数据中心：电力需求与清洁能源挑战

Neil Kolwey & Howard GellerSouthwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) March 2025 About the authors Neil Kolwey Neil Kolwey is Industrial ProgramDirector & Building ElectrificationSpecialist for the Southwest EnergyEfficiency Project (SWEEP), wherehe leads programs to advanceenergy efficiency in the industrialsector and to decarbonize buildingsand industry through beneficialelectrification. Howard Geller Howard Geller is Founder andformer Executive Director ofSWEEP, who led the organizationfrom 2001-21. He currently holds aseat on the SWEEP Board ofDirectors and acts as a Senior PolicyAdvisor, assisting SWEEP onlegislation as well as utility policyand program design. Data centers: Power needs and clean energy challenges Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) reportBy Neil Kolwey and Howard GellerMarch 2025 Executive summary New data centers, especially those designed to power artificial intelligence (AI), are fueling largeincreases in projected electricity demand in the Southwest states, as well as nationally andglobally. While AI offers the potential for significant economic and social benefits, there aregrowing concerns with the rapid increases in electricity demand from data centers and how theywill impact the power sector and state and utility climate goals. The large projected new loads pose two types of threats to state greenhouse (GHG) emissionreduction goals. The first is that utilities may add more gas-fired generation or increase theutilization of existing gas- or coal-fired power plants to meet the demands for more power fromdata centers. In addition, with the added loads from new large data centers, utilities and statesmay have a difficult time adding enough renewable generation to meet the demands fromelectrification of vehicles, buildings, and industry. In addition to climate and clean energy goals, utilities are concerned about how to meet theprojected energy needs from new data centers without over-building new infrastructure, andwithout passing these costs onto other customers. Based on our interviews with Southwest utilities and other research, wehave severalrecommendations for utilities, states, and information technology (IT) companies. Utilityrecommendations————————— 1.Utilities should ensure that new large data center customers, and other new industrial orcommercial customers with demands over 50 megawatts (MW) (or combined demandsfrom several facilities of more than 100 MW),commit to providing sufficient revenue,over a contract period such as 12 years, to cover the generation and transmissioninvestments made on their behalf. Indiana & Michigan Power (I&M) has an excellent example of a model contract andinterconnection agreement with new large data center customers, which we describe inmore detail in the “Utility resource planning” section of this report. This contract, whichhas been approved by the Indiana Public Utilities Commission, was supported by theData Center Coalition, representing many of the large IT companies. 2.Utilities should propose and attempt to get approval for tariffs that require new large datacenter customers, and other new large customers (with the same size threshold as above) to purchase 100% of their electricity from renewable or net zero carbongeneration resources. NV Energy recently received approval for a new tariff, the Clean Transition Tariff, whichwould allow Google and other large customers to make long-term purchases ofrenewable electricity and obtain capacity credit in return. The tariff was proposed inpartnership with Google, and it would fund the incremental costs of the renewableenergy resources, including a new geothermal project which is pending final approval.(We describe the key elements of this tariff in the “Powering data centers with renewableenergy” section below.) 3.Utilities should also work collaboratively with the large data center customers to developnew demand response (DR) programs that reward the customers for reducing demandsthrough load-shifting, battery storage, or on-site zero emissions backup generation.There are no innovative utility DR programs for data centers yet that we know of, buthopefully some will emerge in the next several years, such as through the Electric PowerResearch Institute (EPRI) DC Flex program, described below in the “Demand responseopportunities” section. 4.Utilities should offer energy efficiency programs for large data centers. Using acontractor with data center expertise, we recommend offering design assistance to newdata centers and custom incentives for retrofits to existing data centers, focusing oncooling systems and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. Arizona Public Service (APS) and Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) have successfulenergy efficiency programs with these elements just described, achieving 30-40gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy savings per year. In addition, utilities should pursue opportunities to leverage funding from new data centercustomers to fund energy