Energy experts gathered in Raleigh this week for the annual Making Energy Work Conference, hosted by the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.
“The biggest thing right now, everybody — Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina — everyone’s chasing data centers. And particularly data centers to support AI,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Data centers can provide a big boost to local tax revenue, but at the cost of higher power bills. They’re also one of the main reasons Duke Energy forecasts energy demand soaring at an unprecedented rate.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to new data centers. Developers often place bids for the same project in multiple states, and local opposition to new data centers has halted progress on some.
“Load growth’s not a new phenomenon. You can look back from 1950 to the early 2000s, and that was the norm,” said David Neal, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC. “It’s also important to remember that we’re pretty bad at predicting the future.”
An SELC analysis of past Duke Energy resource plans showed that the utility consistently overestimated energy needs from 2008 to 2016 when forecasting load growth.
Wind energy trundles along in the Atlantic
President Trump has pumped the brakes on wind energy development in the U.S. But there’s still some hope for wind energy in the Atlantic — even if that’s not in North Carolina.
The federal government has stalled new wind turbines all along the East Coast. That includes two projects off the coast of Wilmington. However, Karly Brownfield with Carolinas Southeastern Wind Coalition said wind isn’t totally dead in the Atlantic waters.
“Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind has … as of last week … installed every single one of their 176 monopile foundations for that project,” Brownfield said.
Dominion’s wind farm off the coast of Virginia Beach is scheduled to come online early next year.
Despite conservative opposition at the federal level, Tom Shumaker, the state director for North Carolina Conservatives for Clean Energy, said there’s a lot for the right to like about wind energy.
“Those foundations create artificial reefs. This is tremendous marine wildlife habitat,” Shumaker said. “This is new opportunities for commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, local tourism, just sitting there ready to go.”
