The Bureau of Land Management has launched a tender for a deposit with over 300 million tons of coal in the latest demonstration that the federal government means business with regard to conventional energy.
The deposit that the BLM is tendering is on federal land in Wyoming and contains a total of 440 million tons of the hard fuel, state media reported. Of that, 365 million tons is considered recoverable via surface mining, the reports said.
The latest update on the Wyoming coal tender comes on the heels of news that the federal government would delay the retirement of coal power plants in response to the surge in electricity demand coming from data centers.
“Energy sobriety has returned to Washington, D.C. Our focus is on Americans and the price of utility and avoiding blackouts,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a Reuters gathering, as quoted by the publication. “We’ve got to stop existing firm capacity from retirement.”
The statement accompanied the announcement of coal power plant retirement delays, in which Wright said he expected most of the operational coal power plants in the United States to be kept running for longer. The energy secretary also said he would not exclude prolonging these power plants’ lives.
This course of action fits in with President Trump’s prioritization of baseload generation but it also highlights the rather sudden change in electricity demand trends in the U.S. For years, even decades, electricity demand in the U.S. was quite stable. Now, it is surging thanks to Big Tech’s artificial intelligence race, and a new race has begun: the race to secure enough electricity for the data centers.
Because of this surge, an estimated 100 GW in new generation capacity—excluding wind and solar—needs to be added to the U.S. grid to ensure electricity supply.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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