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July 18, 2024
Regulation and Utility Performance
Last week’s outages in Houston due to Hurricane Beryl were agonizing and frustrating. The Category 1 hurricane made landfall on July 8 and maintained hurricane strength until it reached Houston, delivering 10-15 inches of rain in some areas and resulting in 2.7 million power outages in the region. Four days later, over one million customers were still without…
July 11, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use II: How Are Electrons Like Fish?
Growing data center energy use continues to make headlines. In my first post on data center electricity use, I focused on the technologies that make AI possible and on broad trends in data center investment and electricity demand forecasts out to 2028. If you subscribe to The Dispatch, they had a very good AI energy use…
July 3, 2024
Separation of Powers and Division of Labor
On Friday June 28, the Supreme Court issued their 6-3 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturning the deference to administrative agencies established in the Chevron v. Environmental Protection Agency ruling in 1984. So far opinions vary on how big a change this will ultimately be (courts have not been relying much on Chevron deference…
June 20, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use I: Framing the Problem
Yesterday the silicon chip platform company Nvidia became the most valuable public company in the US, surpassing Microsoft: Nvidia became the U.S.’s most valuable listed company Tuesday thanks to the demand for its artificial-intelligence chips, leading a tech boom that brings back memories from around the start of this century. Nvidia’s chips have been the workhorses of…