Five years ago, Virginia passed a law that requires 100% renewable energy on the grid by 2050.
But Virginia is also home to more data centers than anywhere else in the country, and those new buildings require a whole lot of power.
“All through the 2000s, electricity demand in the state hardly grew at all,” said William Shobe, professor of public policy at the University of Virginia. “And then it really took off.”
5 questions with William Shobe
Are you able to quantify just how much the electricity demand has increased in the five years since the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed?
“We’re tracking it pretty closely. For the last couple of years, data center demand by itself has been growing 25% to 30% a year, and data center electricity use in the state is now bigger than all of our industrial demand, and it’s closing in on residential demand. In the next year or so, data center electricity use in Virginia will pass all use of electricity in homes around the state. So it’s growing pretty fast. It’s not unprecedented. We had growth like this back in the [1960s]. Back in the 60s, electricity demand grew 7%, 8%, 10% a year, almost through the whole decade. But it hasn’t been like that for a long time.”
Some people are calling Virginia the data center capital of the world. Is it really that much? What’s driving all this interest in this new infrastructure in Virginia?
“It really is that much. Part of it has to do with the history of how the internet started. It was a very good place for data centers to connect up to the internet. And I don’t think anybody really expects that to slow down anytime soon.”
With the cost of power going up, this is an issue that’s evolving politically. The incoming Gov. Abigail Spanberger campaigned on energy affordability. Now, Democrats control the state government. What solutions do they have to not only maintain their climate goals, but also to meet this demand for power?
“We have had periods when electricity generation grew pretty fast. So that’s not unprecedented by itself, trying to do it without causing a lot of damage to the environment and a lot of health effects because of the generation. The emissions from the generation is the new challenge because we’d like to have the added generation to support the data centers, but without all the health effects and environmental effects of those data centers.
“The modeling we’ve done indicates we can get there. It’s possible to do, but we just have to give the right incentives for generating clean energy and expanding the supply without the emissions that used to go along with the expanded supply.”
Do you think there’s any way to meet that demand without more natural gas?
“It depends on whether you’re talking about the short run or the long run, because sales of electricity have been going up so fast. It may be that we need to expand the use of natural gas in the short run, but Virginia generates almost 10% of its electricity from solar energy now, and that percentage is growing.
“From year to year, we’re adding quite a lot of generation. Next year, we have a big new wind farm that’s going to be coming online, and we have a pretty strong offshore wind resource that we can tap. Plus, there are plans to add new types of nuclear generation to the mix. The answer to your question is that, in the longer run, it does seem to be possible. We just have to have the right incentives in place.”
When you look at this broadly across the country, what do you think it means for efforts to slow down climate change now that the cost of energy is becoming such a major political issue?
“In Virginia, non-emitting energy resources like solar, for example, that’s our cheapest new source of energy. So if we were just picking new sources of energy along that cost continuum, we want to build plenty more of that solar.
“Now we need a mix of different types of generation. We need the intermittent renewables; we need some base load power. But the development of new technologies, especially new nuclear, and people are talking about developing directional drilling technology that gives us the ability to tap geothermal power. In the short run, we have good technologies we can use in the longer run. There are new sources coming along that can substitute for what we’ve been using.
“We have the development of a fusion energy power plant in central Virginia, a proposed one. So by the time we get out to the point where we have really binding constraints on our ability to meet new energy demand, we’re going to have new options available. So I think it’s really partly a matter of making sure that we’re open to those new technologies as they become available, and we’re ready to incorporate them in our energy mix.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Chris Bentley produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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