“We’re going to need to build more transmission faster than any time we have in the last 70 years as a region,” said Robert Cromwell, who consults with Northwest power utilities. He said the region is already flirting with rolling blackouts because peak energy demand is already near the region’s capacity to provide electricity.
Data center demand is soaring because of artificial intelligence, which uses massive amounts of electricity for advanced computation. These powerful machines already consume more than 10% of all of Oregon’s power and forecasters say data center power use will be at least double that by 2030 — and perhaps some multiple higher.
If the Northwest fails to add enough generation and transmission to meet the growing energy needs, Cromwell said periodic blackouts are inevitable at times power demand is at its greatest. He used an industry term, “rotating load shedding,” to describe rolling blackouts, which briefly cut off power to homes, businesses and even hospitals that need electricity to provide life-saving care.
“Nothing will change policy faster than elected officials going to constituent funerals, and it won’t be for the better because it’ll be reactionary and less than fully thought through,” Cromwell told Wednesday’s meeting of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
Oregon has one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing data center industries, owing in large part to some of the most generous tax breaks anywhere in the world. Data centers don’t employ many people, but the wealthy tech companies that run them enjoy Oregon tax giveaways worth more than $225 million annually.
Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta operate enormous data centers in central and eastern Oregon. Several other companies, including Oracle, LinkedIn and the social network X, have huge installations in Hillsboro.
Earlier this year, the power council issued a forecast suggesting a range of possibilities for data center power demand through the end of the decade. In the middle case, the council said Northwest data centers would need 4,000 average megawatts of additional electricity in 2030.
That’s an enormous jump in demand, equivalent to the power use of 3 million homes.
And yet on Wednesday, Cromwell said the council’s median forecast is too low.
“Your medium case is not high enough and your high case is probably pretty close to spot on,” he said.
The high forecast predicts that data centers will actually need an additional 6,500 average megawatts in the next few years — equivalent to the power needs of nearly 5 million homes.
“There’s no question in my mind that the demand for computation and AI, and the demand to plug in (computer processors), exceeds the available power that we have by 2030,” said Brian Janous, a former Microsoft vice president now consulting for industrial electricity users.
There’s little prospect of blunting that growth by shifting demand to other data centers during peak times or through the invention of more efficient computers, Janous and others told the council on Wednesday. He said the demand for artificial intelligence is so high that data center operators will use all the electricity they can get and will operate all their facilities around the clock.
When power demand exceeds supply, during winter storms or heatwaves for example, utilities and governments must make wrenching decisions about who loses power and for how long. Turning off power to data centers could preserve power for homes and hospitals but would have its own negative consequences.
Think about the faulty CrowdStrike software update last summer, said panelist Sarah Smith, with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That took down banks, hospitals, factories, news sites and many others as online systems went awry.
“Air travel was disrupted for days,” Smith said. “There was a lot of really wide-ranging impacts you could imagine.”
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council is a regional organization that works with utilities and governments in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington to balance future power needs and environmental protections. It convened Wednesday’s panel on data centers to help plan a new forecast the council will issue next year.
Big tech companies generally accept the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are causing climate change. Until recently, most tech companies expressed public commitments to find renewable power for their data centers.
Recently, though, Janous said they’ve become “willing to compromise, in the short run” on their clean power goals because they’re desperate for any source of electricity.
Despite the data centers’ voracious appetite for power, the panelists expressed some hope that the region will be able to meet the challenge and, in time, push data center operators to return to their clean energy aspirations. They suggested a Northwest regional transmission authority, long under discussion, could help streamline the construction of new power lines and collaboration among western states.
Data centers’ power needs are triggering expensive upgrades to the Northwest’s power lines and prompting construction of new power plants. There is growing concern among ratepayer advocates, regulators and politicians that households will end up bearing much of the cost of data center growth through higher residential power bills.
On Wednesday, panelists said data center operators are highly motivated. They said tech companies probably would be willing to bear the cost of additional power themselves, provided they have a pathway to get that energy quickly.
“The companies that are asking for this infrastructure are extraordinarily deep-pocketed and there’s a huge willingness to pay,” Janous said, “because the returns they earn on the back end are massive.”
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