Seattle Times Still Doesn’t Get It

The Sunday Seattle Times headline “POWER HUNGRY Data centers guzzle electricity, threatening state’s clean energy push” details the "Times Watchdog" concern with the impact of data center energy use in Washington.  That the “clean energy push", was the result of Governor Inslee passing the “Clean Energy Transformation Act” in 2019, claiming ”Washington would lead the nation by eliminating carbon emitting energy sources”, 

It required Washington utilities become greenhouse gas neutral by 2030 and use only renewable or non-carbon-emitting power by 2045.  He vetoed legislation authorizing up to $400,000 to study data center power usage in Washington, claiming the data was available from other sources. The Grant County Public Utility District manager worried it will be impossible to generate enough clean energy fast enough to meet state mandates.

The study Inslee vetoed would have verified the district manager was right.  That the Clean Energy Transformation Act requiring utilities eliminate carbon emitting energy by 2045 requires replacing the 35% of the energy from the non-renewable and presumably carbon powered “unspecified emitting sources".   The problem isn’t that the data center power needs make up for 40% of the current renewable green energy power, it’s that those energy sources provide less than 10% of total energy available or only up to 4% of total for data centers.  Significant but hardly a crisis.

Thus, it’s highly unlikely utilities will be able to add the windmills and solar panels needed for the energy required to replace the 35% current carbon emitting energy.  Especially since those power needs will increase as needed for the energy required to replace natural gas and internal combustion powered cars.

The bottom line is it’s not that the data center energy needs threaten the need to meet state mandates.  It’s that the state mandate, the Clean Energy Transformation Act requires nearly quadrupling  the 10% existing “green energy sources”. Highly unlikely despite the hundred of millions planned for additional "green energy sources". (Even more problematic in states without hydropower.) Even if they did manage to do so, the effect on global temperatures will be limited by the fact that Washington emits less than 0.2% of the planets CO2.  

Clearly the Seattle Times still doesn’t get it's not the data center power needs that's the problem, it's the attempts to comply with the Clean Energy Transformation Act.