Colorado가 정전 방지 및 증가하는 데이터센터 전력 수요 대응을 위해 전력망 업그레이드에 $2 billion을 투자 중입니다.

Colorado will receive $250 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to upgrade a key power transmission connection between Colorado and Texas, state and federal energy officials announced from Aurora. The grant is part of a $2 billion federal project designed to squeeze more electricity from the nation's aging power grid as President Donald Trump's administration moves to prevent blackouts amid surging energy demand from artificial intelligence data centers.

The $2 billion will fund 31 projects across 26 states, expected to produce more than 23 gigawatts of additional electricity capacity—enough to power 16 million homes, according to federal officials. "This means lower costs and fewer outages for Coloradans," Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement. "By strengthening Colorado's electric grid and expanding our ability to share power with other regions, we can better protect families and businesses during extreme weather and periods of high demand while continuing to save people money."

The Colorado funding will support the Colorado-to-Texas Western-Eastern Intertie Modernization Initiative, known as CO2TX, a project that strengthens the connection between the Western and Eastern power grids. The nation's electricity system is divided into large regional grids with limited ability to share power between them.

The Colorado Energy Office is partnering with Xcel Energy on the project. The total CO2TX project cost is $1.2 billion, with the federal government providing $250 million and Xcel providing an 80% match. The Colorado portion will shift the main transmission connection from Lamar to a higher-capacity May Valley substation in southeast Colorado and link it directly to the Colorado Power Pathway transmission network, with one terminus at the Harvest Mile Substation in southeast Aurora.

State officials said the upgrades will vastly increase the system's capacity to move electricity, reduce strain on the grid and improve reliability during periods of high demand and extreme weather. The project will also give consumers access to electricity from a larger pool of sources. The upgrades will involve upgrading existing equipment and power lines rather than building entirely new transmission corridors, allowing capacity increases while limiting construction costs and land-use impacts.

The broader federal effort uses new technologies such as sensors to measure real-time weather conditions to ensure safe transmission or direct power away from congested paths. The upgrades could improve power reliability and lower electricity costs for about 100 million Americans, officials said. "This is a quick way to lower electricity prices and increase reliability: using fibers that are already in the transmission lines to analyze what's the temperature out, what's the wind out, how can we use this transmission line to distribute more power, but safely and only in the right conditions," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.

The announcement comes amid warnings that artificial intelligence's voracious demand for power threatens to overwhelm U.S. power supplies, as massive new data centers come online faster than new power plants can be built. Electricity bills are rising faster than inflation in many parts of the country, blamed in some areas on data center demand. Growing opposition to data centers in communities across the country has transformed the midterm election landscape, even as Trump continues to support their expansion despite criticism from politicians in both parties and local communities seeking to block them.

Congress and some states are pushing utilities to expand their use of grid-enhancing technologies to make grids more efficient and reduce the need for new power plants. Julia Selker, executive director of the WATT Coalition, a trade association for grid-enhancing technologies, said both the projects and the scale of investment are significant. U.S. utilities are lagging places like Europe in adopting such technologies, despite prior federal investment in developing and testing them. Drew Maloney, CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, countered that America's electric utilities make a "significant investment" every year in new technologies to strengthen the grid and reduce outages.

Wright said work on the projects should begin right away and he hoped some efficiencies would be in place before winter to tamp down price spikes during periods of extreme weather and high demand. He added that he was uncertain whether the projects would have proceeded without federal funding, though many had been under consideration before the grants were offered. The recipients hadn't "quite pulled the trigger," he said.

The projects announced will involve component enhancements on more than 1,500 miles of transmission lines and technological enhancements across nearly 21,000 miles. Recipients include utilities, cooperatives and four state agencies in Colorado, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma. The state agencies were the biggest recipients, collectively drawing $810 million, with Colorado and Oklahoma projects promising improvements to regional grids.

Funding comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted under President Joe Biden. The government's $1.9 billion in funding will be matched by $3.35 billion from the recipients. PPL Corp., an eastern Pennsylvania electric utility, is receiving $71.5 million to modernize an existing high-voltage transmission line across roughly 30 miles in northern Pennsylvania. The utility noted that two data centers came online in its territory this year with six more under construction, and its peak electric demand could quintuple by 2032 given other data centers in advanced planning stages.

The Trump administration has vowed to "unleash" the nation's energy sector in his second term, aiming to drive record-setting domestic oil and gas production, strip away pollution restrictions on power plants and keep expensive coal-fired plants operating past their retirement dates. The administration has also pledged nearly $4 billion to buy back offshore wind leases as Trump seeks to discourage wind energy expansion in favor of fossil fuels, while pushing tech giants to build and connect data centers to power plants and high-voltage power lines.