According to a report released this week by Bloom Energy, US data centers will need 55 gigawatts of new power capacity within the next five years.
The report, based on a survey of 100 data center leaders, also shows that 30% of all sites will be using onsite power by 2030. For reference, McKinsey research estimates that there was 25 gigawatts worth of demand in 2024.
McKinsey has similar predictions for power demand growth, estimating that US data centers will have more than 80 gigawatts of demand in 2030.
“This growth is fueled by the continued increase in data, compute and connectivity from digitalization, and cloud migration, as well as the scaling of new technologies—the most important of which is AI,” McKinsey researchers say.
But data centers can only operate if there is sufficient power and the industry is already hitting constraints in some geographies.
According to McKinsey, the time required to get new power connections for data center sites in major hubs like Northern Virginia, California, and Phoenix has already begun to go up. And outside the US, Amsterdam, Dublin and Singapore are among the locations that have placed moratoriums on new data center builds because of a lack of power infrastructure.
The spike in electricity needs is unprecedented, McKinsey wrote, and will be difficult to meet.
In another report released this week, Goldman Sachs also predicts a surge in data center power demand, and expects an increase of 160% by 2030, compared to 2023 levels.
Data center builds typically have timelines of 18 to 24 months, gas and renewable power plans have timelines of three to five years, and new transmission development can take seven to ten years. In fact, it’s the power transmission grid that’s often the biggest constraint, the research firm says, more even than the power generation capacity.
According to a report by Grid Strategies, construction of new high-voltage transmission lines has actually slowed recently, dropping steadily from a peak of 4,000 miles of new high-voltage lines in 2012 to just 55 in 2023.
To meet demands, the DOE estimates that 115,000 miles will be needed by 2040, doubling current grid capacity.
Companies are already planning ahead for shortfalls.
Distributed content platform Akamai Technologies, for example, has increased its data center supply by more than 50% over the past three years.
The company depends heavily on its data center suppliers, according to Todd Lawrence, Akamai’s VP of global data center strategy — and that there’s a potential for data center supply issues in some markets.
To prepare, Akamai regularly communicates with its providers about its needs, Lawrence told Network World, and has three, five, and seven-year plans in place for each market.
“This will help Akamai protect access to critical data center supply in key markets,” he says.
In addition to working with data center providers to ensure long-term access to capacity, enterprises are also casting a wider geographical net, looking towards renewables, and considering fuel cells to power on-prem data centers.
“By leveraging the lowest-cost new builds, such as renewables, alongside energy storage solutions like batteries, they can balance reliability with sustainability,” David Wilson, CEO at Energy Exemplar, an energy simulation platform, told Network World.
There are also renewable options that don’t have the same variability challenges as wind and solar, he adds, such as biomass, green hydrogen — and even small modular reactors.
But it takes time to get renewable power generation up and running, says Aman Joshi, chief commercial officer at Bloom Energy, and renewables have the same transmission challenges as traditional power generation facilities.
That’s why nearly a third of data centers are looking to on-site generation, Joshi said.
Other research backs this up.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the growth of stationary fuel cells deployments is accelerating. Stationary fuel cells are the kind used by data centers and industrial plants, as opposed to mobile ones such as those in cars and trucks.
There were 345 megawatts of new installs in 2023, and an estimated 418 in 2024. This number is projected to increase to 1,420 a year by 2035.
The four biggest players in this market are Bloom Energy, Doosan-HyAxiom, FuelCell Energy and Panasonic, with Bloom in the lead.
“The market has huge potential, given the continued demand for decentralized energy solutions,” says Jonathan Robinson, the firm’s global power and energy research director, in the report. “Manufacturers have strengthened supply chain resilience and are now actively focused on reducing costs.”
Bloom Energy’s Joshi, says that his company is expanding production and doesn’t suffer from the same supply chain constraints as other technologies.
“Our supply chain is very different from conventional gas turbines or wind or batteries, and as a result we don’t use the same raw materials as some of the other technologies use,” he says. “We’re very confident in our ability to scale up.”
Source:: Network World