Commentaries on the San Antonio Report present house for our neighborhood to share views and supply options to urgent native points. The views expressed on this commentary belong to the writer alone.
As anybody who misplaced energy throughout Winter Storm Uri or watched a neighbor’s residence threatened by wildfire smoke drifting in from a drought-dried Hill Nation is aware of, Texas should harden, improve and modernize its grid to satisfy fundamental security and reliability requirements. These investments are usually not non-obligatory. They usually carry actual threat of elevating electrical energy payments for households and small companies in a metropolis the place fee strain is already a dwell political concern.
The talk in San Antonio proper now facilities on a startling set of numbers. The roughly two dozen information facilities working in far western Bexar County already devour round 324 megawatts of energy. By the top of 2028, an inflow of latest facilities might add one other 2,700 megawatts of demand, and by 2033, that determine might prime 3,300 megawatts. To fulfill that development, CPS Power expects to spend roughly $1.3 billion on transmission tasks over the following 5 years, including roughly one gigawatt of load-serving capability.
These are actual numbers, and the conversations occurring at San Antonio Metropolis Corridor and CPS Power’s boardroom about who pays for them, and the way, are precisely the correct conversations to have. Metropolis Council members have emphasised that they aren’t anti-data heart, however anti-unplanned, unbuffered development. We agree. However whereas policymakers debate the financing, San Antonio could also be overlooking a quicker, cheaper answer hiding in plain sight: utilizing the grid Texans already paid for extra successfully.
The monetary case is hanging. Based mostly on GridCARE’s monetary evaluation, one gigawatt of AI information heart load serviced by the present system in San Antonio would generate roughly $123 million per yr of latest income after pass-through prices, with zero incremental system prices. That $123 million might lower system-wide charges by as much as 4.4% (saving the typical buyer roughly $64 per yr), justify as much as $1.45 billion in new infrastructure funding and not using a fee improve, or each scale back charges and fund new system funding.
Consider the electrical grid as San Antonio’s freeway system. Interstate Loop 1604 and I-10 are the transmission strains. The neighborhood roads carrying energy to houses are the distribution strains. Simply because the freeways and the “fiesta stack” interchange aren’t gridlocked at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, a lot of the electrical grid sits underutilized more often than not. Analysis from Stanford College on the Western grid and rising evaluation of ERCOT present that true system-wide peak situations, the equal of rush hour with each lane blocked, happen for less than a small fraction of hours per yr. The remainder of the time, substantial capability sits idle.
This issues as a result of the prices to keep up poles, wires, substations and management programs are borne by native prospects. Including giant power customers to the present system, moderately than ready years to construct completely new infrastructure, spreads these fastened prices throughout a broader buyer base and reduces upward strain on charges. Blocking or delaying load development has the other impact: it concentrates rising prices onto a stagnant buyer base — which is precisely what San Antonio households and small companies can’t afford.
Importantly, the instruments to make this work exist already in Texas regulation. Texas Senate Invoice 6 pairs obligatory curtailment necessities with a voluntary demand response program underneath which giant a great deal of 75 megawatts or extra can ramp down or change to backup technology at utilities’ request. In essence, the Legislature has already codified the precept: information facilities can join sooner if they comply with step again throughout the uncommon hours the grid is underneath most stress — {the electrical} equal of agreeing to keep away from the freeway throughout rush hour.
We’ve seen this mannequin work in follow. In Hillsboro, Oregon, Portland Basic Electrical partnered with GridCARE to use superior synthetic intelligence and engineering evaluation to determine the place energy strains and tools had been underused, and when giant hundreds might safely scale back consumption throughout the few peak hours when the grid is pressured. The end result: the utility expects to energise greater than 400 megawatts by 2029, with 80 megawatts of latest information heart load coming on-line in 2026, with out ready years to construct new energy strains and with out placing reliability in danger.
This isn’t a giveaway to the tech business. It’s a pragmatic affordability technique for the folks of San Antonio. San Antonians have already invested within the infrastructure beneath this metropolis. Utilizing it extra successfully honors that funding whereas offering time and sources to plan and construct the following wave of upgrades affordably.
Texas has a head begin that California doesn’t. ERCOT’s market construction, mixed with the flexibleness framework established by SB 6, offers San Antonio an actual alternative to mannequin accountable information heart development for the remainder of the nation. The San Antonio Metropolis Council is already asking the correct questions. The lacking piece is a technical framework that interprets “flexibility” from a coverage aspiration into verified, engineering-backed guidelines that CPS and its prospects can depend on. GridCARE’s framework enhances ERCOT’s Aurora Research findings by offering a proper, engineering-based methodology to qualify, qualify and activate flexibility as certifiable capability on the level of interconnection.
Accomplished proper, San Antonio can entice the information heart funding that diversifies its tax base, modernizes its grid, protects households from the following blackout and retains electrical energy inexpensive, . The trail ahead is to not block load development, however to manipulate it intelligently.
