Psst? Heard of data centers?
If you haven’t heard the term yet, I would like to introduce you to the phrase data centers.
This is a concept that will have great meaning for us all in the future. It’s something you are going to be hearing much more about.
Data centers are for information, what a barn is for a farmer, or a warehouse is for a manufacturer.
A data center is a centralized physical building inside of which electronic information and data that is critical to businesses are stored.
It’s a fact. Almost everything we do these days is digital. We live by our phones. We read books and watch movies on iPads or tablets. Watching T-V is largely digital. Many of us even watch football and basketball on our phones.
It would be hard to imagine any business that could exist today without some major component, or all of its efforts and correspondence, being done electronically. And so many of us communicate only on our phones – and not by talking, either. Life without a phone would be hard to imagine.
So, someplace must act as the electronic traffic cop in all of this. And that’s where data centers come in. As we use more digital devices as means for communicating, the need for data centers is expected to grow dramatically in the future.
We want more storage and faster transmission of information, so nothing is going to slow down this development.
As the need for more and faster information increases, so will the demand for the growth of more energy-consuming data centers to meet those demands.
The website statista.com (sta-TIS-tah) says there were 6400 data centers in the United States by March 2024. That’s by far the largest number in the world. Germany is next with 521.
A study by the Department of Energy found that all the data centers in the United States used 4.4 percent of the nation’s power in 2023. That figure was projected to grow to as much as 12 percent of the nation’s power by 2028.
This is a reason why we must have reliable energy in this nation to meet that demand. Data centers are only going to grow in the future, not only here, but across the globe.
Your Public Service Commission is doing its bit to keep those centers in operation by ensuring a constant and reliable source of energy through the burning of coal.
You’ll be hearing more from me about data centers in the future. Neither they nor their enormous appetite for reliable energy, are going away.
