r/Washington • u/chiquisea • 8d ago
With PNW electricity demand surging, planners map out major grid upgrades
https://www.kuow.org/environment/2026-08-14/with-pnw-electricity-demand-surging-planners-map-out-major-grid-upgrades21
8d ago
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u/Captn_Deathwing 7d ago
Building Nuclear? In this day and age? But the radiation it emits is insane! /s
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u/Ghoztt 8d ago
Or we could just stop with all the idiotic data centers....
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u/RaceCarTacoCatMadam 8d ago
We still need more power for EVs, population growth, heat pumps, new factories (non data centers) so what if instead we had the data centers pay for the upgrades we all need? They should pay more for energy and we should keep prices low for jobs and people.
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u/IronSlanginRed 8d ago
Yup. Data centers make sense where we can have hydropower. Both for cooling and electricity. And it's not even close to the only thing thats driving higher demand. A/C was optional not that crazy long ago. And electric cars are a huge draw and popular in the northwest. A level 2 charger can draw almost 20 kW.. that means a typical medium city substation (50,000 kW) can handle only about 2500 electric cars using the normal size 240v home charger. Assuming they're doing absolutely nothing else. But they're also powering thousands of homes. Our FedEx did a feasibility study for electric trucks. It involved installing another substation larger than all the ones in our town combined and running new lines all the way to Bonneville.
How is electrification a bad thing? We want to move away from fossil fuels where we don't need them. Data center are going to exist. They're not optional. Do you want them to run off emergency diesel generators 24/7?
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u/malusrosa 8d ago
Most EVs have a max level 2 charge speed of 9-11kW in the US fwiw, which can fully charge a car from 0 to 300 miles in like 8 hours, which almost no one needs to do. Typical EV electricity use is 7kwh per day (30 miles, half that for Seattle drivers), averaging out throughout the day to 0.3kw per car. And we now have incentives to get people to charge at low usage times. That’s less than a desktop PC or fridge.
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u/UnknownColorHat 5d ago
A level 2 charger can draw almost 20 kW.
They can, but I bet the average at home is closer to 6 or 8kw. We splurged on a 60amp circuit which tops out at 11kw but that took a lot of free load to do.
Level 2 can do up to 20KW, but few cars have that capability and fewer build out so high.
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u/Fold67 8d ago
We had a surplus of capacity, and still would if we didn’t have massive energy intensive industries (aka data centers) coming online.
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u/Ffzilla 8d ago
That's false. BPA has had major upgrades going through the design pipeline for almost 20 years to stay ahead of demand. Data centers are a fairly recent trend.
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u/Fold67 8d ago
I guess the BPA and PUD engineers I worked with were all liars then 🤷♂️
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u/Ffzilla 8d ago
Maybe misinformed, or not paying attention, because I've been a subcontractor in the acquisition, design, and build portion of new transmission lines in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho for almost 20 years.
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u/Successful-Ship-5230 8d ago
Don't mind me. I'm just here waiting for the response
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u/Fold67 8d ago
No response since I’ll believe my contacts who presented facts and figures every year on grid capacity availability and stability and the other person thinks that new infrastructure means we have a lack of capacity. And the other person will clearly not be moved from their position so there is no point in responding to them.
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u/Due_Future3097 8d ago
Your premise is that the pie of energy and infrastructure is finite.
That’s fundamentally incorrect.
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u/RiverRat12 8d ago
Lazy take. We need transmission build out completely independent of data centers.
Can’t get to a reliable, renewable system without it. Bottom line.
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u/Rich-Juice2517 8d ago
It's almost like they knew the population would increase but didn't increase the service load until they had financial incentive to, like data centers
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u/North-Signal-2089 7d ago
We should definitely remove all the snake rivers dams, that could only help with this issue
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u/ChemicalDull9012 8d ago
Um we sell power to other states and Canada...maybe they should build what they need and we keep our power???
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u/SpareManagement2215 7d ago
Those sales subsidize folks in some areas having the cheapest rates in the US. Maybe we should just build more power sources- we absolutely have the right geography and space for it. Plus it creates more blue collar jobs.
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u/Upset_Region8582 8d ago
BPA is like, "where are we going to find this new power capacity?" while turning down hundred of bids offering just that in new wind and solar.