In this news:
Amazon data center in Stone Ridge, Virginia (right panel). Transmission tower in Canada (left ... [+] panel).
Recently, President Trump declared an energy emergency, which turned out to be an electricity crisis presaged by huge amounts of electricity needed to drive up to 5,000 new data centers in the U.S. to enable AI expansion.
To resolve this crisis, President Trump, through Chris Wright his Secretary of Energy, has turned to natural gas and therefore gas-fired power plants. “Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.”
Wright criticized the emphasis of past Democratic administrations on renewable energy, which he says has yet to prove itself as a reliable source of electricity. This is not correct, as data from other countries show solar and wind resources are commercial successes when tied to grid-scale batteries, and they are cheaper (see below). This combination of renewable resources we call green SoWiBess. As used elsewhere, Bess stands for battery energy storage system.
Wright also plugged small nuclear reactors and geothermal resources, but in reality each of these produce less than 1% of current electricity in the U.S.
What should be government policy for additional power needs for AI data centers? Should it be some combination of fossil and renewable energies? What is realistic? Lots of one-sided books have addressed fossil versus renewable energies but a balanced view is rare. Here we present a balanced list of energy realities, based on data and facts from independent sources, that will clarify the situation. First some background, then we hit the issue of energy feed to AI data centers.
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