During a scorching Memorial Day weekend in May, the air conditioning abruptly shut off for more than 100,000 people across New Orleans. After a power line malfunctioned, the local grid operator had instituted unplanned rolling blackouts to avoid more widespread outages.
Meanwhile, one state over in Mississippi the grid had such a glut of electricity that prices dipped into negative territory.
“We’re so closely located, and we had no ability — truly — to import generation,” Davante Lewis, a commissioner on the Louisiana Public Service Commission, complained at a hearing a few weeks later. “We need greater interregional transmission and we needed it, probably, two years ago.”
But the sweeping report the Department of Energy released this week on the reliability of the United States grids placed little focus on the potential to modernize, upgrade, and expand the aging system for funneling electrons around the country.
Instead, the Trump administration’s 73-page study modeled the effects of dramatic scenarios in which surging electricity demand eclipses the supply of steady generation. Despite noting that regional planners were unlikely to approve grid connections for data centers that “jeopardize the reliability of the system,” the analysis — conducted at the direction of an executive order from President Donald Trump — concludes that the planned closures of coal- and gas-fired power stations risk blackouts.
This, according to Christina Hayes, executive director of the advocacy group Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, was a squandered opportunity, especially given the siloed nature of today’s regional grids.
“By focusing on generation, the report missed a terrific opportunity to assess the value that transmission provides related to supporting reliability and resilience within and between regions,” Hayes told Latitude Media. “If we’re really going to dig deep to bring as much power on as quickly as possible, transmission is the best option.”
The research, which effectively lays out the worst case scenario for the U.S. grid in the next decade, makes some questionable assumptions. Its estimates for how much load growth data centers would drive is in line with what experts anticipate, but the report projects even more demand from other sources — despite the Trump administration’s cuts to programs meant to promote electrification of heating, manufacturing, and transportation.
“While 50 gigawatts of data center load seems reasonable, they also add 51 GW of non-data center load without a clear justification,” Michael Goggin, a vice president at the consultancy Grid Strategies, told Latitude Media. “That would be well above recent load growth rates, and the gutting of incentives for electrification and cleantech manufacturing in last week’s bill likely kills a lot of that load growth.”
The report also seemed to underestimate how much baseload generation is forecasted to come online by 2030. The final version claims that “only 22 GW would come from firm baseload generation sources.” But the Energy Information Administration’s projections show more than 43 GW of non-renewable and non-battery capacity additions by the end of 2030, plus nearly 66 GW of batteries.
When projecting where data centers might come online in the coming years, the report raised eyebrows by forecasting low growth in both California, home to Silicon Valley, and the Northeast.
“It’s interesting the way that they allocated it,” Isaac Orr, vice president at the conservative-leaning Always On Energy Research, told Latitude Media. “You’re looking at California having the same data center demand growth as the Southwest Power Pool,” “And the New England and New York ISOs not having any data center demand? I don’t understand those assumptions.”
Still, he said, “directionally, this report is right.”
“If you’re in a situation where margins are already tight, retiring existing assets is not going to get you where you need to go,” Orr said. “Even if you’re adding nameplate capacity from wind and solar that exceeds the value of what’s retiring, they don’t provide the same value. So of course you’re going to have a shortfall if you don’t replace the coal and gas capacity that’s retiring with something that has the same capacity.”
The policy context
In April, Trump issued a series of executive orders directing Energy Secretary Chris Wright to develop a process for keeping existing power stations open. In May, Trump ordered coal plants slated for closure in Michigan and Pennsylvania to remain online. It’s part of a broader push to restore the country’s coal industry as his administration looks to expand coal mining on public lands.
Since triggering the process to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords on his first day back in office, Trump has taken aim at virtually every major federal policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Just this week, he hired three scientists to top federal positions who doubt the scientific consensus that adding emissions from fossil fuels and industrial agriculture to the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat and changes the planet’s historic weather patterns.
Even so, the Energy Department’s report has some merit, said Charles Hua, executive director of the nonprofit PowerLines that advocates for affordable and reliable electricity.
“On the high level, the objective outlines are very aligned with what we think are key priorities: economic development, affordability and reliability,” he told Latitude Media. But he agrees with Hayes that there’s a key gap: moving power more effectively within and between regions.
“What’s missing in this is the transmission and distribution piece,” he said. “The nearest-term way to do that is to get more out of our existing grid infrastructure and to harden, improve and modernize our existing grid infrastructure while working on the structural challenges of building new grid infrastructure.”
