Nevada’s largest utility says it will need three times the electricity required to power Las Vegas just to handle proposed data centers — and it probably can’t do that without fossil fuels.
That means the utility could miss Nevada’s clean energy targets requiring 50% renewable power by 2030.
“I can’t remember a time in the history of the industry where we’ve seen as much interest in adding load, which is primarily driven by data centers,” said Shawn Elicegui, senior vice president of regulatory and resource planning for NV Energy, which provides electricity to 90% of the state.
It’s one of many utilities across the country grappling with how to meet the exploding electricity demand for data centers to power artificial intelligence without sacrificing long-term plans to move away from fossil fuels in favor of renewable and zero-carbon sources.
In North Carolina, which is also seeing a surge of data centers, the largest utility is revising its long-term plans to delay the retirement of coal plants and to build more natural gas plants. Legislators removed an interim goal for utilities to cut carbon emissions, spurring concern from environmentalists that the state might miss its goal of zero carbon emissions by 2050.
NextEra Energy, which serve commercial electricity in over a dozen states, completely dropped its goal to reach zero emissions by 2045 due to the “demand for all forms of power generation,” the company said in a recent business filing.
The Trump administration has encouraged states to use coal to meet the demands from manufacturing and data centers. Tech companies are also slowing down on their own climate goals to meet the consumer demands for artificial intelligence.
