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This week in charts
2024 Market cap surge
Revenue from abroad
Positive and negative Real GDP growth
Dwelling vs. intellectual property products
Foldable smartphones market share
Global smartphone shipments
Apartment affordability
Population in China
10-year returns: Commodities
10-year returns: U.S. Treasuries
S&P 500 companies with fast sales growth
Property damage by natural disaster
AI set to fuel surge in new US gas power plants
As many as 80 new gas-fired power plants will be built in the US by 2030, said energy consultancy Enverus, adding 46 gigawatts of capacity — the size of the electricity system in Norway and nearly 20 per cent more than was added in the past five years.
The capacity surge is expected to unfold during the second presidential term of Donald Trump, who has vowed to keep fossil fuels at the centre of the US economy, and signals a reversal of earlier forecasts for natural gas capacity to fall in the next five years.
The expansion will imperil Biden administration climate targets, which called for greenhouse gas emissions to fall by 50-52 per cent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade and the grid to be 100 per cent carbon-pollution free by 2035.
US gas power plants emitted more than 1bn tonnes of carbon dioxide last year, up nearly 4 per cent in a year and the highest on record, according to data from Ember, an energy think-tank.
None of the planned gas plants tracked by Enverus will come equipped with carbon capture systems. While the Biden administration required new facilities to include the technology starting in 2032, Trump is expected to scrap or weaken the rule.
The gas boom comes as the US races against China to develop AI and tries to bring back manufacturing lost to Asia in recent decades, sparking a historic surge in demand for cheap electricity that can run uninterrupted.
The US is already the world’s biggest natural gas producer thanks to its huge shale reserves. This helped keep domestic prices for the fuel relatively low, even during Europe’s energy crisis, and has underpinned the boom in seaborne exports.
Although clean energy supplies are also rising across the US — boosted by vast subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act — developers say intermittent renewables, even with new batteries, are not yet adequate to meet the needs of big consumers.
In December, Entergy announced a $3.2bn plan to build three gas plants totalling 2.3GW to serve Meta’s $10bn AI data centre, the tech company’s largest. Meta will become Entergy’s “single largest customer” once the centre is online, the utility told the Financial Times.
US power consumption, known in the industry as “load”, is already at a record high but will leap by another 16 per cent by 2029, according to think-tank Grid Strategies.
The US Department of Energy says electricity demand from data centres used for AI will triple in the next three years.
Other companies are now racing to catch up with the US’s gas needs.
Share prices of utilities and turbine manufacturers, including Siemens Energy and GE Vernova, have risen sharply over the past year.
Big Oil producers, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, are also entering the business, designing plants to supply AI data centres directly, avoiding the grid.
Some producers are keeping ageing gas plants around, while others are building scale through acquisitions. Last year, Wood Mackenzie revised down 2035 expectations for total US gas plant retirements by 10 per cent.
This week’s fun find
Black hole myth busted: they don’t suck anything in
Black holes are some of the strangest, most wondrous objects in all the Universe. With huge amounts of mass concentrated into an extremely small volume, their interiors inevitably collapse down to singularities, surrounded by event horizons from which nothing — not even light — can escape. In terms of ranking objects by density, black holes are the densest objects known to exist within the entire Universe. Whenever anything passes too close in the vicinity of a black hole, the forces from the black hole will tear it apart into its constituent particles. If any particles of matter, antimatter, or radiation ever cross over the event horizon, those quanta will simply fall down into the central singularity, where they cause the black hole to grow by adding to its total mass.
These properties about black holes are all true. But if you ask people to tell you their conception of a black hole — including what it is and what it does — you’ll often find that there’s an idea associated with black holes that’s absolute fiction: that black holes suck any surrounding matter into them. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and completely misrepresents how gravity works. The biggest myth about black holes is that they suck. Here’s the scientific truth behind how they work instead.
