Photographer: Kyle Grillot\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
(Bloomberg) — When the Trump administration called Friday for an emergency power auction in an ambitious bid\u00a0to speed the construction of big power plants and tame skyrocketing power bills, top officials\u00a0made clear the vision encompassed specific kinds of energy: coal, gas and nuclear.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to build baseload power plants to keep the lights on, to keep our homes warm and to power our economy,\u201d US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at an event steps from the White House on Friday. Baseload generation means coal, natural gas and nuclear, according to an administration fact sheet on the plan. It notably excludes renewable energy.<\/p>\n
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But building the kind of power plants that the Trump administration prefers has become extremely difficult. Nobody has constructed a US\u00a0coal plant in over a decade. And no developers have released plans for large-scale nuclear\u00a0after the last new reactor came in billions of dollars\u00a0over budget and years behind schedule.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Valerie Plesch\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
Gas plants have their own challenges. The time it takes to get a US gas plant into service is increasing, with average lead times growing from 3.5 years to 5 years between 2023 and 2025, according to BloombergNEF. The cost of building a combined-cycle gas plant, the more efficient type, grew about 49% over the same time frame.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe key limits are the turbine market and the people who actually build these things,\u201d said Evercore analyst Nicholas Amicucci. \u201cSiting and permitting are a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n
The massive jump in power consumption from data centers, new factories and the overall electrification of the economy has led to an accompanying spike in the demand for the turbines that produce electricity by burning natural gas. That\u2019s led to a rush among tech firms, utilities and developers all competing to secure a limited number of gas turbines. Turbine manufacturer GE Vernova\u00a0has said it\u2019s sold out through 2028 and is now taking orders for 2029.<\/p>\n
Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who are chair and vice chair of of President Donald Trump\u2019s National Energy Dominance Council, joined Republican and Democratic governors of 13 states Friday to to issue a \u201cstatement of principles\u201d urging the biggest US grid operator, PJM Interconnection LLC, to hold an emergency wholesale electricity auction later this year.<\/p>\n
The auction would let tech companies that build massive data centers bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation.\u00a0An auction\u00a0could support $15 billion of new plants, which would add as much as\u00a07.5\u00a0gigawatts of capacity, according to a Jefferies report. A gigawatt is roughly the output of one traditional nuclear reactor.<\/p>\n
The comments from administration officials and Virginia\u2019s\u00a0\u00a0outgoing governor Glenn Youngkin on\u00a0Friday highlighted a central conflict in US energy. There\u2019s broad acknowledgement that the US power grid needs every electron it can get, but many Democratic leaders have opposed the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure and many Republicans have been critical of subsidies encouraging new solar and wind farms.<\/p>\n
Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies and a former senior economist at PJM, said the auction should include clean energy, as well. He said sources such as offshore wind and batteries have the same capacity value as gas plants and noted that no power source is available every second of the year. \u201cThe market should include all resources with the credit they deserve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Back at the White House on Friday, Youngkin and Trump\u2019s cabinet secretaries largely\u00a0rejected renewable energy as an option. \u201cRenewables are not going to get it done,\u201d Youngkin said. \u201cWe need gas plants. We need nuclear. We need it all. We need it now.\u201d<\/p>\n
–With assistance from Jennifer A Dlouhy, Naureen S Malik, Akshat Rathi and Will Wade.<\/p>\n
(Updates with Jefferies estimate in the 8th paragraph.)<\/p>\n
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\u00a92026 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photographer: Kyle Grillot\/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — When the Trump administration called Friday for an emergency power auction in an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,7904,5473,198368,198367,198365,51930,198366,25443,74,3479,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-413800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-bloomberg","12":"tag-doug-burgum","13":"tag-emergency-power","14":"tag-gas-plant","15":"tag-gas-plants","16":"tag-glenn-youngkin","17":"tag-power-consumption","18":"tag-power-plants","19":"tag-technology","20":"tag-trump","21":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}