change.....all of the above is to suggest that China has not fluked out with "emissions"* * "emissions" is a catch all word/concept that includes efficiency,all cost's, sustainability, scalability, local air polution, and CO², CO, etc, while serving a political purpose that has been embraced by every single person in China
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  I'm cautious when I read terms like, "fair share". Perhaps the pricing is unfair in this case. However this kind of language is often deployed in political contexts. There are market based arguments for lower pricing for buying in bulk. Typically the political arguments for subsidizing industry revolve around job creation. Ultimately, the previous pricing tiers seem to have been determined by political means. This presents a contradiction for proponents of "fair share" pricing. If the previous political process resulted in an "unfair" outcome, then why is the new politically determined outcome "more fair"? What does "fair share" really mean here? Wouldn't the previous outcome suggest that the political process has issues with creating "fair" outcomes? I get the impression that Oregon Public Broadcasting would dismiss or even demonize market based metrics as "unfair". There also seems to be a vague sense that tech bros and cryptocurrency users have become class enemies for some political persuasions.
Animats 1y ago
Large data centers may have to go on interruptable power, and shut down servers during peak electricity load periods. Steel mills do that.
- phil21 1y ago
  Datacenters already do this as matter of course. It’s more or less table stakes for a grid connection in most places, certainly if you want anything resembling best rates.
kolinko 1y ago
It seems, according to the article, that the local energy operator is a bigger problem than just growing demand from AI - they don’t seem to manage the energy transformation competently, and the issues began pre-chatbots. “In 2022, PJM stopped processing new applications for power plant connections after it was overloaded with more than 2,000 requests from renewable power projects, each of which required engineering studies before they could connect to the grid”
- wcoenen 1y ago
  It is not just one grid operator (though some may be worse than others). Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last 20 years[1] because all growth has been offset by efficiency gains. The same is true in Europe, e.g. Germany[2]. As a result, grid operators and lawmakers in the west have collectively forgotten how to deal with rapid growth of electricity demand. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/383650/consumption-of-electricity-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/383650/consumption-of-el...
- phil21 1y ago
  When you are being spammed with grifters who are basically using system inefficiencies, subsidy, and dumping externalities onto the public grid there is very little way to keep up. If all the actors here were acting in good faith, I would agree. This is not a problem of well-sited and competently researched energy generation plans simply being held up by nothing but red tape and a rubber stamp. There is certainly some of that, but it’s not the whole story. Operating the grid has historically taken a lot of “gentleman’s agreements” and inertia from the proper overengineering of overbuilding from generation’s past to function. Those social constructs have largely broken down by now. When you don’t build stuff for a generation (no pun intended) you lose the ability to. Interesting times ahead indeed.
brador 1y ago
Dyson. Sphere. Why do we stall human progress and not get started on this end state tech yesterday? It is the key to a functioning singularity. And the kicker? It’s easy. We already have all necessary parts available off shelf. And it’s green, ain’t no pollution like space pollution.
CraigJPerry 1y ago
Electricity prices are static since at least the 70s https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-... Total electric production is stagnant over the same period https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity If you want to grow value in an economy, how do you do it without growing energy supply and reducing energy cost? Intensive growth (the economist's answer to infinite growth on a finite planet) can only do so much for an economy as we continually add more valuable things to spend energy inputs on. Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  There’s no value in doing more with less? Take LED lighting, an absolutely enormous energy save producing better lighting than incandescent bulbs.
  - CraigJPerry 1y ago
    >> you can only do so much > There’s no value That's not a reasonable interpretation. But even so, your example's a good one: 100w bulb lasts hundreds of hours 5w led puts out comparable light with 20x less energy AND lasts tens of thousands of hours The led is a little more intensive to make, but let's just assume it's less intensive than all the bulbs you'd need to make to burn for the same time (i'm not sure if it's true though). Seems a slam dunk in the LED's favour right? But it's still the same problem, you fall out of intensive growth and back to extensive growth as soon as you want more lighting. So are we saying there's a bar on how many lights we should ever want on the planet?
  - phil21 1y ago
    It’s valuable, it’s it’s the least valuable part of the value chain. A rounding error that looks good due to the immense scale of the numbers involved. Buys you some time. Cheap energy and delivery is many times more valuable than spending that same amount of money on efficiency. One has your engineers and builders working on solving new problems - the other is just taking existing solved problems and making them more efficient. I’d much rather be finding new and exciting ways of burning ridiculously clean and cheap megawatts of electricity than spending the same human capital on how to solve the same solved problem marginally more efficiently. For the most part the low hanging fruit has been long picked and we have long past hit the point of diminishing returns. Ideally you do both of course. You can have your devs spend a year making your code run 50% more efficiently. Or you can use those same devs to make new features and simply buy 50% more cloud compute capacity. Computers are cheap and human capital is limited. It’s interesting HN generally goes one direction here when it’s “their” economic interests on the line and the other way around when electric generation and grid capacity is the topic.
mg 1y ago
How hard would it be to power all data centers via solar panels attached to batteries? The area of solar panels needed to power data centers is .. maybe 100x the area of the data center? Only a tiny percentage of the USA is covered by data centers. Maybe 100 million square meters? That would be something like 0.001%. Then covering 0.1% of the USA with solar panels could power all data centers.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Saris 1y ago
Surely this is a problem with the power company selling more power than they have available? It's not like a datacenter just takes power with no oversight, they have to be given a tie-in to the grid of a certain size first by the power company.
thefz 1y ago
I am sure it will all be worth it for a Ghiblified photo of yourself

76 points by riffraff 1y ago

Oregon passed a bill during the recent legislative session that aims to make users like those pay their fair share, rather than jacking up prices for everyone https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-cryptocurrency-business-environment-power-electricity/ https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-c...

dehrmann 1y ago
> "some of those cost increases [to Oregon electric consumers] came from data centers coming onto our shared grid" Wochele said [citation needed] The article did go on... > According to Oregon CUB, large industrial users, like data centers, that have connected to Portland General Electric’s system pay about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, or kWH, which is the unit of energy used when 1,000 watts of power is used in an hour. Residential customers in the same PGE system pay close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour But that's a disingenuous comparison. Data centers are cheaper to serve because there's ~one massive line going to one place, power use is generally more fixed and predictable, and they might be paying less because they can reduce power use during heat waves.
- davidw 1y ago
  Be that as it may, they use up a lot of power and are pushing demand ahead of supply, which can only mean higher prices: https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/26/fast-growing-energy-demand-data-centers-pose-challenges-west/ https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/26/fast-growing-energy-d...
  - phil21 1y ago
    This was predicted far before the latest datacenter investment craze. It’s what happens when a generation of people decide to stop building electrical capacity. Writing has been on the wall for decades and the AI craze was the final tipping point. It will be scapegoated of course. I’m highly skeptical that these are great investments overall, but the fact the answer isn’t “use this money to help subsidize rapidly expanding grid capacity” is indicative of the unseriousness of society today. Ideally you use this newfound demand to build out capacity and if the demand goes away due to it being malinvestment - at least you have a bunch of shiny new grid capacity that was half paid for by stupid venture capital money.
- gusgus01 1y ago
  It doesn't detail it in the articles and it's quite hard to find details without looking at a specific bill or a specific provider, but for my provider in NYS, the cents/kwh for electricity cost does not include transmission costs or the fee for being connected to the grid. Those are separate line items that cover the cost of the lines and infrastructure for the community. On a more arguable note, even if you only use "one big line" to connect, you're stil part of the grid and should be shouldering some of the burden to maintain that grid and not just your line.
- Retric 1y ago
  It’s not really disingenuous as distribution from a local substation to individual customers is cheap in most cases. When you start talking 10,000+ homes on say 1 acre lots they collectively use a lot of power in a fairly small area. Most of the distribution costs occur on the other side of a substation due to efficiency losses with long distance transmission etc. A data center located next to a power plant has some advantages, but still needs power when that power plant is offline.
- kolinko 1y ago
  If power use is an issue during heat waves, it means the construction of solar capacity was messed up somewhere in the process. In Poland/EU during summer we have electricity surplus, not deficit.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    It just depends on how the electricity is spent. If you have lots of electric heaters and no air conditioning in your country, then the demand is high in winter and low in summer. But if it's the other way around then the demand peeks during heat waves.
    - kolinko 1y ago
      Our current solar capacity / peak generation is roughly enough to cover ACs if we had 90% (like US) generation, not 10%. On top of that we have other sources which we need anyway for winter. Oregon was very slow do adapt solar due to poor regulation and other reasons. It even says so in the article.
- citrin_ru 1y ago
  There is a standing charge which supposed to cover distribution cost and per kWh price which is supposed to cover the energy itself. Almost 50% of my bill is the standing charge (I don’t know how high it’s for PGE though).
roenxi 1y ago
How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay. This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  Point of politics: China is highly motivated to build coal plants until 2030 at which point they have agreed not to raise their CO2 emissions afterwards. Of course that means that they have a perverse incentive to increase them as much as possible and tell then
  - mcintyre1994 1y ago
    Their emissions declined for the first time in the 12 months to May 25. Might be a fluke and you might be right, or they might have motivation to decrease them outside of the agreement you mentioned.
    - metalman 1y ago
      Chine built in a legislative and regulatory allowance for coal, before wind, hydro and solar took off, they have also connected to the russian natural gas pipe line network, with a second major line in the works. The final piece to there grid is a large cappacity ultra high voltage trasmission grid running east west that shipps excess solar ,wind+other, electricity accross multiple time zones, and therefore peak demand is met as one long continious wave, rather than spikes. China is putting in coal plants where there is a local demand that is somehow islanded from the main grid....big country, challenging geographical/topographical conditions, and pragmatic development, so coal(there own and others), American LNG, Irainian Oil, russian nat gas,etc, etc, etc.....but the hidden story is that just 10 years ago they were burning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for power, and met there develoment goals at the cost of the worlds worst air quality, which they have now been able to dramaticaly change.....all of the above is to suggest that China has not fluked out with "emissions"* * "emissions" is a catch all word/concept that includes efficiency,all cost's, sustainability, scalability, local air polution, and CO², CO, etc, while serving a political purpose that has been embraced by every single person in China
palmfacehn 1y ago
I'm cautious when I read terms like, "fair share". Perhaps the pricing is unfair in this case. However this kind of language is often deployed in political contexts. There are market based arguments for lower pricing for buying in bulk. Typically the political arguments for subsidizing industry revolve around job creation. Ultimately, the previous pricing tiers seem to have been determined by political means. This presents a contradiction for proponents of "fair share" pricing. If the previous political process resulted in an "unfair" outcome, then why is the new politically determined outcome "more fair"? What does "fair share" really mean here? Wouldn't the previous outcome suggest that the political process has issues with creating "fair" outcomes? I get the impression that Oregon Public Broadcasting would dismiss or even demonize market based metrics as "unfair". There also seems to be a vague sense that tech bros and cryptocurrency users have become class enemies for some political persuasions.

Animats 1y ago

Large data centers may have to go on interruptable power, and shut down servers during peak electricity load periods. Steel mills do that.

phil21 1y ago
Datacenters already do this as matter of course. It’s more or less table stakes for a grid connection in most places, certainly if you want anything resembling best rates.

kolinko 1y ago

It seems, according to the article, that the local energy operator is a bigger problem than just growing demand from AI - they don’t seem to manage the energy transformation competently, and the issues began pre-chatbots. “In 2022, PJM stopped processing new applications for power plant connections after it was overloaded with more than 2,000 requests from renewable power projects, each of which required engineering studies before they could connect to the grid”

wcoenen 1y ago
It is not just one grid operator (though some may be worse than others). Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last 20 years[1] because all growth has been offset by efficiency gains. The same is true in Europe, e.g. Germany[2]. As a result, grid operators and lawmakers in the west have collectively forgotten how to deal with rapid growth of electricity demand. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/383650/consumption-of-electricity-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/383650/consumption-of-el...
phil21 1y ago
When you are being spammed with grifters who are basically using system inefficiencies, subsidy, and dumping externalities onto the public grid there is very little way to keep up. If all the actors here were acting in good faith, I would agree. This is not a problem of well-sited and competently researched energy generation plans simply being held up by nothing but red tape and a rubber stamp. There is certainly some of that, but it’s not the whole story. Operating the grid has historically taken a lot of “gentleman’s agreements” and inertia from the proper overengineering of overbuilding from generation’s past to function. Those social constructs have largely broken down by now. When you don’t build stuff for a generation (no pun intended) you lose the ability to. Interesting times ahead indeed.

brador 1y ago

Dyson. Sphere. Why do we stall human progress and not get started on this end state tech yesterday? It is the key to a functioning singularity. And the kicker? It’s easy. We already have all necessary parts available off shelf. And it’s green, ain’t no pollution like space pollution.

CraigJPerry 1y ago

Electricity prices are static since at least the 70s https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-... Total electric production is stagnant over the same period https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity If you want to grow value in an economy, how do you do it without growing energy supply and reducing energy cost? Intensive growth (the economist's answer to infinite growth on a finite planet) can only do so much for an economy as we continually add more valuable things to spend energy inputs on. Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
There’s no value in doing more with less? Take LED lighting, an absolutely enormous energy save producing better lighting than incandescent bulbs.
- CraigJPerry 1y ago
  >> you can only do so much > There’s no value That's not a reasonable interpretation. But even so, your example's a good one: 100w bulb lasts hundreds of hours 5w led puts out comparable light with 20x less energy AND lasts tens of thousands of hours The led is a little more intensive to make, but let's just assume it's less intensive than all the bulbs you'd need to make to burn for the same time (i'm not sure if it's true though). Seems a slam dunk in the LED's favour right? But it's still the same problem, you fall out of intensive growth and back to extensive growth as soon as you want more lighting. So are we saying there's a bar on how many lights we should ever want on the planet?
- phil21 1y ago
  It’s valuable, it’s it’s the least valuable part of the value chain. A rounding error that looks good due to the immense scale of the numbers involved. Buys you some time. Cheap energy and delivery is many times more valuable than spending that same amount of money on efficiency. One has your engineers and builders working on solving new problems - the other is just taking existing solved problems and making them more efficient. I’d much rather be finding new and exciting ways of burning ridiculously clean and cheap megawatts of electricity than spending the same human capital on how to solve the same solved problem marginally more efficiently. For the most part the low hanging fruit has been long picked and we have long past hit the point of diminishing returns. Ideally you do both of course. You can have your devs spend a year making your code run 50% more efficiently. Or you can use those same devs to make new features and simply buy 50% more cloud compute capacity. Computers are cheap and human capital is limited. It’s interesting HN generally goes one direction here when it’s “their” economic interests on the line and the other way around when electric generation and grid capacity is the topic.

mg 1y ago

How hard would it be to power all data centers via solar panels attached to batteries? The area of solar panels needed to power data centers is .. maybe 100x the area of the data center? Only a tiny percentage of the USA is covered by data centers. Maybe 100 million square meters? That would be something like 0.001%. Then covering 0.1% of the USA with solar panels could power all data centers.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Saris 1y ago

Surely this is a problem with the power company selling more power than they have available? It's not like a datacenter just takes power with no oversight, they have to be given a tie-in to the grid of a certain size first by the power company.

thefz 1y ago

I am sure it will all be worth it for a Ghiblified photo of yourself