Economic Cents: Green Energy Needed for Data Centers

There's a significant gap between the green energy we produce, and what we'd need to produce, to fuel data centers.

By Bruce Saller
COLUMNIST

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash

Data Centers use a lot of energy, but how much Green Energy would it take to power them?

According to Dominion Energy’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan, Data Centers will consume about 100,000 Giga-Watt Hours (GWH) of electricity, about 400% more than today.

So, let’s determine how much nuclear, wind, solar and storage would be needed to power this load.

Nuclear

Lake Anna has two nuclear reactors providing 1.79 GW of power (.895 GW each). The reactors need to be shutdown on a regular basis for re-fueling and maintenance, and are expected to be operational 83.5% of the time (capacity factor) over the plant’s lifetime.

Dominion is proposing building Small Modular Reactors (SMR) which typically generate 300 Mega-Watts (MW) that have a capacity factor of 92%.

We can calculate the average annual output by multiplying the output, the capacity factor, and the number of hours in a year (8760).

So, Dominion would need to build 16 Lake Anna sized reactors or 42 Small Modular Reactors (or some equivalent combination of them) in the next 14 years to power the expected data centers.  Currently, there are no new nuclear plants being designed.

Wind

There are two type of wind turbines: onshore and offshore.  Onshore turbines can generate 6 MW; offshore turbines can generate 14 MW. Dominion uses capacity factors of 37% for onshore and 43% for offshore. Using the same calculations as above, we would need 5,142 onshore turbines or 1,896 offshore turbines (or some equivalent combination) to power the data centers.

Dominion is currently constructing 176 offshore turbines and planning for installation of 34 (200 MW) onshore turbines.

Solar

There are three ways to install solar panels: fixed, single axis and dual axis.  Fixed solar panels do not move and are generally used on residential rooftop systems.  Single axis solar panels are installed to tilt around the North-South axis (like a see-saw), following the sun as it moves across the sky.  Dual axis (or two-axis) solar panels are installed to additionally rotate along the East-West axis to track the changing altitude of the sun over the year.  A single axis system typically adds 15% plus 0.35% per degree of latitude, while a dual axis system adds 30% plus 0.25% per degree of latitude.  Using Richmond’s latitude of 37.5 degrees results in an improvement of 28.1% for a single axis system and 39.4% for dual axis.  Single/dual axis systems are more expensive, but typically pay for themselves in a few years.  A fixed solar system typically generates 1500 GWH of energy a year for each GW of installed capacity.  This increases to 1921.9 GWH for single axis and 2090.6 GWH for dual axis systems.

For solar, we are going to determine how many acres of panels are needed.  A typical solar panel produces 20 W/sq ft.  There are 43,560 sq ft in an acre, so an acre of solar panels produces 871,200 W.  So we need 1147.8 acres of to produce 1GW.  The table below calculates the acres needed for the three types of solar installations:

These acres are just for the panels, and do not include the space between them, access roads, etc.

Dominion currently has 1.6 GW of solar installed and another 3 GW planned or in construction.

Storage

Both Wind and Solar systems need storage systems to provide power when they are not producing power.  A typical battery storage system needs between 600 – 1000 sq ft per MWH of capacity.  Assuming we need to store one day’s worth of energy (100,000 GWH/365 = 2778 GWH), and the storage needs 800 sq ft/MWH (800,000 sq ft/GWH), we would need:

2778 * 800,000 / 43,560 = 51,019 acres for battery storage.

Currently Dominion has installed 8 MWH of Battery Storage in a pilot project per their Integrated Resource Plan.

Summary

Dominion’s most aggressive generation plan, according to their Integrated Resource Plan, will add the following green generation by 2038:

This is only 55% of the energy needed to power the additional Data Centers and does not include the additional energy needed for electric vehicle charging and other growth.  Dominion needs to accelerate their planned renewable generation capability; otherwise, they would need to import large amounts of fossil fuel generated power from other providers.

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