is the sixth Democrat to announce a run for governor
with 43 and counting. Data processing centers are
popping up all over Wisconsin. Like the
Microsoft Data Center in Mount Pleasant, where the
tech giant is developing a 100 acre site. After buying
it from Foxconn. Data centers contain servers and
drives to store, process, and disseminate data.
Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta
operate large scale data centers. The Great Lakes
region is a popular site for them because of the
large amounts of water. Data centers need to cool
the equipment. But what about the electricity
needed to run them? What are the implications of
that usage? We turn to Line Roald, professor in the
UW-Madison Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering. And thanks for being here.
>> Thank you for having me. >> So we know that
everybody talks about the millions of gallons of
water that are needed to to cool these data centers,
but how much electricity do they need to do all that
processing like this. Microsoft. 1 and Mt.
Pleasant. >> Yeah. So it varies quite
a bit by data center and the type of data center.
But the Mt. Pleasant data center I think, is supposed
to use about 450MW of power. And that is a lot. That's
about the same amount as all the households in
Milwaukee together. >> And so if you if you
talk about 43 data centers, obviously not all is large
as that, but across the state of Wisconsin, that's
sucking a lot of power. >> Yes it is. Yeah. And the
projection is moving forward with even more
particularly of these very large data centers coming,
is that it will consume really a lot of power that
is going to change, really the scope of use of
electricity in Wisconsin. >> So this growth of these
centers seems explosive, right. And all of a sudden,
have you been surprised by it?
on data centers and their energy use since about 2018.
And back then it was already clear that we are
likely going to see an increase in energy use from
data centers just because it's getting harder. It was
getting harder to keep up the efficiency gains that
have allowed us to do ever more computing with
essentially kind of the same amount of electricity.
So for a long time, electricity use was fairly
flat. But then now. So you were expecting that there
would be an increase. But of course, with AI and
these large language models and these very, very large
models that need really, really large data centers
for training and inference, it's really been quite
explosive, I would say. So it's a bit unprecedented
for the grid to see this amount of growth in this
short time period. >> In Wisconsin. Do we have
the capacity to provide the electricity?
are hundreds and hundreds of megawatt of power that
is just kind of laying around being, waiting,
waiting to be used. And so we don't necessarily have
the capacity to meet all that demand as it is today.
And so we are going to need new infrastructure, new
transmission lines, new power plants in order to
meet that demand, because it's also not like the
regions around us necessarily have that
energy there. >> So what about the cost
of this energy demand? And then that infrastructure of
which you speak, does that get passed along to the
consumer? Like am I going to see it in my electric
bill? How much of it and how that
cost will be spread. So you can imagine that when more
people want something, the price sometimes tend to go
up, because there's maybe a limit to the supply of that
of electricity, but also the way utilities do things
is that they build infrastructure to meet the
demand of their customers, and they have to file what
is called a rate case with the Public Service
Commission in order to determine how that cost is
being covered. So they have to ask for permission to
spend that money to build that new infrastructure,
and they have to talk about how they are going to
consumers. And there's a lot of open questions in
exactly how that is going to happen. And so I think
both in Wisconsin but also elsewhere in the country,
there's a lot of questions of how this might impact
consumer bills. And frankly, to be to to be honest with
you, I am not entirely sure where where the Public
Service Commission, for example, will land with
that, how the utilities will do things, and also
what kind of contracts these companies are able to
get with the utilities. A lot of that will determine
how energy bills will or might change.
>> What would happen in peak times like summer. Can
the grid in Wisconsin manage that load, and are
there concerns about blackouts or that kind of
thing? during peak times in summer,
it can be challenging to meet the demand as it is
today. So we have seen in past years that there has
been warnings by Nordyke, who is the regulatory body
that has been saying that, okay, there could be
challenges meeting peak during summer peak hours.
And so what we might be seeing is that there is a
need for more demand response. I mean, you might
be familiar with, for example, energy rush hours
where the utility says, okay, I'm going to control
the thermostat in your home and make it a little bit
warmer during those peak hours to reduce the amount
of electricity that we need in order to cool the house.
During summer when it's very warm. And so of course,
this happens. If it happens, it happens at a household
level. There are very small changes in energy demand,
and the effect comes from many, many people adjusting
their temperatures at the same time. So we could see
more of that. But we could also see that data centers
actively participate in this and that they are able
to reduce their energy demand during those peak
to do so, we are going to need less infrastructure.
There would be less stress on the grid, and there
would be a lower chance that there would be large
Blackouts, typically. Hopefully we will not see
that because utilities are quite good at predicting
energy demand and particularly large data
possible to know a little bit in advance how much
they will use, so hopefully we would not get there. But
but there's definitely an increased stress on the
grid that could be grid that could be