Powering data centers is about to become a significant issue in the United States as demand for electricity to run them is increasing dramatically. To cope, utility companies are planning to build new methane-fired generating stations and even restart a half completed nuclear power plant in South Carolina. Many residents of traditionally Black communities fear the expansion of thermal generation will place additional burdens on their cities and towns. Ninety years ago, FDR and South Carolina Governor Blackwood worked together to bring electricity to rural South Carolina. But to build the power plant that would make it happen, they destroyed the homes of 900 Black sharecropping families. With them, 6,000 graves — including those of formerly enslaved people — were removed or desecrated. Today, as South Carolina races to power its digital future, history seems to be repeating itself, with Black communities once again paying the price for progress, says Canary Media.
Last year, the parent companies of Facebook and Google pledged more than $4 billion for new data centers in South Carolina. While state officials work to craft legislation to attract these new projects, residents and community advocates say this will ramp up environmental hazards, increase utility bills, and exacerbate health disparities. Meanwhile, experts say the economic promise of AI remains a mirage for Black communities, widening wealth gaps, and displacing workers. “Most Black households, especially rural ones in the South, are not using AI or as much computing power, but they are having to pay for that demand in both money and dirty air,” said Shelby Green, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute.
Energy experts argue that the growing electricity demands from data centers are prolonging America’s dependence on dirty energy sources. Nationwide, at least 17 fossil fuel generators scheduled for closure are now delayed or at risk of delay, and about 20 new fossil fuel projects are being planned to meet data centers’ soaring energy demands. By 2040, South Carolina projects the need for four new fossil fuel power plants. A Black community in Colleton County, South Carolina, recently celebrated the closing of a coal-fired power plant that was connected to poor health outcomes for residents. But now the state proposes to convert that very site into a methane-fired power plant to meet the energy demands of data centers.
Every year, the pollution from natural gas plants is responsible for approximately up to 12,000 early deaths in the US, studies show. “If you mapped all of the existing power plants in South Carolina, they’d follow the old path of one of the foundational pillars of the American economy through South Carolina — plantations and enslaved labor. We’ve seen the repeated pattern of these threats in our community,” says Xavier Boatwright, an activist who has worked on environmental issues in rural South Carolina for years.In South Carolina, and across the country, statistically, Black people use the least amount of electricity, yet experience the highest energy burden — meaning a larger share of their income goes toward energy bills.
Tech companies like Google are making huge profits by securing special deals with utility companies. Last year, the company inked a deal in South Carolina to pay less than half the rate that households pay for electricity. That low rate, coupled with tax breaks and state subsidies, are used to lure big tech companies. However, these deals force local families and households to cover the cost of building extra power plants, meaning everyday customers end up footing the bill. It’s just another example of the “heads we win, tails you lose” mentality adopted by corporations and governments that puts extra financial burdens and health risks on communities of color.
Tom Wilson of the Electric Power Research Institute tells Canary Media there is a way that some of the need for more thermal generating stations could be avoided. It’s called demand response, and it is a concept familiar to those who promote more distributed energy resources, virtual power plants, and EV chargers. In its simplest terms, it means that if data centers would agree to throttle back their energy usage somewhat during periods of peak demand, the need for those new generation resources could be reduced considerably. “Data centers are not just load. They can also be grid assets,” he said. His most recent project is called DCFlex — which stands for “data center flexibility.” It is a collaborative effort to get data centers to “support the electric grid, enable better asset utilization, and support the clean energy transition.”
That won’t be easy. From Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” to emerging hot spots in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, and beyond, utilities are being inundated with demands for round-the-clock power from data center projects that can add the equivalent of a small city’s electricity consumption within a few years. Meanwhile, it usually takes four or five years to connect new power plants to the grid. Flexibility could make a big difference, because the impacts of massive new utility customers like data centers are tied not just to how much power they need but specifically to when they need it. Utilities live and die by the few hours per year when demand for electricity peaks — usually during the hottest and coldest days. By refraining from using grid power during those peak hours, new data centers could significantly reduce their impact on utility costs and carbon emissions and unlock tens of gigawatts of “spare” capacity on US grids, according to a recent analysis.
Such flexibility won’t solve all the power problems that the massive expansion of data centers could cause, but for utilities struggling to plan and build the generation and grid infrastructure needed to support data centers, flexibility is worth exploring because data centers could make their operations flexible a lot faster than utilities can expand power grids and build power plants. Brian Janous, co-founder of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which develops “clean-powered, ready-to-build sites for the largest electric loads,” such as data centers. “You need to understand, when a utility says, ‘I can’t get you power,’ what they mean is, ‘There are certain hours of the day I can’t get you power,’” he said. The data center industry “lacks visibility into this, which is kind of shocking,” given that data center flexibility is nothing new.
Janous thinks many utilities are eager for such flexibility propositions today. One unnamed utility executive told him recently that the backlog for connecting large data centers to its grid is now at least five years. “I asked, ‘What if the data center could be dispatchable?” And he said, ‘Oh, we could connect them tomorrow. But nobody’s asking me that.’” He outlined how that could work. Data centers would use onsite power generation or storage to replace part of the electricity they would otherwise get from the grid or use less electricity during peak hours. Using batteries to store electricity for later use would be a key part of the strategy.
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