AI Data centers will require large [massive?] amount of electricity.
No doubt, many here remember how Enron drove up electricity prices massively in California. If you don’t think that will happen with AI hyperscalers becoming energy traders, I have a bridge I would like to sell you. It is a virtual certainty that, like most large corporate Treasury departments, that these new power traders will be profit centers and the traders’ pay will reflect how they perform.
By Tsvetana Paraskova, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. Originally published at OilPrice
- Meta, Microsoft, and Apple have either requested or obtained authorizations from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to sell wholesale power.
- U.S. power utilities are investing a record amount of money into transmission and grid connections, but uncertainty about the size of demand raises investment risks.
- The venture into power trading from hyperscalers could give utilities more certainty that their future new capacity will find customers.
Power capacity developers “want to know that the consumers of power are willing to put skin in the game,” Meta’s Parekh told Bloomberg in an interview last week.
“Without Meta taking a more active voice in the need to expand the amount of power that’s on the system, it’s not happening as quickly as we would like,” the executive added.
U.S. power utilities are investing a record amount of money into transmission and grid connection. But current forecasts of AI-driven power demand vary so much that there is a massive margin of error, analysts and utility officials told Reuters Events in June.
A possible overbuild would come at the expense of the American ratepayers, who have already seen electricity prices rising at a faster pace than U.S. inflation over the past three years.
https://archive.is/Afwzy
California officials have pounced on the Enron memos as proof that energy traders and freelance power generators–mainly from out of state–were manipulating California’s energy markets, raising prices and even triggering blackouts.