Week Recap: US Gas Plants, Vietnam Coal, and Tech’s Impact

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The U.S. Data Center Energy Train Wreck

Highlights of the Podcast

00:00 – Intro

00:57 – The U.S. Data Center Energy Train Wreck

03:32 – US Power Demand Surge Spurs 133 New Gas Plants Amid Climate Targets

07:25 – Vietnam’s shift back to coal is under EU scrutiny

10:33 – New Microgrid to Provide Resilience for a Houston Data Center and the Grid

13:20 – Germany Repurposes Underground Gas Storage for Green Hydrogen

15:21 – How Big Tech Helped Bring on America’s New Energy Crisis

17:33 – Outro

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Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Stuart Turley: [00:00:15] Hello everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat Daily stand up. This is the weekly recap. And I’ll tell you what. Today is Saturday. June 1st I hope you had an absolutely wonderful week. Michael and I have been extremely busy. The staff was just running amok with great stories. We’ve had some fabulous. We had, things going all over the place. We had Ted Cruz, over at the Americans for prosperity. And we’re I’ve got lots of great content coming out from that meeting as well, too. So sit back and enjoy the rest of the show. I’m going to turn it over to the staff for the best of this week. Have a great day. [00:00:56][41.2]

Stuart Turley: [00:00:57] The U.S data center energy train wreck. Oh my goodness, Ron Miller wrote it. Great article on this one. And when you sit back and think about the current data center electricity demand globally, data centers consume 1 to 1 and a half, 1 to 2% of overall energy, and this will only rise to 3 to 4% by 2030. Here’s a little bit of a weirdness, though, on this. Data centers use more electricity than entire countries. Wow. Data centers. I mean that there’s a chart in there from the, inner data and IEA, data centers can use more than Nigeria, Colombia, Argentina, Egypt, South Africa, Indonesia, the UK. Holy. Oh. [00:01:50][52.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:01:51] That’s. Yeah, it’s it’s pretty crazy when you’re talking about, 1 to 2% of overall world energy and then that by 2030 could be somewhere between 3 and 4%. And I love how we actually throw this, the first chart up here. Data center power demand. I mean, there’s a significant chunk right now that they’re estimating that’s going to be used for AI. It’s something that, Toby Rice talked about six months ago, and he, he, he, he got a little pushback or people were laughing at him when he was talking about that, but he was spot on considering where things are going. We saw today Tesla or excuse me, it was a couple days ago. Tesla okayed their like $7 billion supercomputer. Well, something’s going to have to cool that that that could. And as these things roll out more and more, it clearly will become, you know, I mean, OpenAI has shown you sort you can solve the AI problem by buy more compute and more power. So you got to do something with it. [00:02:45][53.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:02:45] Well, and it brings up a couple of, the, the following, articles here it is. All related. People are now going to say it’s okay to kill the, whales in order and, you know, to not go after the environment. If you take a look at the amount of million, compute instances, 400 terawatts are needed right now in order to do 2023 for the workload for data centers. Unbelievable statistics. I mean, it’s hard to even put your numbers around that. [00:03:20][35.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:03:21] Yeah. And they compare the amount of, of of usage needed for a ChatGPT query and a Google search. It’s pretty unbelievable. It’s about ten times the difference. [00:03:31][10.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:03:32] It is. U.S. power demand surge 133 new gas plant amid new climate targets. Here’s where it is absolutely horrific. And this morning I’m going to give a shout out to Arrhenius law of David Blackman and, Tammy Nemeth and myself. We were on the energy realities, and we had Tom Kirkman on who is battling with AI and having a great time. And we talked about this. I mean, Tom carbons a nut. Absolutely love that man. And so when we talk about projected electricity use in the United States from 2022 to 2050, in terawatt hours, we’re in 2022. We’re at about, four terawatt hours, in. [00:04:21][49.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:04:22] 24,000 terawatt hours. [00:04:24][1.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:04:24] Let’s not go crazy for that. Yeah, for 4000. And now we’re going to be at 5178 terawatt hours in 2050. How are we going to get there? And then balancing the climate goals, it’s not going to happen unless we start putting in hydrogen. So here’s where it gets funny. They’re going to start putting in this little shuffle. And back. There are the 133, gas plants coming online by Duke Energy, by all these other big, utilities. And they have double tagged these is saying they are hydrogen ready and capable. [00:05:04][40.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:05:07] Getting around the net zero thing. [00:05:08][1.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:05:09] Exactly. And hydrogen is not going to work. I’m. Just telling you right now, I love hydrogen. It takes more energy to create. It is a smaller molecule. It is corrosive. And it goes boom. And Hindenburg is not a good brand label for a car. You know, I’m going to go out on a limb. Okay. So when you take a look at how we’re getting these, the utility companies are actually playing on the, regulatory issues coming along and they’re saying, oh, they’re hydrogen ready? Right. Yeah, yeah. You’re never going to run hydrogen. They’re just putting in natural gas plants. [00:05:50][41.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:05:51] Yeah. It’s, it’s pretty, I mean, I don’t blame this is a great follow up from the last article, because it shows you if we are going to see this expansive growth of data center power, which is using more power than some countries. Well, the energy to supply those data centers has got to come from somewhere. And it’s not going to come from wind. It’s not going to come from solar. Because guess what? You want to do your ChatGPT query at night. Well, guess what’s not shining at the at night? The sun gets what’s not really blowing at night the wind. So you have this comparison of, well, where is that quote unquote baseload straight line energy going to come around, sort of data center draws. It draws a constant stream of power. Whether or not you’re utilizing that server farm or not. It’s not like you wind down half the racks. All of a sudden there’s less power. I mean, there is a little bit, but there’s also just a level of power you need to keep if any of all of those servers on. So this is a problem that people are going to have to solve. You know, we’ve already started seeing some moratoriums on new data center builds out because they haven’t been able to find the power. You know, I mean, good for them for going in. I guess everybody see, the free market always ends up at the right decision, regardless of how much hand-waving goes over here. It really is a testament to our free market system that in light of all of this ESG push, people are still getting these, natural gas plants approved because it’s the only way people aren’t dumb. At the end of the day. [00:07:21][90.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:07:22] We know I’m going to say some people aren’t dumb at the end of the day, hey, let’s go to Vietnam. Shift back to coal is under EU scrutiny. Here’s a tag line on it. Vietnam is moving away from green energy and back to coal to ensure factories avoid blackouts after costly shortages in 2023. This doesn’t sit well with the EU green ambitions for this South Asian country. I got one thing to say for the EU and the United States and any of the other G7 countries. Good in your finger in other people’s businesses. [00:07:58][36.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:07:59] Can we go away? [00:08:00][1.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:08:02] Let people put power in. This is stupid. Vietnam needs to go back to coal because it’s reliable. Coal fired power plants account for one third of the country’s total installed power plant in de just there recently has generated 67%. Of the power sometimes is hit, by coal. [00:08:27][25.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:08:28] But I think this is the worst part. So the heat. What what what what spurred all this is this heat wave that’s happening in Vietnam right now. Basically in the months of May and June of last year, okay, led to massive power outages across the north of the country, factories owned by some of the largest. Now, I’m just going to read straight from the article factories owned by some of the largest tech firms, including tech giant Samsung, experience weeks of blackouts that, according to the Vietnamese government, was 1.4 billion in economic losses, roughly 0.3 percentage points of the GDP. That’s pretty ridiculous. You can’t be a small part of your GDP is shot because the EU is trying to tell Vietnam how it should produce its energy. [00:09:14][46.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:09:15] And it comes in here from, president, Ursula. She says that leaked private briefing notes from the UK government officials cast doubts on the ability of Vietnam’s environmental industry to influence other skeptical ministries of the green transition, according to, reports in Politico Europe. Here’s my problem on this. Let’s encourage natural gas and replace those coal powered fire plants with clean, burning natural gas. It’s cheaper. You can do LNG imports, you can put in pipelines, and let’s reduce. I’m all in for saving the plant. [00:09:54][39.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:09:55] Yes. I think from Vietnam’s perspective, though, they don’t have the capital to go build an LNG import terminal. IT and the infrastructure to build out the Elon, if you don’t have any natural gas, you know, if you’re not able to go drill for natural gas yourself, if you’re not able to afford the capital to be able to build an LNG import. Facility. I mean, at some point you’re you’ve got to go back to call. [00:10:17][22.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:10:18] Exactly. Let’s see, this also goes into a bigger picture. And that is I wish the G7 would stay out of Africa. Let’s go with Africa first and get people power first. Let’s get people power. New microgrid to provide resilience for Houston data Center and the grid. Michael, this is my prediction. This is the tagline on here. The microgrid will be, located at Via Source Solutions via Center and Houston, a mixed use technology hub that will be home to high performance computing data center, more than 200 data labs, and mission critical infrastructure. What we’re witnessing right now with micro grids, AI, and the advent of this type of article coming out, is you’re going to see electrification becoming more, racially motivated, and you’re going to hang on your. I know you threw up and you just threw up for our podcast listeners. Michael Tanner was about to go, Stuart, I’m cutting this podcast right now. Now listen to me. And where I’m going with this is those that have the money are going to be able to afford a microgrid. Those that can afford a microgrid will be able to survive the, ramifications of the bad energy policies, just like the million folks that are out of power in Ercot in Texas today because of the storms, the electrification and the bad problems that happen there. Those with microgrids will remain up and that the disproportionately impacted communities will not have microgrids because of the costs. [00:12:04][106.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:12:04] So anyway, yeah, it’s I’m with you. You know, microgrids and being able to have redundant systems are going to be critical for this. You know, we talked at nauseum yesterday about data centers and how much power they’re going to be using. So it’s going to be critical. The real question is though are we going to build it smart. You know the I have my question is. [00:12:32][27.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:12:33] The Goldman Sachs says the the estimates by 2030, the U.S. could need to add as much as 47GW of power generation just to support new data centers. [00:12:43][10.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:12:44] Goldman Sachs never got anything wrong. So I, I’m with you there. [00:12:47][3.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:12:48] Well, they try to hire you twice, or they say it was a wrong when they tried to hire you or they wrong they didn’t hire you. [00:12:53][5.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:12:54] I was, I was, I wasn’t bullish enough for them. Oh, okay. You know, I was it wasn’t bullish enough for me where I thought natural gas prices were going. And I said, well, actually, they tried to hire me for their natural gas desk, but I was I was I wasn’t bullish enough. Their oil desk didn’t want to hire me because I wasn’t bullish enough. If you remember, guys, I was I was all over natural gas prices booming and I just so I swung and missed it that one. [00:13:19][25.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:13:20] Well let’s go over here and take a look at Germany. Germany repurposes underground gas storage for green hydrogen. Holy smokes Batman. Germany’s government approved on Wednesday a draft law to enable faster deployment of hydrogen projects in infrastructure by fast tracking, permitting and environmental checks for hydrogen production, storage and transportation, and government sources told Reuters. I’ll tell you, I got one word Hindenburg. This is not a good thing. Hydrogen and pipelines and natural gas in redoing a natural gas storage plant, facility, in order to put in green hydrogen adds up to a lot of expense, a lot of technical corrosion. And is it going to be something that’s actually even going to make a difference on the overall, environment? I don’t think so. Germany, quote unquote, plans to spend €559,000,550 million, a direct grant and conditional payment mechanism, up to 157 billion, or €1.45 billion, to support the second Krupp steel Europe. And that’s trying to make it get to use, instead of natural gas, hydrogen. This has all the makings of another failure. My, trans in repurposing underground gas storage for transporting and storing green hydrogen. If they pull it off, I want to be the first to admit and call up Edgar Lage, in the. And he’s the CEO. Chef. I would love to go visit with him. So if I’m wrong, I love to have him on the podcast. [00:15:19][119.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:15:20] Let’s go to that. How big tech has helped America’s new energy crisis? When we sit back and take a look. Big tech may be the single reason that we do not have an energy transition. I don’t believe that the word transition is properly used there. Tech giants have, propagandized against reliable fossil fuel power plants by falsely claiming to be 100% renewable and implying everyone to do, could do it. Epstein continued, in fact, this is Alex Epstein. In fact, they have just paid utilities to credit them for other solar and wind. Blame others for their coal and gas use. This is very much like Google. Google censors me, and they. I loved it when they said, green since 1977. And then they finally had to change it. And they’ve changed their stories and everything else. They’re not green. Do you know how much power they use and how much they they don’t. Anyway, so Apple CEO Tim Cook got bragging, rights. California got brownouts. Even Texas, one of the better run states in the union, has made itself overreliant on unreliable energy sources. What a great quote in there. So, big tech firms have been loudly trumpeting on how green they have been quietly shopping. All the while they’ve been shopping for nuclear power to run their data centers. Nuclear is going to be the sustainable data center in a. I insurance companies are going to be the death of the energy transition. Either your electric vehicles won’t be able to be insured, or your insurance is going to go so high on your homes and because of the fires and everything else. So anyway, big tech, insurance. You gotta love it. [00:17:32][0.0][250.0]

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