In the report, the agency noted that electricity providers, data center customers, and other large customers had all expressed concerns about the ability to keep up with demand, and “almost uniformly, they recommended accelerating generation and storage additions, delaying retirements, making additional investments in existing resources.”
Those updates include the “uprating and relicensing of existing nuclear and hydroelectric facilities,” and demonstrating new clean, firm, affordable, dispatchable technologies as soon as possible. “In most cases, [stakeholders] see new natural gas capacity additions — in addition to solar, wind, and batteries — as the primary option available today to maintain reliability,” the report said.
“We’re going to need all sources of power, including geothermal and hydrogen,” IDC’s Graham said. “AI’s power consumption is really growing. You can draw certain analogies to cloud. The one thing about AI that’s different is the magnitude of energy consumption per server.”