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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 1900 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 lina roald professor in the uw madison
department of electrical and computer engineering and thanks for being here thank you for having me
so um 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 one in Mount Pleasant yeah so it varies quite a bit by data center and the type
of data center but the Mount Pleasant data center I think is supposed to use about 450 megawatts 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 as 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 so I have been working on data centers under 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 are expecting that there will 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 so it's not like there are hundreds and hundreds
of megawatt of power that is just like 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
that's a good question how much of it and how would 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
the 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 spread that across consumers and there's a lot
of open questions and 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 be honest with you I am not entirely sure 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
yeah so already now 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 Norik who is the regulatory
body that has been saying that okay there could be challenges meeting peak demand in the Midwest
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 hour is 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 happens at the 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 and 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 hours and if they are able 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 it would be large
impact like blackouts blackouts typically hopefully we will not see that because utilities are quite
good at predicting energy demand and a particularly large data centers that it might be possible to
you know 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 challenging to manage
all right well thank you very much professor lina roewald thanks
you're great yeah you made it understandable like you know uh electrical grid