California Air Resources Board

I wish to include the following which appeared on page B1 of the Wall Street Journal on 1/7/2026, which provides timely information on the anticipated unreliability of the State’s electrical grid. CARB should be very concerned with its proposed standards to reduce and ultimately eliminate Californians from purchasing gas space and water heaters and how these mandated standards will subject California homeowners to the adverse impacts of such misguided policy through unreliable electricity for such necessary and essential daily needs as providing reliable home heat and hot water.

In case my attached file is not received I’ve included the article below.

Power Grids Push for Tech Cutbacks
BY KATHERINE BLUNT
Power-hungry data centers risk pushing parts of the U.S. power grid toward failure. Some technology companies are fighting a potential solution: disconnecting the data centers from the grid when electricity is in short supply.

Across the U.S., tensions are mounting as companies including Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com and Microsoft debate with utility executives whether their electricity needs can be met without causing blackouts during times of extreme demand.

Power officials have been raising concerns that the grid isn’t equipped to handle the sheer number of data centers tech companies are seeking to build. They say it will take many years to build new transmission lines and power plants needed to support the surge in demand while keeping the lights on for others.

Meanwhile, they are working to find ways to connect data centers to the grid sooner without jeopardizing the reliability of the system. Some have proposed either requiring or encouraging data centers to stop using it when there is a risk of blackouts, ei-

A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI data center in New Carlisle, Ind. NOAH BERGER/ AMAZON WEB SERVICES/ GETTY IMAGES

ther by powering down or switching to backup electricity supplies.

“It’s a high-stakes fight, because hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars of capital are on the line,” said Michael Webber, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin and former chief technology officer at investment firm Energy Impact Partners. “Power is the critical bottleneck.”

The problem is most acute within PJM Interconnection, the organization responsible for overseeing a power market spanning 13 states in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic region. A surge in data-center development there already has pushed electricity prices higher and made the threat of blackouts more likely.

PJM executives spent months last year trying to negotiate solutions with tech companies and others involved in the build-out. PJM proposed, in part, having data centers bring their own power source or otherwise agree to have service cut off when supplies get too tight.

The Data Center Coalition, a trade group, and some of its most prominent members called the proposal discriminatory and expressed concern about the potential need to rely more heavily on diesel backup generators, which are subject to air-quality regula-tions and other restrictions. They argued that data centers need to run constantly not only to train and run AI models but also to serve cloudcomputing needs for other sectors including healthcare and financial services.

“A reliable power grid is essential for data centers, which depend on consistent, uninterrupted power to support critical operations,” the trade group wrote.

PJM had planned to wrap up new rules for data-center connections by the end of last year, but the process ended in a stalemate in November when its members, which include utilities, power-plant owners and customers including tech companies, failed to agree on a plan.

In a December meeting convened by Virginia utility regulators, Ray Fakhoury, an energy policy manager for Amazon Web Services, said the company had concerns about proposals that would require data centers to disconnect from the grid for more than brief periods. The company’s data centers have backup diesel generators for limited emergency circumstances, he said.

“We also have an obligation to customers that are operating in times of peak energy demand, right, during times of emergency,” he said. “Whether it’s first responders or air-traffic controllers that continue operating despite an emergency call, we have to be available to those customers.”

In Texas, which has become a hot spot for data-center development, peak demand is expected to nearly double by 2035, according to the state’s grid operator, known as Ercot. By then, Texas utilities expect data centers to require more than 86 gigawatts of power, which is roughly the record amount of electricity Texans used on a sweltering day in August 2023. (Ercot forecasts them needing less power, citing delays and other factors.)

Texas lawmakers last year passed legislation establishing conditions for cutting off data centers from the grid when power demand threatens to exceed supply. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill.

The Southwest Power Pool, which operates part of the grid stretching from the Texas Panhandle to North Dakota, has been working to establish new rules for data centers looking to tie into the system. It plans to begin offering data-center operators the op-tion of “conditional” service, allowing them to connect to the grid faster with the understanding that they might get cut off when supplies tighten.

“Some may want to do that. Others may not,” said Antoine Lucas, SPP’s chief operating officer. “Our big goal is, how can we provide them with options while at the same time maintaining reliability?”

Google is one of the few tech companies that for years has been working to determine how it can change its machine-learning processes to use less power during times of strain on the grid. The company has pilot programs with several utilities in which it reduces power use within its data centers in exchange for payment, a tactic known as demand response.

With lengthening wait times to connect to the grid, data-center operators that figure out how to reduce power consumption when needed might be able to get ahead in line, said Jesse Jenkins, who heads Princeton’s Zero-carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory, or ZERO.

A study published last month by ZERO and two energy- software firms found that data centers that build their own power sources and agree to disconnection during times of strain might be able to connect to the grid three to five years faster than those that don’t. The research was funded by Google.

“The pressures of connecting to the grid at the scale and pace that people are talking about is going to push these solutions,” Jenkins said. “There isn’t another option.”