Overreliance on EV’s Generate Power Grid Concerns

July 03, 2024

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by Mark Dorenkamp (Brownfield Ag News) There are concerns a reliance on electric vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector could compromise the U.S. power grid. Scott Richman with the Renewable Fuels Association says grids are already struggling and there’s increasing demand from data centers being used for artificial intelligence.

“You put on top of that the increased needs for electric vehicles, Southwest Research Institute estimates that’s about a 12 percent increase in electricity needs by 2035. It’s more than adding an additional state of California’s electricity needs.”

He suggests those pushing for EV mandates aren’t being practical.

“The overlay of EV power demand is going to be (a problem), and also just the addition of transmission lines, the state of the grid, and where that is. So that’s also something that has to be taken into consideration.”

Richman tells Brownfield a recent independent study found if automakers rely primarily on EV’s to meet EPA’s tailpipe standards and 17 states adopt California’s “zero emissions vehicle” mandate, biofuel consumption would fall 38 billion gallons and electricity consumption would jump 480 terawatt hours by 2035. READ MORE; includes AUDIO

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Electricity demand may slow US emission cuts — study: Researchers at the Rhodium Group said current policies could help lower emissions from power plants. (Politico Pro Energywire)
New York grid may see reliability shortfall in next decade, preliminary report finds -- The draft analysis shows a risk of blackouts without significant new generation. (Politico Pro)
Power line protest targets tech executives in Maryland (USA9 News; includes VIDEO)
Maryland data center conference gets caught up in power line controversy (WTOP)
Fitzwater to hold community meeting on proposed transmission line --- October 9, 2024 --- Frederick, MD (Frederick News Post)
Behind the Hype: The 'Jaw-dropping' Expectations for AI, Natural Gas -- Anecdotal evidence suggests "jaw-dropping" energy needs as AI data centers come online, but building up the power supply will be a complicated process for producers and midstream companies. (Hart Energy)
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Excerpt from Inside Climate News: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Illinois are among those pushing back, calling on PJM in June to speed up transmission expansion.

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Maryland is among the states that have long argued that PJM should consider clean energy and growth targets when planning transmission upgrades. From power-hungry data centers to future electrification of buildings and transport, there’s plenty to plan for.

Utilities have an outsized say over transmission planning and dislike the FERC order, Inside Climate News reported earlier this year, because it allows entities other than shareholders to have a say in decision making. Proponents of the rule worried it would be delayed by challenges. PJM is one of two grid operators to request a rehearing.

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PJM agrees that the rule will assist in long-term planning and more holistically assessing system needs, he added. The grid operator earlier said its rehearing request was about “seeking flexibility to implement its requirements in a less prescriptive way” and “to reflect its unique circumstances and regional needs.”

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“There’s hundreds of gigawatts waiting in the queue to come online. But they’re all backed up because PJM doesn’t do long-term coordinated transmission planning that balances all of the various needs of states,” said Charkoudian, blaming some of the delay on fossil fuel interests and utilities that hold significant voting power within PJM.

“That’s why I’m also calling for changes within the PJM governance structure because presently we have outcomes that benefit fossil fuel [energy] generators and transmission owners that keep us from moving towards our clean energy and economic development goals,” she said.

Lapp, the Maryland people’s counsel, lamented that FERC’s rule came too late to avert one consequence of PJM’s failed transmission planning: Maryland customers are now on the hook to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to keep a coal plant—Brandon Shores—running longer than planned because a 2025 retirement could have caused grid reliability issues. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico Pro Energywire: Ensuring electric vehicles benefit the grid — rather than burden it — will require unprecedented cooperation between automakers and electric utilities, according to two major reports released this week.

The reports — one from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (AAI) and another from the Department of Energy — address a budding sector often called "vehicle-to-grid." The idea is that EVs could act as mobile batteries, helping solve the grid's supply problems instead of just driving up energy demand.

But experts say that the sector's progress isn't keeping up with the speed with which Americans are buying more EVs and starting to form new habits.

“You’re talking about exponential step changes” as the number of EVs on America’s roads could grow eightfold by 2030, said Bienvenido Clarin, a team lead on electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit electric-grid research organization.

“There needs to be the stronger coordination between the critical shareholders,” Clarin added. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico Pro Energywire: The U.S. is on pace to slash greenhouse gas emissions as much as 56 percent by 2035 compared with 2005, but the reductions will depend in part on how the power sector responds to forecasts for soaring demand, the Rhodium Group said Tuesday.

Demand for electricity could jump between 24 and 29 percent from now by 2035, according to the report, driven by both electrification of buildings and transportation as well as data centers and manufacturing.

Researchers behind the new report studied the effects that existing laws and incentives could have on emissions over the next decade, saying current policies “have never been stronger for achieving even deeper cuts to emissions.” Still, the Rhodium Group put the greenhouse gas emissions reductions from 2005 to 2035 as low as 38 percent if major policy pieces like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and some EPA pollution rules remain intact.

The report from the research firm did not study scenarios that include changes to policies in legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The next president — likely Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump — and the nation’s highest court could help shift emissions trends starting next year. READ MORE

Excerpt from USA9 News: Data centers are a target now for protestors because the Maryland Office of the People’s Council, the state agency that protects ratepayers rights, has determined that, “data centers are largely—if not exclusively—responsible” for the electricity demand MPRP will serve.

PJM, the company that operates the electricity grid in 13 states says, "it’s more than just data centers. It’s EV (electric vehicles), manufacturing and other growth.”

The project is also designed to provide grid resilience and reliability as some power plants in Maryland are taken offline to meet carbon reduction goals, according to PJM.

But PJM's own documents cite data center demand from utilities serving Northern Virginia and Maryland as a driving force for the power line.

A new master-planned data center development is under construction in Southern Frederick County on a site rivaling the size of an international airport. Developer Quantum Loophole describes the project as "multi-gigawatt scale." A gigawatt is enough power to serve 750,0000 homes. READ MORE

Excerpt from WTOP: The demonstrators were there to express outrage over a proposed power transmission project that would run from a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to Northern Virginia, the biggest hub for data centers in the world.

It’s just the latest public display of opposition to the power line over the past several weeks, which has inspired a flash mob protest movement in Frederick, Carroll and Baltimore counties that continues to grow, as landowners fear their property could be seized or chopped up to make way for the power lines.

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“That transmission line is not part of any proposed data center in Maryland,” said Kelly Schulz, the former state lawmaker and Hogan administration Cabinet member who is CEO of the tech council. She noted that the Quantum Loophole project was on the books well before the proposed transmission line became publicly known, and added: “We respect the First Amendment rights of our fellow Marylanders.”

The tech council and other interest groups also put out statements as the conference was getting under way, saying much the same. But the demonstrators weren’t buying it.

“That’s pretty disingenuous,” said Steve Black, a Frederick County tree farmer who was one of the protest leaders. “It doesn’t comport with reality.”

Black said that in seeking bidders to build the proposed transmission line, PJM, the regional grid operator, asserted that an increasing number of data centers would be a drain on the grid.

Data centers house the critical infrastructure that stores and manages the data serving the internet. They are becoming increasingly common as consumer and corporate demand for data grows exponentially.

“We view data center development as the principal threat to land conservation,” Black said.

Even if the proposed power line is not directly related to Quantum Loophole, it’s clear that the regional power grid, which is already on the verge of being overloaded, is going to need more energy transmission and distribution sources to accommodate the anticipated dramatic growth of the data center industry in Maryland.

...

One demonstrator, David Arndt, said state and local policymakers have so far only given data centers incentives instead of laying down aggressive regulations that will guarantee environmental and consumer protections.

“We’re not saying we’re against data centers,” said Arndt, co-chair of the Climate Justice Wing of the Maryland Legislative Coalition, a statewide progressive group. “We’re just saying let’s put guardrails around them.”

...

Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed a Moore bill designed to streamline the environmental approval process for data centers.

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Frederick County has developed a master plan offering guidelines for data center construction, speakers said Thursday — and stands in contrast to what happened just across the Potomac River in Loudoun County, Virginia, where 300 data centers were plopped willy-nilly throughout the community, alongside strip malls and housing developments.

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But Sen. Karen Lewis Young (D-Frederick), who attended the daylong conference, noted that environmentalists and other critics of the Quantum Loophole project were not invited to speak, and she remains a skeptic about the data centers’ potential. Young is one of three lawmakers who voted against Moore’s data center bill in this year’s legislative session. READ MORE

Excerpt from Frederick News Post: Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater plans to host a community meeting next month to address residents’ concerns about the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP), a proposed 500,000-volt transmission line that would impact parts of Frederick, Baltimore and Carroll counties.

In Frederick County, the proposed transmission line could run through the eastern and southern parts of the county near New Market and Ijamsville, either north of Buckeystown or south of Adamstown and ending at the existing Doubs substation.

PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of electricity through Maryland and several other neighboring states, selected the project to address increasing power demand in the region.

PJM has said the increase in demand for power is “increasingly driven by the development of data centers throughout the PJM footprint, combined with the accelerating electrification of transportation and industry.”

The New Jersey-based Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) proposed the MPRP as a solution for anticipated strain on the regional power grid. PSEG’s proposal was selected by PJM.

The community meeting on the project is scheduled for Oct. 9 at 6 p.m. It will be held in the auditorium of Oakdale High School. Representatives of PSEG will attend the meeting to present information and answer questions from the public.

PJM has been made aware of the community meeting, and the county hopes to hear back from the regional transmission organization, county spokesperson Vivian Laxton wrote in a text message on Tuesday.

In a video message last week announcing the community meeting, Fitzwater said “the construction of a new transmission line will be felt by our community for decades to come.”

“If it’s necessary, we need to make sure it’s done right,” she said.

In July, PSEG hosted one community meeting in each of the three counties that would be impacted by the MPRP. The delegation for Maryland legislative district 4 in Frederick County hosted another forum at Linganore High School on July 31.

The community meeting on Oct. 9 will be recorded for later viewing. The recording will be available in the FCG-TV video archive at www.FrederickCountyMD.gov/FCGtv. READ MORE

Excerpt from Hart Energy: - Anecdotal evidence suggests "jaw dropping" demand for electricity in Texas and especially Virginia as AI data centers come online. Building up the power supply will test producers and midstream companies and threaten energy security.

READ MORE

Excerpt from PV Tech: New energy security hazards will be central to the global clean energy transition over the next decade as the world’s electricity demand grows, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

In its World Energy Outlook 2024 report, the IEA said that geopolitical tensions and fragmentation are “major risks” for international energy supply security and coordinated efforts to reduce carbon emissions. As many effects of the energy crisis of 2022 recede, the risk of further disruptions is “very high”, the report said.

On a broad scale, it highlighted the conflicts which have ignited in the Middle East and the ongoing war in Ukraine which have the potential to destabilise fossil fuel supply, as happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The main risk for clean energy technologies comes from the concentration of supply chains in very few countries—predominantly China. The report shows that manufacturing supply chains for solar PV, batteries, wind turbines and critical mineral mining operations like cobalt, lithium, and copper will be dominated by the leading global supplier until at least 2030.

‘Every story is a China story’

IEA executive director Fatih Birol said: “As with many other global energy trends today, China is a major part of what is happening.

“Whether it’s investment, fossil fuel demand, electricity consumption, deployment of renewables, the market for EVs, or clean technology manufacturing, we are now in a world where almost every energy story is essentially a China story.

“Just one example: China’s solar expansion is now proceeding at such a rate that, by the early 2030s – less than ten years from now – China’s solar power generation alone could exceed the total electricity demand of the United States today.”

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But enabling this growth requires greater investment in electricity grids and energy storage technologies, the IEA said.

“A larger share of variable renewables raises the potential for imbalances between available supply and demand,” the report said. “Electricity storage, stronger grids, demand-side response and dispatchable low-emissions sources of power are essential to meet flexibility requirements in clean energy transitions.”

It said that for every dollar spent on renewable power generation, 60 cents are spent on grids and storage. Infrastructure is not keeping pace with power expansion.

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The full report, containing information and forecasts for the world’s energy markets, can be read here, READ MORE

Excerpt from Renewable Energy World: As renewable energy development accelerates, securing optimal sites for solar and wind projects is increasingly challenging in some U.S. regions. The number of suitable land parcels for renewable energy projects is “rapidly shrinking,” and developers who delay risk being left with fewer, less desirable options, according to a new analysis from Paces, a data and software provider.

The report, Illinois and New York Renewable Energy Site Selection Trends, explores the decline in viable sites in Illinois and New York and considers how these tendencies could significantly impact the future of renewable energy development. The data spans January 2024 through October 2024, with projections extending through June 2025.

Paces argues that the shrinking availability of suitable sites poses a significant challenge for renewable energy developers. As land availability becomes scarce, competition for optimal locations will increase, which can lead to higher costs and longer development timelines. Fewer suitable sites could also result in bottlenecks in the permitting process, especially in jurisdictions with more complex regulations.

In its analysis, Paces focused on the following variables:

Number of suitable sites: Defined as parcels with +1 MW of feeder capacity and +15 buildable acres.
Average site size (acres)
Available feeder capacity

Across both Illinois and New York, Paces said the analysis reveals a “rapid” decline in the number of suitable sites for renewable energy development. In Illinois, the number of suitable sites decreased from 13,302 in January 2024 to 7,735 by October 2024, a 41.9% reduction. In New York, the number of available sites dropped from 6,908 in January 2024 to 6,245 by October 2024, a 9.6% reduction.

Credit: Paces

In addition to fewer suitable sites, the average acreage of available land is shrinking, forcing developers to scale down their projects or piece together multiple smaller parcels, the report said. In Illinois, the average site size fell from 51.0 acres in January 2024 to 45.2 acres by October 2024, an 11.37% decline. In New York, the average acreage decreased from 41.0 acres in January 2024 to 39.0 acres by October 2024, a 4.88% reduction.

Credit: Paces

‍The availability of feeder capacity – essential for the energy output of renewable energy sites – is also shrinking, further complicating site selection. In Illinois, the average feeder capacity declined from 3.03 MWs per site in January 2024 to 2.97 MWs by October 2024. In New York, the average feeder capacity dropped from 3.54 MWs in January 2024 to 3.33 MWs by October 2024.

Credit: Paces

‍Looking ahead, both markets are expected to see additional reductions in site availability and feeder capacity. In Illinois, the number of suitable sites is projected to drop to 5,981, with the average site size shrinking to 41.2 acres and feeder capacity falling to 2.8 MW per site. In New York, projections show the number of sites declining to 5,372, with feeder capacity dropping to 3.2 MW per site. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico's Power Switch:

Forecasts of skyrocketing electricity demand are colliding with America’s struggle to get things built — think long-distance transmission lines, solar projects, big battery storage and high-tech upgrades to the grid.

Zero-carbon electricity has expanded quickly in the United States. Plans to build high-voltage power lines are progressing significantly for the first time in years. But neither is coming online fast enough to replace the steady retirement of fossil fuel power plants, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

That was the unusually grim conclusion from the top grid monitor’s annual 10-year forward-looking assessment, writes Peter Behr.

Peak demand for power is expected to grow by 128,000 megawatts over the next four years — the energy equivalent of 60 huge coal-fired power plants — quintupling earlier forecasts. Data centers to power an artificial intelligence boom, the expansion of advanced manufacturing, electric vehicle purchases and the scaling up of electrification across the economy are all driving that demand.

Advocates of fossil fuels say the grid’s precarious state is an indication that clean power is a liability. Wind and solar power don’t run 24-7 in the way that natural-gas-fired plants do. Either way, industry analysts and regulators who aren’t tied to any single corner of the industry say long-range power lines are critical for building a more resilient grid.

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Efforts to accelerate the often yearslong process of building out such power lines have bedeviled lawmakers. The most recent bipartisan push failed to muster enough support this week.

The Biden administration has set ambitious climate targets, including stringent pollution standards for power plants and generous tax credits for EVs. Just today, the Environmental Protection Agency greenlit California’s request to phase out gasoline-powered cars by 2035. If it survives the Trump administration, the plan could dramatically and swiftly reshape the industry.

California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, and 11 other states — totaling 30 percent of the U.S. car market — plan to enact its climate standard for cars.

The more EVs hit the road, the more electricity will be needed to power them. And that’s not to mention the vast quantities of energy needed to drive AI data centers.

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Electricity is one of the most decentralized industries in the country. It’s governed by the decisions of a dizzying array of utilities, regional grids, and state and federal regulators. It is, and remains, extremely hard to get things built — even if a tech billionaire with Trump’s ear needs the energy. READ MORE

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