Data-centre boom strains power

A single artificial intelligence data centre can now ask for as much power as a mid-size city, and utilities from Nevada to Virginia are saying the grid was not built for that many giant customers at once. In Nevada, NV Energy said proposed projects would require about three times the electricity used by Las Vegas. (abcnews.com) That scramble starts with what changed inside the buildings. Artificial intelligence training packs warehouses with more chips, and those chips draw more electricity and create more heat than older cloud-computing servers, so each new campus needs bigger substations, more cooling and thicker power lines. (architectureandgovernance.com) The numbers have moved fast enough to surprise even power planners. The International Energy Agency said on April 10, 2025 that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to about 945 terawatt-hours, which is slightly above Japan’s current annual electricity use. (iea.org) In the United States, the Department of Energy-backed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said data-centre electricity use tripled from 2014 to 2024 and could double or triple again by 2028. That is a huge jump for an industry that used to be treated as a background load, like office towers with extra internet cables. (energy.gov) (eta-publications.lbl.gov) The strain is not spread evenly. The Electric Power Research Institute says data centres already account for more than 25% of electricity demand in Virginia, and it projects that share could rise to 39% to 57% by 2030 if projects now under construction and in planning are completed. (powering-intelligence.epri.com) That is why the fight is moving from server rooms to utility commissions. Dominion Energy told Virginia regulators in February 2026 that data-centre-related power requests had reached nearly 70,000 megawatts, compared with the company’s all-time peak load of 24,678 megawatts on January 23, 2025. (virginiabusiness.com) When a utility gets a request that large, the problem is not just generating electricity. It also has to build transmission lines, substations and transformers, and those projects can take years because land deals, permits and equipment orders all move slower than a technology boom. (datacenterdynamics.com 1) (datacenterdynamics.com 2) That delay is colliding with state climate targets. Nevada’s law requires 50% renewable electricity by 2030, but NV Energy says the speed and size of proposed data-centre demand means it may need fossil-fuel generation to keep up. (abcnews.com) Other states are running into the same trade-off. The Associated Press reported on April 8, 2026 that Duke Energy in North Carolina is revising plans in ways that delay coal retirements and add more natural-gas generation as data-centre demand rises. (abcnews.com) The companies building these campuses say they are not ignoring the power problem. The data-centre industry accounted for about half of all corporate clean-energy procurement in 2024, according to the Data Center Coalition, but buying wind and solar contracts does not instantly create enough local grid capacity where the buildings are actually being constructed. (abcnews.com) So the boom is now forcing a basic choice in plain sight. Regions that want artificial intelligence investment need power first, and right now the fastest options are often natural gas plants, delayed coal retirements or expensive grid upgrades that arrive years after the servers do. (iea.org) (abcnews.com)