Reliable electricity is the centerpiece of our modern way of life.
Here at A&N Electric Cooperative, we're proud to ensure electricity is available when it's needed — every day, every night, every time. That's reliability today. But what does reliability look like tomorrow?
Our ability to keep the lights on into the near future will require innovating for and investing in smart, creative solutions to tackle an immediate problem across our industry: Electricity demand is quickly outpacing the ability to supply it.
This is not a challenge we're tackling alone. A&N is united with a collaborative community of local electric cooperatives across Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. Together with 10 other regional electric cooperatives, A&N owns Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, a not-for-profit wholesale electric generation and transmission provider that was created to support electric distribution cooperatives like ours. ODEC generates the power we provide to you. There's strength in numbers, and we're all working together toward a common goal: to provide reliable, responsible, affordable energy to all our member-owners.
Finding ourselves where supply and demand is teetering toward a crisis is not a surprise. You've probably seen many of the headlines yourself. However, the speed at which the industry has arrived at this critical stage is sooner than experts predicted, due to the sheer exponential rise of demand.
The ever-growing electrification of our world — from EVs to streaming services — has had a major impact on demand. Our online lives are all stored in the cloud hosted by data centers, everything from business documents and government records to online shopping and the videos we all love to stream. The explosion of data centers, and now generative AI, are driving a massive surge in the consumption of electricity.
In addition, regulatory goals and policy changes have put enormous pressure on our industry over the years. Regulation has not always responsibly ensured electric power plant resources are equipped to keep up with the rapid electrification of our lives. Across the U.S., as more and more electric power plants are being retired, we lack adequate replacement resources.
Unfortunately, as a country, our aging power infrastructure is not ready to keep up with demand without investment. Nuclear power is a real opportunity, but the development of improved reactor designs and the time needed to build a new nuclear plant are likely at least a decade away from being ready to contribute to an energy solution — and, right now, that’s just not soon enough. Improved battery storage is another technology that's still years from offering meaningful solutions. So, we continue to explore a range of options and opportunities to bridge the growing gap between supply and demand.
Without near-term solutions, crises like blackouts could be reality in our near-term future. According to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report, blackouts could increase by 100 times in 2030, relative to today’s averages, if the U.S. continues to shutter electric power plants and fails to add additional dispatchable power capacity amid rising demand.
Dispatchable power sources, such as gas, nuclear and coal, are available on demand — regardless of weather conditions or time of day. ODEC ensures reliable power is always at the ready by maintaining a dynamic mix of power generation, including dispatchable power generation as well as renewable energy sources. While important to the overall mix, wind and solar are considered intermittent resources because they rely on weather to produce energy.
A future of increased blackouts is not a future we embrace, and we want you to have confidence in the fact that we’re doing everything we can to prepare to prevent it.
“This report affirms what we already know: The U.S. cannot afford to continue down the unstable and dangerous path of energy subtraction previous leaders pursued, forcing the closure of baseload power sources like coal and natural gas,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement related to the U.S. Department of Energy report.
“It's critical that we meet this moment with innovation and integrity,” says Chris Cosby, President and CEO of ODEC. “The road ahead will require a diverse mix of energy resources to ensure a reliable power supply to meet ever-growing demands. In addition to reliability, we are also focused on affordability, protecting our member cooperatives and all of their member-owners from rising energy costs.”