Once a journalist, always a journalist.
Though it’s been 36 years since I had a fulltime job in a newsroom, 33 years since I graduated from law school and more than 10 years since I became our state’s ratepayer advocate, I still know what news smells like.
And smell it I did on Aug. 28. That’s when a bunch of Eversource executives showed up at the Walker Building in Concord — home to our office, the state’s Department of Energy and the Public Utilities Commission — for a dog and pony show whose official title was “Energy Informational Series #2: Transmission & Distribution System.”
Among those present were Bob Coates, Eversource’s highest ranking official based in the Granite State, and Brian Dickie. Their titles, respectively, are president and vice president of New Hampshire Electric operations.
Coates and Dickie don’t actually run Eversource’s storied local subsidiary, still technically known as Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH). Their overlords in places like Boston and Hartford are the people who truly call the shots. Any semblance of PSNH as a quasi-independent entity disappeared in 2012 when Connecticut’s Northeast Utilities (then PSNH’s parent) merged with the Boston-based utility NSTAR to create the corporate monolith later rebranded as Eversource.
But Coates and Dickie know how to keep the lights on, by overseeing everything from control center operations in Manchester to the drones that hover above transmission lines in Coos County for signs of woodpecker damage. So when they show up, I listen.
Hence I was not asleep when Dickie casually let slip at one point that Eversource has been in communication with a developer (whom he did not identify) interested in maybe building a data center in Bow. I scribbled down a note to that effect, kept my poker face on, and said nothing.
A colleague was more daring than I was. He piped up and asked Dickie for details — like, for example, how much electricity might this new potential data center draw from the system that all of us are paying for? “Two hundred megawatts” at the maximum was Dickie’s answer, stressing that the number is in flux.
Even a data center using half as much electricity as that — 100 megawatts — would be monster-sized, easily the single biggest electricity user in the state. But as you ponder that, do not panic. Truly.
We can manage data center load. In fact, if we do it right, data center load can be added to the grid in a manner that actually reduces the cost of electricity for everyone.
How do I know this? For one thing, I read last year’s white paper from Tyler Norris of Duke University. He concluded that in New England alone, we could absorb as much as 2.8 gigawatts — that’s 2,800 megawatts — of new data center load if the data centers would agree to be “curtailed” (i.e., disconnected from the grid) just 0.25% of the time.
That’s less than 22 hours a year. They would, presumably, occur at times of peak demand brought on by extreme weather.
Some have dismissed such estimates as unrealistic. Maybe — but surely there is at least some of what Norris called “headroom” to be squeezed out of the system through load curtailment. Meanwhile, new data centers could absorb a hefty share of the fixed costs that the rest of us bear, via our electric bills, to keep the poles and wires in place.
More recently, an up-and-coming software company called Emerald AI announced on Aug. 25 that it has raised investment capital totaling more than $1 billion. Emerald AI aspires to deliver the “headroom” Norris touted.
According to its CEO, interviewed recently on the “Volts” podcast, it’s all about “temporal flexibility, spatial flexibility and resource flexibility.” In other words, Emerald AI shifts the actual work performed by a data center in time, or move the work to other locations, or just de-prioritize the work, as necessary, to save energy without degrading the computational output in question.
Maybe it’s all an example of what the late Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance.” After all, the whole artificial intelligence bubble could burst, taking the data center boom down with it.
Whatever. I am merely suggesting that as ratepayers we look upon data centers — fellow customers, with real clout as electricity buyers — not just as potential enemies but also, in the right circumstances, as potential allies. Yes data centers are ugly and intrusive, but so is Merrimack Station in Bow, which used to burn coal to produce electricity.
That’s exactly where any data center in Bow would land, next to lots of pre-existing grid infrastructure. It’s not exactly Canterbury Shaker Village or the Mount Washington Hotel. Plus, I cannot begrudge municipal officials in Bow any enthusiasm they might have over the property tax revenue such a project would yield.
However, I apologize to nobody when it comes to having set off any media frenzy over Bow as a possible host for a new data center. All I did was send one e-mail, and then I posted one little tweet.
I am sure Eversource would have preferred me not to share what Dickie said during his visit to the Walker Building. But he made his data center comment to a crowded assemblage of state employees that included all three members of the PUC.
That made the gathering a public meeting or, at least, an event that should have been a public meeting. The public sphere is exactly where such conversations belong.
Attorney Donald M. Kreis is the state’s Consumer Advocate, representing the interests of residential utility customers.