Pre-Market Surges -- April CPI Comes In Better Than Expected -- May 15, 2024

Locator: 47156B.

CPI: first slowdown of the year.

Personal investing:

• I'll re-post my earlier thoughts which I took down overnight. 
• adding to positions in CRH and MU today, by rule
• no recommendation; see disclaimers.

Market: US equity markets -- 70% of the market is run by:

• "algos"
• momentum

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Back to the Bakken

WTI: $77.99.

Thursday, May 16, 2024: 21 for the month; 85 for the quarter, 284 for the year
39877, conf, Liberty Resources, Overdorf W 158-06-1-12-1MBH,

Wednesday, May 15, 2024: 20 for the month; 84 for the quarter, 283 for the year
None.

RBN Energy: as data centers proliferate, utilities turn to gas-fired power to meet demand. Archived.

The growing number of energy-intensive data centers coming online across the U.S. is spurring utilities to ramp up their plans for adding new sources of power generation — including a slew of gas-fired plants — and also complicating their efforts to rely more on renewable resources and decarbonize the power grid. The push to quickly develop new energy infrastructure is also running into well-documented issues with permitting such projects. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the proliferation of massive data centers — many of them catering to the surge in interest in artificial intelligence (AI) — and what that means for utilities and power-related demand for natural gas. 

U.S. electricity consumption totaled 4.07 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2022, the highest on record and 14 times greater than in 1950, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). As shown in Figure 1 below, electricity use increased in all but 11 years between 1950 and 2022, although the recent trends tell a more complex story — eight of those year-over-year decreases have occurred since 2007 thanks to efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce power usage. But things are changing, and quickly.

Figure 1. U.S. Electricity Retail Sales to End-Use Sectors, 1950-2022. Source: EIA

The EIA expects the U.S. to set new power-demand records in 2024 and 2025, and fast-rising demand from AI-focused data centers, electric vehicles (EVs) and the “electrification of everything” strongly suggest that we’re in for an extended period of power-generation development. The EIA sees U.S. energy consumption steadily increasing through 2050, with electricity playing an increasingly large role.