As recently discussed at the CPU Board meeting regarding the Integrated Resource Plan, the region is expected to be short in power capacity. The following article outlines how the tech industry is driving up demand:
“The Pacific Northwest’s power grid could be pushed beyond its limits in just five years by the staggering electricity demands of the booming data center industry, regional power planners recently reported.
A forecast by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council highlights a looming conflict between an increasingly digital world and utilities’ capacity to meet surging power demand. The forecast cautioned that data centers could consume as much as 4,000 average megawatts of electricity by 2029 — enough to power the entire city of Seattle five times over.
In that scenario, the region would need to find more sources of power to avoid a shortfall. Otherwise, the Northwest will struggle to keep lights on while also phasing out fossil fuels and meeting environmental mandates to protect salmon, according to a council report presented Tuesday in Portland.
Data centers, the backbone of the modern internet, are warehouses of humming servers that store information relied upon by nearly every online user, and are becoming increasingly important as use of artificial intelligence grows. The International Energy Agency predicts data center power demand worldwide will double by 2026, in large part due to AI.
The data center industry has particularly boomed in Washington and Oregon, which offer cheap hydroelectric power for an industry that requires steady, round-the-clock power. Washington’s data centers began popping up in the mid-2000s, when tech companies began building massive warehouses in Central Washington’s agricultural counties with the help of tax incentives designed to bring tech jobs to rural areas.
Data centers draw vast amounts of power to cool computer servers that run continuously to feed the demand for search, video streaming and audio.” (Seattle Times, L Ramadan, 07.10.24)