US power demand now projected to grow by 128 GW by 2029! Last year, Grid Strategies broke the news that utilities and system operators had doubled their forecasts for electric demand growth from 2022 – a sudden jump driven by data centers and industrial load, among other factors.🧵 1/4 🔌💡 - ThreadSky

wilson-energy.bsky.social • 87 days ago

US power demand now projected to grow by 128 GW by 2029!

Last year, Grid Strategies broke the news that utilities and system operators had doubled their forecasts for electric demand growth from 2022 – a sudden jump driven by data centers and industrial load, among other factors.🧵 1/4
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Comments

you-cant-eat-money.bsky.social•86 days ago

Massive demand for air conditioning with the record-breaking heatwaves?

michael-thomas.bsky.social•87 days ago

Crazy! Appreciate all the work y'all have done on this topic.

laughlax.bsky.social•86 days ago

How much of this is utilities placing a too-high expected completion rate on their large load requests?

brendan.bsky.social•86 days ago

I also think a lot of it is data center cos (especially those who lease out rack space) who are trying to max out power capacity to a site before they have tenants. It’s just buying an option, but the load is far from certain even if the site gets built.

laughlax.bsky.social•86 days ago

Exactly. That category of data center load requests can be just as "speculative" as the generation interconnection queue.

andrewcarter.bsky.social•86 days ago

Until they're not.

agelston.bsky.social•86 days ago

Place your bets!

andrewcarter.bsky.social•86 days ago

bpbartholomew.bsky.social•86 days ago

cxcarroll.bsky.social•85 days ago

🤣

jameshewett.bsky.social•86 days ago

🤣

wilson-energy.bsky.social•87 days ago

Today's News: We see that projections have more than doubled again. 2029 load is expected to hit 947GW – representing 15% growth in demand in just 5 years. The scale of expected load growth has increased fivefold over two years.
Read the Report: https://gridstrategiesllc.com/reports/
🧵 2/4
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jpv.switch.box•86 days ago

If no one else is going to do it, I guess I'll cosplay as @volts.wtf and chime in with the obvious counterpoint: utilities are directly incentivized to inflate their forecasts, because building stuff is how they make money. (Also, we're at the fever pitch stage of the hype cycle re: data centers) 🔌💡

demonhelp.bsky.social•86 days ago

We all playing the greater fool theory. The big que is are we near peak or this bubble is gonna inflate like our bellies from thanksgiving to Christmas.

#energysky

kevinleecaster.bsky.social•85 days ago

Regardless of how the WWW oligarchs' intentions related to data centers works out, demand for electricity has to drastically increase in order for us to maintain economy and quality of life as we decarbonize.

wilson-energy.bsky.social•87 days ago

In 2022, the projections were only 23 GW of growth by 2029. In 2023, it jumped to 39, and now it’s at 128 GW by 2029.

I ran polls on LinkedIn and #EnergySky, and only 6 of 26 responses correctly expected the number to be larger than 128 GW. More people thought it would be less than 50 GW!
🧵 3/4
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monewsdaily.bsky.social•86 days ago

Which is why I don't really think #EnergySky is all that great. Very myopic without a lot of cross pollination in other areas. @tonyseba.bsky.social and @aukehoekstra.bsky.social on the other hand have been quite good in sentinel intelligence tying things together.

wilson-energy.bsky.social•87 days ago

There are real risks to America’s economic, technological, and geopolitical leadership if the grid can’t keep up with demand. Large-scale electric transmission expansion is the most cost-effective way to reliably power this growth through more efficient use of existing resources.🧵 4/4
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patb2009.bsky.social•87 days ago

Ayn Rand and jebus are not going to build a new grid

chrisrobertson.bsky.social•86 days ago

👀welp

krrabago.bsky.social•87 days ago

This has to be taken seriously. As does the fact that “forecasts” often come freighted with many agendas.

pattydurand.bsky.social•86 days ago

Please do a research study on false utility load growth projections so we know what’s real and what isn’t based on what they’ve said would happen in the past.

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