After decades of relatively flat electricity demand, the US power sector is expecting demand to grow due, in large part, to new data centers. These energy-intensive facilities are reshaping the grid, with some utilities now projecting over 20 percent load growth by 2035. In places like Virginia, which constitutes 13 percent of all reported data center capacity globally and 25 percent of the data center capacity in the United States, data centers already account for over a quarter of some utilities’ total electric demand, and their footprint is only growing.

The myth
Utilities are struggling to maintain accurate forecasts and identify resources that can meet this growth. There is a high-profile effort to keep coal plants that are set to retire online and run them at unprecedented levels, ostensibly for reasons of reliability. But the truth is, coal-fired power plants, far from being a reliable backbone for this new era of electricity demand, are a brittle, outmoded technology that threatens to undermine the very grid resilience they’re being proposed to protect.
Coal plants face a fundamental constraint: they are aging and increasingly unreliable. Most of the coal fleet was built in the 1970s and 1980s, and years of wear and tear have led to a rise in unplanned outages. In many cases the sheer cost to maintain and modernize these plants did not make sense with the availability of more reliable and affordable alternatives — and that’s still the case.
According to the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) Ensuring Efficient Reliability report, a coal plant’s capacity accreditation, or the amount of time it can contribute to peak demand, is only 83 percent when adjusted for real-world performance. PJM also has capacity accreditation of coal plants at 83 percent and some plants fare even worse. Gridlab’s reliability study found Colstrip, a large regional coal plant in Montana, operating with a capacity accreditation of only 54 percent — meaning it’s effectively unavailable nearly half the time it’s needed.

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https://rmi.org/reality-check-we-have-whats-needed-to-reliably-power-the-data-center-boom-and-its-not-coal-plants/