Reality Check: We Have What’s Needed to Reliably Power the Data Center Boom, and It’s Not Coal Plants

This RMI briefing argues that aging coal-fired power plants are an unreliable and inflexible solution for meeting the rising electricity demand driven by the data center boom in the United States. The document asserts that clean, scalable resources such as battery storage and demand flexibility are better suited to the real-time operational needs of data centers and can meet over 95 percent of future demand.

• Data centers are significantly increasing electricity demand in the US power sector, with some utilities projecting load growth exceeding 20 percent by 2035. In Virginia, data centers represent 25 percent of US data center capacity and 13 percent of global capacity, already accounting for more than a quarter of total electric demand for some utilities.
• Aging coal plants are increasingly unreliable due to wear and tear from the 1970s and 1980s, leading to frequent unplanned outages. Capacity accreditation for coal plants is often low; the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) and PJM both cite 83 percent, while the Colstrip plant in Montana was found by Gridlab to have a capacity accreditation of only 54 percent.
• Coal plants lack the flexibility required to support voltage-sensitive loads like data centers because they ramp slowly and have long startup times. The average coal plant ramp rate is 4 percent per minute, and a cold start can take over 12 hours to reach maximum capacity. This inflexibility can lead to grid instability, as evidenced by a 2024 event where a transmission fault caused a sudden disconnection of 1,500 megawatts of data center load.
• Inflexible coal generation can cause grid congestion and market distortions. In the MISO region, which spans 15 US states and one Canadian province, congestion-related market distortions have cost more than $1 billion annually.
• Clean, scalable solutions—including battery storage, demand flexibility, and clean energy portfolios—can meet more than 95 percent of future demand and are more cost-effective and responsive than coal plants.

APA

RMI (2025). Reality Check: We Have What’s Needed to Reliably Power the Data Center Boom, and It’s Not Coal Plants. https://rmi.org/resources/reality-check-we-have-whats-needed-to-reliably-power-the-data-center-boom-and-its-not-coal-plants/

Chicago

RMI. Reality Check: We Have What’s Needed to Reliably Power the Data Center Boom, and It’s Not Coal Plants. 2025. https://rmi.org/resources/reality-check-we-have-whats-needed-to-reliably-power-the-data-center-boom-and-its-not-coal-plants/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=Reality Check: We Have What’s Needed to Reliably Power the Data Center Boom, and It’s Not Coal Plants |date=12 August 2025 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/reality-check-we-have-whats-needed-to-reliably-power-the-data-center-boom-and-its-not-coal-plants/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2025reality, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{Reality Check: We Have What’s Needed to Reliably Power the Data Center Boom, and It’s Not Coal Plants}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2025}, month = aug, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/reality-check-we-have-whats-needed-to-reliably-power-the-data-center-boom-and-its-not-coal-plants/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }