Ballooning power requests from data center developers requires more of the solar, wind, and storage battery investment that President Donald Trump opposes, grid and finance experts said Wednesday at a U.S. Energy Association webinar.
The panel featured a cross-section of grid officials, consultants and financiers who stressed that a shock wave of new power demand from artificial intelligence is hitting an unprepared U.S. power system. Their prescription: Utilities need to add as much power to the grid as possible, from nuclear and gas to wind and solar.
“Electricity scarcity is upon us, and this is the new world for industrials, for data centers, for consumers, where electricity is not abundant and we need to manage sources of power,” said Jeff Weiss, executive chair of Distributed Sun, a solar power developer. “We’ve never had this in America.”
Trump has been hostile to renewable energy — on Wednesday, for example, he called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” — and Republicans are phasing out clean energy tax credits (see related link). Many analysts predict that solar growth, now booming, will slow dramatically by the end of the decade.
