What I’m reading: Data centers and electricity demand, geothermal networks, and Copenhagen's "five-minute city"
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This look at highlights from what I’ve been reading is the last Quitting Carbon newsletter of 2024. I'll be taking a break until the new year, spending the week between Christmas and New Year's in a favorite place: Portland, Oregon. I look forward to sharing more of my discoveries, as well as reporting and commentary on the energy transition, with you in 2025. Until then, enjoy!
DOE’s LPO is closing billion-dollar deals, daily: It’s hard keeping track of the billion-dollar-deals the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office is announcing or closing on an almost daily basis in the Biden administration's final weeks. Last week, LPO announced its biggest deal yet: a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee of up to a whopping $15 billion to California utility Pacific Gas & Electric. Jeff St. John reported on this and other recent big deals for Canary Media.
St. John also reminded readers that despite all the slings and arrows directed at LPO by its conservative critics, the program is providing real value to American taxpayers. “And while the LPO does exist for the purpose of making loans that private-sector lenders find too risky, the office has earned a profit for the federal government on the nearly $35 billion it has disbursed since it was created in 2005. As of September 2024, the LPO has realized $1.03 billion in actual and estimated losses, but it has also earned $5.4 billion on interest paid and collected $15 billion in principal repaid, meaning the office is in fact a moneymaker,” he wrote.
Data centers and surging U.S. electricity demand growth: Perhaps the biggest story of 2024 regarding the future of the US energy industry – after the results of the presidential election – is the tech industry’s seemingly insatiable appetite for electricity to run its data centers. A new report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that data center load growth has tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or triple by 2028. The report finds that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, or 176 terawatt-hours (TWh), and are expected to consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028 (up to 580 TWh).
Experts warn that all that new electricity demand could strain the country’s power grid. “More than half of North America faces a risk of energy shortfalls in the next five to 10 years as data centers and electrification drive electricity demand higher and generator retirements threaten resource adequacy, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said in a 10-year outlook published Tuesday,” Utility Dive’s Robert Walton reported last week.
Geothermal networks in Massachusetts: Could underground thermal networks be part of a decarbonized future for fossil gas distribution companies? A Boston-based non-profit called HEET and the utility Eversource Energy are piloting such geothermal energy systems in Massachusetts. I first heard HEET’s Zeyneb Magavi and Audrey Schulman pitch the concept at an electrification workshop I attended hosted by the think tank RMI in May 2019. I reported on the coming geothermal pilots for Greentech Media in August 2020.
“In June, Eversource completed a geothermal system in Framingham, Massachusetts, that provides heating and cooling for an entire neighborhood, including public housing residents, by tapping low-temperature thermal heat from underground wells. It was the first geothermal system ever built by a gas utility. More than that, it’s a demonstration project that could chart a new course for the industry by transitioning off gas while preserving jobs,” Inside Climate News’ Phil McKenna reported last week in a helpful update on the status of these projects in Massachusetts, across the U.S., and internationally.
Copenhagen’s “five-minute city”: Regular readers of this newsletter will recall that the name Quitting Carbon was inspired by my e-book of the same name on Denmark’s energy transition. In that book, I wrote about a project then planned for Copenhagen’s former industrial waterfront called Nordhavn. Now, 10 years after I visited the site of the new sustainable neighborhood, which then was nothing but aspiration, The Guardian’s Steve Rose checks in on the progress thus far. Planners designed Nordhavn as a “five-minute city,” with all of life’s basic amenities just a short walk or bike ride away.
“If you go back in time, when you did city planning, you would say: ‘Where do the roads go? How do the cars get from A to B?’ That was your main priority,” Ramboll’s Lars Riemann told Rose. “Then we’d put bike lanes next to the roads, pedestrian areas next to that and so on. Here, we did the opposite. We said: ‘What does a walkable city look like? What do the streets look like? What do people like to experience as they are walking?’”
So, what does this look like in the real world? “The city of the future increasingly resembles the city of the past – which is to say, the past before motorcars and monolithic modernism took over. Except now we can have clean transport, safe streets and cosy, triple-glazed apartments, but people still make eye contact with their neighbours,” wrote Rose.
A rough year for climate politics: My friend Justin Guay, now with the Quadrature Climate Foundation, published a column last week at Heatmap on the rough year for climate politics in 2024. Do read the whole column – Justin is one of the smartest, most experienced advocates at work in the climate fight today. But I want to highlight one section that especially resonated with me: Justin’s advice to the clean energy industry to join the political fray more assertively.
“At the same time, the clean energy industry must step up. For all its economic success, it remains politically underpowered. Researchers Robert Brulle and Christian Downie found that from 2008 to 2018, trade associations opposed to climate action outspent climate-positive industry groups by a ratio of 27 to 1. This is neither serious nor sustainable. If clean energy is to cement its place as the backbone of the global economy, it must take greater responsibility for its political future. Industries that shape policy don’t wait for others to speak on their behalf – they do it themselves,” he wrote.
Housing is a climate solution: Policy that enables more people to live near jobs, shopping, and transit is a climate solution. Earlier this month, Sightline Institute’s Catie Gould wrote about new research showing that parking reform alone can boost homebuilding by 40 to 70%. “Allowing for fully flexible parking could lead to more new homes – more than other land use reforms combined. According to new modeling research out of Colorado, fully flexible parking resulted in two to three times as many new homes as legalizing granny flats or larger multifamily buildings near transit, even when every new building still included some amount of parking. When given the option to maximize housing projects for actual housing instead of parking, buildings ultimately get more homes, become more financially feasible, and have a better chance of actually getting built,” wrote Gould.
