My Guest Essay in the New York Times

Why Rising Electricity Bills Aren’t Inevitable

I have a guest essay in today’s New York Times online edition — “A Simple Fix to America’s Soaring Electricity Prices” (my first solo Times piece) — which more or less attempts to boil down Rethinking Load Growth into 1,000 words for a general audience.

It’s surprisingly challenging to distill these ideas into a few hundred words, but the crux is this:

The new electricity demand doesn’t automatically raise bills. A recent study showed that states where electricity use grew fastest often saw average household prices fall, while states with flat or declining use saw prices rise. The impact depends, in significant part, on how cleverly the existing grid is managed — and whether that new energy demand occurs at times when the grid is already strained.

Much of the grid sits idle most of the time. On a typical day, only about half of its capacity is in use, and the country’s most efficient gas plants run less than 60 percent of the time. Because the system must be able to handle its busiest hours — those moments during a heat wave or a cold snap when almost every air-conditioner, heater, factory and data center is running at once — those few peaks in demand end up determining everything, including the size of our power plants, the thickness of our wires and the bills we pay. Trim use during those peaks, and the cost savings ripple everywhere.

The solution is simple: Ask the largest power users to draw a little less from the grid during the limited hours when it’s most strained. They can do that by running briefly on batteries, using electricity generated on site or shifting workloads. Average Americans would never notice — emails would still send, chatbots would still respond and websites would still load — but the grid would breathe a little easier.

Inevitably, a significant amount of nuance has to be jettisoned for a piece like this, but I was glad to be able to incorporate a nod to the potential for data centers and other large loads to procure flexibility from off-site customers:

Some data centers that specialize in instant, on-demand services — like web search, streaming or chat — may find it impractical to dial back during peak hours. But even then, similar benefits can be achieved if data centers pay residential and business electricity consumers to shift their use during extreme peak hours with smart thermostats, networked appliances and battery systems that can adjust automatically. That could provide the same relief for the system while data centers compensate other users directly.

Of course, any discussion of this topic today would be incomplete without mentioning the U.S. Department of Energy’s recent Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANOPR), which effectively validates this approach:

The federal government is now validating this approach. In an extraordinary move, on Oct. 23 the Department of Energy directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to propose a rule that would allow new data centers and factories to plug into the grid years sooner if they agree to lower their use during the rare hours when supplies run tight. The proposal has drawn strikingly broad, bipartisan support.

For most of you, this will read as a 101-level overview. Still, I hope it helps make these ideas — especially around system utilization and large load flexibility — accessible to a broader audience. If nothing else, we have this artistic depiction of “flexible” power infrastructure that ran alongside the piece:

Image credit: Brendan Conroy for The New York Times