US electricity consumption barely grew for almost 20 years as efficiency gains offset population and business growth. Data center construction broke that pattern. A single large facility can draw as much power as a small city, and the pace of building has forced utilities to plan for far more generation than they had projected.
Data centers consumed about 176 terawatt hours in 2023, enough to supply roughly 17 million homes, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Five years earlier the figure was less than half that. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that data centers could account for 9% to 17% of all US electricity by 2030, which would more than double their current share even under the most conservative case.
Forecasts keep moving. In 2023 the North American Electric Reliability Corporation projected the country would need 80 additional gigawatts over the following decade. A year later it revised the figure to 132 gigawatts, an increase of 65%. New generation takes years to permit and build, and in the states where data center construction has advanced furthest, utilities cannot add capacity fast enough.
EPRI's low end 2030 projection of about 380 terawatt hours would roughly double current data center consumption. Its high end figure of 790 terawatt hours, enough to power about 75 million American homes, would more than quadruple it. Goldman Sachs Research estimates AI could account for more than a quarter of global data center power demand by 2027, up from 14% today. A single server rack now draws about 11 times what it did five years ago, according to the International Energy Agency.
Source: Quartz - https://qz.com/data-center-electricity-demand-growth-us-081726