Comment: In Australia, the discussion over the urgent need to upgrade Australia’s.power grid infrastructure is over the need to incorporate new sustainable power sources, supporting EVs. as well as the necessity to replace aging power plants, many of which are coal powered. In America however, it’s another far bigger challenge, with successive federal administrations essentially “kicking the can down the road” so that now the US ranks 13th in the world for having a modern national infranstructure . Estimates of the cost of upgrading America’s power grid vary but can be as high as $2.59 trillion by 2035. If America hopes to catch up with the world’s largest electricty producer; China, which produces approximately 30% of the world’s electricity production they have one hell of a long way to go. SNIP
Excerpt from The Washington Post,
AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up. Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades. Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma. The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants. “When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
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