BOSTON: Largest US power grid PJM on Thursday braced for record-setting consumption spurred by a heat dome and the boom in data centres by re-routing massive traffic jams on power lines and dispatching costly fossil fuel plants to avert outages.
PJM expected sweltering heat approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) to break the system’s 20-year-record for demand about 6pm on Thursday. The latest forecast for peak power consumption is 166.2 gigawatts (GW), which would top the record of 165.6 GW. PJM says it has the capacity to meet the challenge.
While power-hungry data centers strain PJM’s grid this week, the operator’s overall cost of running a system for 67 million people has increased nearly 70pc this year, or by more than $16 billion, according to the latest report from PJM’s independent market monitor.
Booming demand from data centres accounted for $3.8 billion, or about 23pc of the total $16.25 billion year-over-year increase in wholesale power costs across the grid, according to Monitoring Analytics estimates.
PJM’s total cost of wholesale power was $40 billion during the first five months of this year, up 68pc from $23.8 billion in the year-earlier period, according to the market monitor’s report..
