While several regulated utility companies stand to benefit enormously from datacenter electricity demand, cost recovery provisions for electric infrastructure projects supporting those customers will be essential for keeping their credit ratings intact, analysts said.
Entergy Corp., Pinnacle West Capital Corp., Southern Co. and WEC Energy Group Inc. are particularly well suited to capture earnings growth associated with building out generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure needed by hyperscalers, analysts at Evercore ISI and Morningstar told clients in a pair of recent reports.
"Data center electricity demand growth is a key source of upside for US utilities that we don't think the market appreciates," Morningstar analysts wrote April 8. "We consider the sector 9% undervalued as of April 8 in part because we expect electricity demand growth to top market expectations."
The International Energy Agency projects US datacenter electricity consumption to grow from 200 TWh in 2022 to about 260 TWh in 2026 and account for 6% of total power demand. Datacenters represent 2.5% of US electricity consumption, according to Boston Consulting Group, and this could triple to 7.5% by 2030.
Datacenter demand growth and infrastructure investment needs for individual utilities could be substantial. Morningstar said a Microsoft Corp. datacenter under development in Racine County, Wis., comprises "over 10% of WEC's current load in the state," while Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary Amazon Web Services Inc.'s planned $10 billion datacenter complex in Madison County, Miss., "could require up to $3 billion of utility investment during the next five years" in Entergy's service territory.
We Energies — an umbrella for WEC Energy utilities Wisconsin Electric Power Co. and Wisconsin Gas LLC — plans to spend about $335 million on electric distribution facilities to support the Microsoft site. The company asked Wisconsin regulators to authorize it by June 1 to accrue allowance for funds used during construction for all of the construction work in progress balance during equipment procurement and construction of the distribution infrastructure.
Moody's agreed that Pinnacle West's Arizona Public Service Co. and Southern's Georgia Power Co., whose territories are both seeing influxes of projects proposed by major tech companies, stand to particularly benefit from load growth, but cautioned that utilities issuing debt to accommodate demand also need to ensure they can recover costs efficiently.
"Data centers often do not begin operating at full capacity until three to five years after they sign an electricity service contract with a utility, which delays how soon the utility can collect the full amount of revenue and cash flow to be generated by the data center," the credit rating agency wrote in an April 8 report. "Therefore, contractual or regulatory provisions for interim cost recovery are important to maintain utility financial ratios."
A utility's integrated resource plan can help protect reliability and customer affordability in the event that load growth "is not permanent or usage does not meet expectations," Moody's continued. "For example, some utilities are requesting upfront payments from data centers to cover infrastructure hook-up costs, which mitigates the burden of these investments on utilities and their customer base."
Retail customer cost-sharing is already an issue in the mid-Atlantic, where a cluster of datacenters known as "Data Center Alley" in northern Virginia requires significant utility investment.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on April 8 approved the PJM Interconnection LLC's regional cost assignments for $5.1 billion in transmission network upgrades to support the northern Virginia developments, despite objections that the plan will force Maryland customers to shoulder the costs of Virginia tax subsidies for datacenters.
Under PJM's plan, about 10% of the costs would be allocated to customers in Maryland. The Maryland Office of People's Counsel argued that PJM failed to account for a Virginia law expected to deliver approximately $3.6 billion in tax subsidies for datacenter development between 2022 and 2025.
"Seeking to isolate any infrastructure affected by state public policy and require the state enacting such policy to shoulder the infrastructure's costs absent voluntary agreement to do so, as Maryland People's Counsel appears to suggest, ignores the regional nature of PJM's transmission system and the full distribution of benefits of regional infrastructure," Commissioner Allison Clements wrote in a concurrence to the order. "Adopting Maryland People's Counsel's suggested outcome would be impractical and unworkable."
Electricity demand from datacenters in a zone that mostly covers Dominion Energy Inc. subsidiary Dominion Energy Virginia's service territory could grow from approximately 3.5 GW in 2023 to more than 15 GW in 2028, according to PJM's projections.