Renewables’ Head-On Collision With Reality

Mr. Walsh told me: “The country is woefully short of electricity now with the displacement of coal and gas by the Biden Administration. The Supreme Court handed coal a victory—but the perception and behavior are still to drive coal out of the market. Only continuous load, fossil fuel plants can provide the energy growth and reliability needed, and data centers and population growth are driving the demand for energy growth.”

AI Needs Data, Data Needs More Data Centers, Data Centers Need More Energy

The battle for artificial intelligence (AI) dominance is a key part of the data center boom. AI needs voluminous and growing data, data needs data centers, and data centers need energy. The routers, servers, and air conditioning for the resilience of these data centers must have reliable, constant pull energy.

This successful legislative push was only one step on a long pathway to small modular reactors, and according to Mr. Walsh, this process could possibly be another 10 or more years before energy is delivered out of this initiative. At 7 percent growth in energy demand increase per year, the math is not adding up.

The United States is the dominant world maker of natural gas-powered power plant turbines, and these have a low Chinese component dependency. At some point in the future, small modular nuclear reactors may be part of the solution; however, data centers need energy now, and the only realistic pathway forward is fossil fuels, despite the unicorn promises of “renewables.”

Natural gas turbines are the easiest to build and deploy to support the voracious energy growth of data centers.