As utilities face a surge in electricity demand, a study by Duke University scholars offers an alternative to costly new generation: Let data centers come online under an agreement that they won’t be able to draw power from the grid when energy use is at its highest levels. “If you’re not putting more stress on some of the existing peaks, you may be able to defer that capacity addition and come online more quickly,” lead author Tyler Norris told The News & Observer.

On March 5, testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommitee on Energy, Tyler Norris cited a recent Nicholas Institute study on how load flexibility could help the existing U.S. power grid meet elevated demand.

During a hearing Wednesday, Tyler Norris, James B. Duke Fellow at Duke University, told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy that repealing tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act would likely hinder utility providers’ plans to expand nuclear, wind and solar energy sources. “If you pull back incentives for a given activity, you’re going to see less of that activity," Norris said. "In this case, that means there’s going to be less generation out of the system, and it’s going to impose higher costs.”

A recent Duke University study found that electric utilities can already handle demand growth from data centers for most of the year. They just need to shift when those power requests happen during a couple of hours in the year. “If these loads were able to reduce consumption at critical times, then we could accommodate them without triggering the need for this new generation or transmission,” coauthor Dalia Patiño-Echeverri, associate professor at the Duke Nicholas School of the Environment, told WFAE. 

John Virdin, director of the Nicholas Institute's ocean policy program, joined the Transforming Tomorrow podcast to discuss his work analyzing the activities of the biggest companies operating in the ocean. Virdin explained efforts to bring the companies together to make progress on conserving the oceans, where the major impacts of their actions are and what factors are influencing their behaviors.

While it remains to be seen how much federal clean energy and climate funding the Trump administration can roll back, the effort is already having market effects, Nicholas Institute expert Jackson Ewing told Time. “There's going to be more reticence to invest in some of these energy transition and climate focused sectors, because the political environment is clearly less appealing for those investments now compared to what it was a year ago or six months ago during the Biden administration,” Ewing said.

A wave of workforce reductions under consideration by the Trump administration would render the Environmental Protection Agency incapable of protecting Americans from grave threats in our air, water and land, writes Nicholas Institute Board Chair William K. Reilly along with fellow former EPA administrators Christine Todd Whitman and Gina McCarthy in a New York Times op-ed.

The United States' still-young offshore wind industry is in "critical condition" as it faces political and regulatory uncertainties under the Trump administration. "It was already a challenging industry in many respects," Nicholas Institute Director Brian Murray told USA Today. "But what's happened now will cause delays, and delays cause more problems."

Canary Media reports that if data centers and other big electricity customers limit their power use during peak hours, it could unlock tens of gigawatts of ​“spare” capacity on US grids, citing a recent analysis from Duke University’s Nicholas Institute.

Lilli Watson, policy associate with the Nicholas Institute's Water Policy Program, presented the Internet of Water Coalition and its technology and capabilities to the Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources, and Water committee of the Oregon State House.