By Chamber Business News
In 2019, The Nature Conservancy published a study concluding that global nuclear generation would likely need to triple by 2050 to meet clean energy goals—demonstrating that experts knew a substantial increase in nuclear power would be necessary even before the emergence of artificial intelligence and its associated energy demand.
The simple reality was that renewable energy resources like wind and solar alone could not provide the reliable power needed to sustain modern economies, even as load growth was flattening or declining in some areas.
Yet at the time, investments in nuclear energy had stagnated. Without growth in demand, there was little incentive to finance new technologies, and few could predict where the next wave of demand would come from—causing some to shift the debate toward reducing consumption rather than improving the technologies needed for modern society.
Today, however, we know exactly where the demand is coming from. As new data centers appear across the country, electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades—creating one of the most rapid increases in U.S. history. A single hyperscale data center, for example, can require 100 megawatts (MW) of power or more, leading experts to predict double-digit increases in demand over the next decade and requiring more power plants to be built faster than many utilities can deliver.
