This is an area where having a centralized/command economy like China's would come in handy.
Need the world's largest powerplant? Right-o. Need $168 billion to build it? Again, right-o.
Reuters, July 21 - China embarks on world's largest hydropower dam, capital markets cheer
Not just the world's largest hydro powerplant, the largest, period. Four times the generating capacity of the current (so to speak) largest generator, the Three Gorges Dam site with its 22,500 megawatt nameplate capacity. By comparison the average American nuclear generating plant has a 1,000 megawatt capacity.
Instead the Western world is constrained by capitalism with democratic characteristics.
From Yahoo Finance, August 5:
Big Tech is power-hungry, and America's aging grid can't keep up
For more than a decade, the demand for power across the US has been nearly stagnant, growing by less than 1% per year. Then came the data center revolution.
The world's largest tech companies are waging a power-driven arms race to be at the forefront of the computing and AI technology wave. These so-called hyperscalers — including tech giants like Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), and Oracle (ORCL) — have poured money into pushing artificial intelligence development and computing ability ever further.
In turn, US electricity demand has exploded and is projected to grow five times faster over the next 10 years than it did in the previous decade, according to research from Bank of America (BAC). And these companies are showing no signs of slowing down.
"The large data center developers and their hyperscaler customers want power right away," said Rob Gramlich, president of electricity infrastructure consulting firm Grid Strategies.
But America's tech industry may be overestimating just how much pressure the power grid can take — and how quickly the nation's utilities will actually be able to meet the rampant demand. Aging infrastructure well beyond its useful life, decades of stagnant industrial investment, and years-long delays in getting new power connected to the grid may put a wrench in Big Tech's plans.
In some of the country's most important markets, this "misalignment of expectations" could equal a lag of at least one to two years, if not longer, before the power that data center developers are seeking is actually available, according to a July report by clean energy fuel cell provider Bloom Energy (BE).
Closing that gap, according to eight different analysts, researchers, and energy traders who spoke with Yahoo Finance, will require a long lead time, an intensive amount of new energy infrastructure development, and an enormous amount of capital.
In the meantime, the ramifications are likely to be widespread. Stress on the grid is sending Americans' electricity bills higher, and the US is losing ground to foreign competitors looking to host the new generation of computing hubs that hold and process data generated by some of the most powerful companies in the world.
Michael Dunne, the chief financial officer of energy utility operator NextEra Energy (NEE), called out the excess demand on the company's earnings call in July: "There is an outrageous amount of need for energy infrastructure in this country that's going to go well past the end of this decade."
Dunne's company stands to benefit.
Power play
Across the globe, a web of thousands of data centers is springing up, from “Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County, Va., to Richland Parish in the northeastern corner of rural Louisiana and Kolkata, India, and it forms the backbone of the AI and cloud-computing industries.Global power usage by data centers is expected to grow from a current level of around 55 gigawatts to 84 gigawatts — equivalent to the power usage of roughly 70 million homes — in only the next two years, according to research from Goldman Sachs....
....MUCH MORE
