The current state of the U.S. power sector can be summed up in just a few words: too much demand for electricity; too small of a power grid.
In the past two years, electricity demand forecasts have risen dramatically, a sharp reversal after nearly two decades of little-to-no electricity growth.
The cheapest and cleanest way to meet most of this skyrocketing demand is through new solar, wind, and battery projects to plug into the grid. It’s also the only way to address this growth without undermining the emissions goals of states, the federal government, and the Big Tech firms whose data-center construction plans are driving much of this booming electricity demand to begin with.
But an underbuilt and overburdened U.S. power grid is preventing clean energy from getting built and connected — just when the grid needs it the most.
Solving this supply-demand mismatch will be the challenge for utilities, grid operators, regulators, and policymakers. After all, if it wasn’t AI data centers causing this reckoning now, it’d be electric vehicles or green hydrogen facilities or building electrification sometime in the near future.
In other words, the era of rising electricity demand is here to stay. Below is a by-the-numbers breakdown of why it’s so hard for the U.S. to meet that need with clean power.
Load growth is getting out of control — but not everywhere
The latest data on the surge in U.S. electricity demand is not just surprising, it’s “shocking.”
So says a December report from consultancy Grid Strategies that found that the five-year load-growth forecasts from utilities across the country have jumped almost fivefold from 2022 to late 2024, to nearly 128 gigawatts — a pace that would force the country to increase its capacity to generate and deliver electricity by nearly 16 percent by 2029. That’s an unprecedented growth rate in the modern era.
This forecasted growth isn’t evenly distributed, however.
The lion’s share is concentrated in data-center clusters like Northern Virginia, which is already facing a strained grid and obstacles to further expansion. Parts of Georgia and Texas are dealing with an inrush of data-center developers and increasing demand from manufacturing and oil and gas extraction, respectively. Swaths of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest are also expecting gigawatts of new demand in the next five years; some utilities see enough proposed new development to nearly double their current electricity delivery capacity.
The response from utilities has been to fall back on the status quo — fossil fuels. In the past year or so, utilities have dramatically expanded their plans for new gas-fired power plants, and some are proposing to delay planned closures of coal power plants.
The gridlock keeping clean energy from meeting the need
In a world where grid congestion wasn’t a problem, clean power could meet most, if not all, of that near-term growth in demand.
But that’s not the world we live in. Instead, the backlog of solar, wind, and battery projects now seeking to interconnect to U.S. grids has ballooned to nearly 2,600 gigawatts’ worth of generation capacity. That’s roughly twice the country’s existing generation capacity, per data from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Only a fraction of those projects would likely be built even if the grid had room for them. Since 2000, just under one-fifth of all projects requesting grid interconnection have been completed, according to LBNL’s latest “Queued Up” report.
That’s partly due to energy developers crowding interconnection queues with multiple applications in hopes of finding at least one that will greenlight their project. But it’s also due to the multiyear wait times for projects seeking interconnection and the increasing cost of grid upgrades those projects are asked to pay once they do receive approval to plug into the grid.
