Data Centers Highlight the Limits of Renewable Energy Scaling

• Data centers are turning into an unexpected obstacle that may well compromise the whole transition offensive against hydrocarbons.
• Wind and solar could supply power to data centers for certain periods of a day, week, or month, but the bulk of the round-the-clock supply must come from baseload generation facilities.
• The part about the affordability of the energy system likely has to do with emissions rather than money.

Until about a year ago, no one paid much attention to data centers. Everyone used them, of course, but they didn’t think about them. Then, the AI rush began. It was followed by a rush for energy supply. One year in, and data centers are threatening the very energy transition on which so many governments have staked everything.

Power utilities, regulators, and climate activists appear to be experiencing growing concern about the immediate outlook for oil and gas demand, Reuters reported this week, saying the fast growth in demand for electricity caused by the mushrooming of data centers had come as a surprise to many. There may have been some frustration, too, because wind and solar have been unable to scale up fast enough to cover this additional demand, per some of the people Reuters spoke to—even though there is no scale that would have covered that demand, not for intermittents.