An anonymous reader cites a report in The Week Magazine. New technological advancements seem to be creating new problems across America. There is an impending and catastrophic power shortage. The advent of these technologies, such as green factories and data centers, has renewed concerns that America will run out of electricity. These concerns also come at a time when America's aging power grid is in dire need of repair. Highly publicized incidents like the 2021 Texas power outage, partially caused by crypto farming, have exposed how vulnerable the country's power supply is, especially during emergencies. There have also been warnings from tech moguls like Elon Musk, who said the U.S. will run out of power and artificial intelligence transformers by 2025. The question arises: Is the United States really in danger of going dark in order to maintain green sustainability?
The emergence of new technologies means that demand for electricity is rapidly increasing across the country. In Georgia, “industrial power demand is surging to record highs, with electricity use projected to be 17 times higher over the next 10 years than in just the recent past,” Evan Halper wrote in the Washington Post. told the paper. Northern Virginia “would need the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to provide all of its electricity.” [its] Halper said Texas faces similar issues; This demand is creating a “race to squeeze more power out of an aging power grid.” At the same time, companies are “encouraging commercial customers to exit.” “We're going to great lengths to sequester energy sources, including building our own power plants,” Halper said, adding that much of that “has to do with rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which will “We are promoting the construction of large-scale warehouses of computing infrastructure.” This infrastructure requires significantly more power than traditional data centers, and the crypto farms mentioned above also consume large amounts of power.
Climate change is also having a negative impact on sustainability efforts. A recent report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation estimates that more than 300 million people in the United States and Canada could face power shortages in 2024. We also found that electricity demand is currently growing faster than at any time in the past five years. That's partly because “the push to electrify heating and transportation systems, including electric vehicles, is creating a new winter peak in electricity demand,” Jeremy Hsu wrote in New Scientist. Stated. One of the main challenges in these sustainability efforts is the push to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable electricity. Natural gas is often seen as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy, but it also has unintended consequences for the power grid. Systems that deliver natural gas “do not have to meet the same reliability standards as the electric grid, and in many cases there is no real way to guarantee that fuel will be available at gas plants in the winter,” The Natural says. Thomas Rutigliano says. The Resource Defense Council told the new scientist: As a result, “North American electricity supply has become virtually inseparable from the natural gas supply chain,” John Moura of the Electric Reliability Council of North America told New Scientist. As such, “a reliable power supply that reduces the risk of power outages will depend on the implementation of future natural gas industry reliability standards,” which may be easier said than done.