Facing U.S. Electricity Shortfall, Crisis Years Unfolding

“Energy is everything” is a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, but was said by someone else. It is as compelling today as ever, but as the nation moves into the age of electrification, it could be modified to “electricity is everything.”

On Day One of President Trump’s second term, he declared an energy emergency. It has been followed by what amounts to a new energy policy, although it isn’t called that in a formal way.

This policy has been pursued with brio for coal, gas and oil, and has been accompanied by an aggressive jettisoning of environmental regulation deemed to be punitive. Equally it has deemphasized renewables, and Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have castigated renewables, especially wind.

Trump called wind turbines “so pathetic and so bad.” Wright said they are “subsidized, indefensible, land hogs that drive energy prices up.”

The electric utility industry doesn’t agree; and study after study show wind, even without subsidies, to be the cheapest new generation available, according to Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Deans delivered his remarks during a virtual press briefing, hosted by the United States Energy Association.

Utility presidents like renewables and have found wind, even with intermittency, desirable as the cheapest power available. Improved batteries are making intermittency much less of a problem. Texas, home to so much oil and gas, also has the largest installed wind generation component in the United States, and is second in solar generation.

Utilities In An Awkward Position

Administration opposition to wind and solar has gone against a global trend, and has put many of the nation’s utilities in an awkward position. They neither wish to compromise their standing with the government nor to unleash costly hostility from it by defending renewables or advocating for them. Walk softly and continue where possible with renewables is what they hope to do.

They know the incipient energy crisis facing the nation is not in fossil fuels, which are abundant, but in electricity which is strained as demand has risen faster than the electric infrastructure — generating and transmission — can accommodate.

Rudy Garza, president and CEO of CPS Energy in San Antonio, the nation’s largest municipally owned gas and electric utility, told me recently, “I need every electron I can get.” I hear versions of that statement often.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the dedicated electricity supply prognosticator, predicts the nation will get by this winter unless there is unusual cold, in which case the picture changes and blackouts become a possibility.

Over the next decade and beyond, electricity shortages will appear to be a constant threat. While the rate of growth is driven by many factors, primarily it is from data centers.

As artificial intelligence and its uses accelerate, so does the need for more data centers.

One utility in Texas, a prime area for data center development, says it has more than 40 data centers that have approached it looking for power if they build. Another utility, Rayburn Electric, a rural electric cooperative northeast of Dallas, says if it followed through on all the applications it has received, the utility would triple or quadruple in size.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration, using conservative assumptions, calculates electricity demand will grow by 28 percent by 2050.

ICF, the respected global energy consultancy, using a greater expectation of the uses of electricity, says demand could grow by a whopping 78 percent by 2050.

Either way, the pressure is on the industry and the government to adopt plans and policies to provide for this surge in demand.

Yet historically, energy policy has been elusive.

President Jimmy Carter, looking at what then were dismal options for oil and gas, backed the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation. President Ronald Reagan backed open markets and deregulation, which turned on the oil and gas boom spigot.

But it was technology that rode in to save the day with increased gas and oil production from fracking, a new kind of turbine to burn to gas and, yes, wind and solar, to fill in the blanks in generating.

A practical de facto national energy policy, which consisted of “all of the above,” took over.

Promising Technologies Were Abandoned

It wasn’t quite “all of the above,” and some previously promising technologies were abandoned. These included Carter’s scheme of coal gasification and synthetic oil from coal. Other more exotic technologies, like ocean thermal gradients, magneto hydrodynamics, in situ coal gasification and exploiting deposits of hot, dry rock in volcanic areas (in what was known colloquially as the hot rock project, run by the Los Alamos National Laboratory) were shelved, too.

There is a reasonable expectation that nuclear, and particularly small modular reactors, will make the difference in the out years. But these won’t spring directly from demonstration to widespread deployment.

New technologies go through an evolutionary cycle. The first of a kind is just the beginning. Wind turbines went through many iterations before they reached their present state of effectiveness. Solar started with power towers and mirrors in what is known as solar thermal before the more versatile photovoltaic cells were developed.

Fracking needed 3D seismic, horizontal drilling, as well as better fluids and drill bits to reach its current potency.

Ergo, “all of the above” is probably good policy and “electricity is everything” is a harsh truth.