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Data Center Demand: The Biden-Harris Energy Transition Will Just Have To Wait

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A nuclear power plant

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By David Blackmon

Google has made big news in the energy space over the past week, and all of it conflicts with the Harris-Biden goals of a glorious future powered entirely by windmills, solar arrays and presumably some combination of Unicorn fur and fairy dust.

Last week, the Washington Post ran a major story detailing the fact that Nebraska’s Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) will be forced to keep two coal-fired power generation units running for years longer than previously planned to accommodate the electricity needs of new data centers being built in the area by Google and Meta. Originally scheduled to be shuttered at the end of 2023, the units will now remain active through 2026, and local residents and activists expressed skepticism they will be shut down even then.

“A promise was made, and then they broke it,” the Post quotes local resident Cheryl Weston as saying. “The tech companies bear responsibility for this. The coal plant is still open because they need all this energy to grow.”

Well, yes, they do. Given the way supposed deadlines and promises related to this government-forced energy transition have been consistently extended and broken, Weston’s skepticism seems well-grounded.

By now, most everyone is aware of the enormous new demand the proliferation of data centers is placing on the U.S. regional power grids. The new demand from Big Tech is being added to an electric system already strained by huge demands from crypto mining, EV charging and general population growth and economic expansion.

This demand growth threatens to overwhelm the ability of power companies to build new electric generating capacity rapidly enough to keep up. This is especially true for companies operating in areas that restrict such new generating capacity to be “green,” i.e. intermittent wind and solar.

In the Washington Post’s story, the OPPD attributes the need to keep the coal units running on the slow development of anticipated new wind and solar capacity. But that avoids the reality that these data centers and other big power demand hogs require reliable generation, 24 hours a day, 7 days every week. The limitations of intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar, even when combined with current backup battery tech, leaves companies like Google and Meta demanding more reliable, consistent generation.

This reality is not limited to the Omaha area. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and parent company Alphabet are also backing a new company engaged in the development of a new generation of modular nuclear reactors as a means of securing its future electricity supplies. In a deal with nuclear startup Kairos Power, Google commits to buying power from seven Kairos reactors when they go live in the coming years.

“The end goal here is 24/7, carbon-free energy,” Google/Alphabet senior director for energy and climate Michael Terrell said. “We feel like in order to meet goals around round-the-clock clean energy, you’re going to need to have technologies that complement wind and solar and lithium-ion storage.”

These developments involving Google and Meta come on the heels of other recent stories detailing efforts by tech giants to secure their future power needs. In early October, Constellation Energy announced it will reactivate its Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to feed the power needs of nearby data centers under development by Microsoft. Constellation announced a similar deal in July to power data centers owned by Amazon from other nuclear facilities it operates.

The securing of their own power supplies could well become a requirement for big tech companies in some regions, as regulators and grid managers become increasingly concerned about their potential to drain regional grids of needed capacity to keep the lights on for everyone else. Bloomberg recently reported on comments by Thomas Gleeson, Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Texas, warning data center developers they should plan to provide at least part of their own power needs if they wish to connect to the grid in a timely fashion.

What it all means is that demand for reliable, 24/7 power supplied by nuclear, natural gas and even coal is going to continue rising for the foreseeable future. The glorious energy transition will just have to wait for reality.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Business

It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

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From the  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers

The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.

Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.

These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.

In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.

Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.

According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.

Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.

A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.

Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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2025 Federal Election

Carney’s budget is worse than Trudeau’s

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By Gage Haubrich

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is planning to borrow more money than former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

That’s an odd plan for a former banker because the federal government is already spending more on debt interest payments than it spends on health-care transfers to the provinces.

Let’s take a deeper look at Carney’s plan.

Carney says that his government would “spend less, invest more.”

At first glance, that might sound better than the previous decade of massive deficits and increasing debt, but does that sound like a real change?

Because if you open a thesaurus, you’ll find that “spend” and “invest” are synonyms, they mean the same thing.

And Carney’s platform shows it. Carney plans to increase government spending by $130 billion. He plans to increase the federal debt by $225 billion over the next four years. That’s about $100 billion more than Trudeau was planning borrow over the same period, according to the most recent Fall Economic Statement.

Carney is planning to waste $5.6 billion more on debt interest charges than Trudeau. Interest charges already cost taxpayers more than $1 billion per week.

The platform claims that Carney will run a budget surplus in 2028, but that’s nonsense. Because once you include the $48 billion of spending in Carney’s “capital” budget, the tiny surplus disappears, and taxpayers are stuck with more debt.

And that’s despite planning to take even more money from Canadians in years ahead. Carney’s platform shows that his carbon tariff, another carbon tax on Canadians, will cost taxpayers $500 million.

The bottom line is that government spending, no matter what pile it is put into, is just government spending. And when the government spends too much, that means it must borrow more money, and taxpayers have to pay the interest payments on that irresponsible borrowing.

Canadians don’t even believe that Carney can follow through on his watered-down plan. A majority of Canadians are skeptical that Carney will balance the operational budget in three years, according to Leger polling.

All Carney’s plan means for Canadians is more borrowing and higher debt. And taxpayers can’t afford anymore debt.

When the Liberals were first elected the debt was $616 billion. It’s projected to reach almost $1.3 trillion by the end of the year, that means the debt has more than doubled in the last decade.

Every single Canadian’s individual share of the federal debt averages about $30,000.

Interest charges on the debt are costing taxpayers $53.7 billion this year. That’s more than the government takes in GST from Canadians. That means every time you go to the grocery store, fill up your car with gas, or buy almost anything else, all that federal sales tax you pay isn’t being used for anything but paying for the government’s poor financial decisions.

Creative accounting is not the solution to get the government’s fiscal house in order. It’s spending cuts. And Carney even says this.

“The federal government has been spending too much,” said Carney. He then went on to acknowledge the huge spending growth of the government over the last decade and the ballooning of the federal bureaucracy. A serious plan to balance the budget and pay down debt includes cutting spending and slashing bureaucracy.

But the Conservatives aren’t off the hook here either. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that he will balance the budget “as soon as possible,” but hasn’t told taxpayers when that is.

More debt today means higher taxes tomorrow. That’s because every dollar borrowed by the federal government must be paid back plus interest. Any party that says it wants to make life more affordable also needs a plan to start paying back the debt.

Taxpayers need a government that will commit to balancing the budget for real and start paying back debt, not one that is continuing to pile on debt and waste billions on interest charges.

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