America’s power grid is straining under the weight of a fast-changing energy landscape. Beyond the usual summer hum of air conditioners, power demand is surging from electric vehicle chargers and sprawling new data centers. At the same time, the infrastructure built to deliver reliable electricity is aging and showing its limits. From Texas heatwaves to California blackouts, the warning signs are impossible to ignore.
This isn’t a technical challenge—it’s an economic and political reckoning. If the grid fails, it won’t be because we lacked solutions. It will be because we didn’t act quickly enough.
For nearly two decades, U.S. electricity demand was flat. Now, consumption is climbing, driven by technologies that arrived faster than planners expected.
*Artificial intelligence has unleashed a wave of data center construction. *
Electric vehicles, heat pumps, and electrified industry are adding further strain.
Just as demand is accelerating, the U.S. is retiring some of its most dependable sources of power.
Wind and solar capacity continue to grow, but not fast enough.
Heat pumps use more electricity than a gas or oil fueled furnace. Same goes for a gas hot water heater.
Also, if you have a gas-fired home furnace, nearly all of the heat from combustion goes into heating the house. If the gas is instead burned in a power plant, there are a lot of thermodynamic losses in the process. The average efficiency of gas-fired power plants in the US is around 44%. In other words, 56% of the combustion heat is exhausted to the environment and doesn’t go to heating your house at all. Of course, we use electricity for more than just home heating.
American Power companies are optimized for profits and steadily increasing excessive Executive Compensation. Spending money to make the grid more resilient, or plan for future capacity will only happen if the completely bought-off state and Federal regulators force them to do it.
It is not just the gigawatts of new capacity that is needed to keep up with the increasing demand, but new transmission lines are also needed to properly connect the power producers with the power consumers. In the US, the pace of construction of those lines has slowed.
From the link:
July 21, 2025 (Washington, D.C.)—** A new report released today by Americans for a Clean Energy Grid and Grid Strategies warns that the United States is failing to build the high-voltage transmission infrastructure needed to support the nation’s surging electricity demand and growing strategic industries.**
In 2024, just 322 miles of high-voltage transmission lines were completed, marking the third slowest year for such construction in the past 15 years. By comparison, nearly 4,000 miles were built in 2013 alone.
Also:
The Department of Energy’s 2024 National Transmission Planning Study implies the need to build roughly 5,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission per year in the U.S. to ensure grid reliability, support economic growth, and deliver low-cost power to customers. The 2024 buildout—less than a tenth of that target—underscores the scale of the challenge.
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Another problem is the supply chain for new electrical transformers. Those transformers are need to step the voltage up and down, as needed, in the transmission network.
PJM is proposing to cut power to the big computer data centers when demand is exceptionally high.
From the link:
The PJM proposal would impact large new data center operations that are not using energy they have developed or acquired. Under emergency situations, PJM operators would cut off power to these data centers first, before ordering rolling blackouts at utilities or other responses.
The same issue confronts grid operators across the United States. PJM’s response stands out because its 13-state region, with 67 million customers, is the nation’s largest, and it hosts “data center alley” in northern Virginia, by far the largest U.S. concentration of the data farm installations.