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Think of all the stuff you use electricity for that you didn't 20 or 25 years ago — all those devices, maybe even your car — and yet electricity use has barely budged this century. In 2000, the country used about 4 million gigawatt-hours of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency; in 2022, it used about 4.5 million GWh, a growth rate of about 0.5%.
In some ways, the purpose of current U.S. climate policy is to reverse this trend. Only about a fifth of all energy produced in the United States is electrical. Removing carbon emissions from transportation, heating and industry will require first converting all of those industries from running on combusted hydrocarbons to running on electricity — while at the same time, of course, working to make electricity generation carbon-free.
All that is to say, we’re definitely going to be using more electricity. Today, if you ask any utility, electricity market organization, or anyone working on energy generation and transmission, they’ll tell you we’re in for an era of load growth.
“For a long period of time, we could balance out additional demand with efficiency improvements,” Xan Fishman, energy policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told me. “Recent forecast are showing we’re going to need a lot more electricity.”
When GridStrategies LLC looked at documents grid planners filed with federal regulators, it found that their aggregate five-year load growth forecasts had gone up from 2.6% in 2022 to 4.7% last year, while their forecast for peak demand, i.e. the maximum amount grids plan on having to be able to provide, had shot up by 18 GW. That’s the equivalent of about 35 gas-fired power plants running on full blast.
In New England, for example, ISO-NE is forecasting 2.4% annual growth over the next 10 years, while its winter peak demand will grow by 3% per year thanks largely to electrifying transportation and heating; that, in turn, is largely thanks to aggressive decarbonization mandates in the region’s constituent states.
Not all of the demand growth we’re currently seeing comes from electrifying our existing energy consumption. New sources of demand are popping up all over the grid — which, especially where they’re generated by new industrial uses, shows how the Biden administration’s combined climate and industrial policy raises the bar for itself. As a result of domestic content requirements for tax subsidies and explicit subsidies for certain kinds of non-energy manufacturing (namely semiconductors), manufacturing construction has shot up in the past few years. And these new plants require huge amounts of electricity.
When PJM Interconnection, the 13-state East Coast and Midwest electricity market, was making its load forecast, it specifically called out Intel’s CHIPS Act-funded facility under construction outside Columbus, Ohio; the electrification of New Jersey ports funded by the Inflation Reduction Act; and planned data centers in Maryland and Virginia as notable examples of increased load generation. For AEP, the utility serving Columbus, the forecast peak summer load in 2030 has gone from about 23.5 GW to 26 GW, compared to around 21 GW in 2023. Dominion, the utility serving Virginia and the booming Loudon County datacenter complex, forecast annual load growth of around 5% over the next decade.
To get a sense of how tremendous that is, when the energy system researchers with Princeton University’s REPEAT project wanted to project how much electricity consumption would have to increase annually to reach net zero by 2050, it turned out to be “only” 2.4%. Virginia is planning load growth at twice that rate just to feed electrons to its data centers.
“When you’re talking about a data center or a three-shift, seven-day-a-week manufacturing process, that’s far less manageable” than, say, electric cars, David Porter, vice president of electrification and sustainable energy strategy at the Electric Power Research Institute, told me. EVs can be powered at specific times based on demand for electricity across the grid, or by a distributed energy resource like residential solar and batteries. To power energy-hungry manufacturing processes, though, requires the kind of consistency that only fossil fuels and nuclear (or naturally limited renewables like hydropower) have historically been able to provide.
There’s no better example of the tension between electrification and emission reductions than in Georgia, where the state’s main utility Georgia Power has said that its estimates for load growth between 2023 and 2031 had jumped up from less than 400 megawatts to 6,600, a 17-times increase. The utility attributed this forecasting hike to “rapid economic expansion and an unprecedented increase in the demand for energy to the state,” including electric vehicle and battery manufacturing facilities, which the Biden administration has done so much to boost demand for and encourage their construction in the United States.
The utility also said that to serve this load growth, it would have to add new renewable resources, acquire power from other utilities and generators, and build new gas power plants, which immediately raised the ire and suspicion of green groups. The Sierra Club described the request as “shocking.”
But proponents of climate action shouldn’t necessarily despair at this new load, Fishman told me. “It’s really easy to decarbonize if you stop building stuff,” he said. “But [Americans] would likely keep buying stuff, and that stuff would be built elsewhere, quite likely with greater emissions intensity.”
In other words, “a resurgence of American manufacturing might lead to more U.S. emissions than in a scenario where we aren’t increasing our manufacturing base,” Fishman told me, but it’s “highly likely to reduce global emissions.” That’s because even now, U.S. electricity is cleaner than electricity in, for example, China, which is still heavily reliant on coal. (According to the IEA, 63% of China's electricity comes from coal burning, compared to 20% in the United States.)
Data centers, meanwhile, are expected to account for 6% of total electricity demand in the U.S. by 2026, according to the IEA, up from about 4% in 2022. And the AI ones will eat up even more: A ChatGPT query is about nine times as energy intensive as a Google search, according to the IEA. If generative artificial intelligence grows at anywhere near the rate that its proponents expect, it will lead to hefty increases in electricity demand, both from manufacturing the chips needed to power the systems and the electricity to power them. One example is Silicon Valley Power, a utility serving, well, Silicon Valley, which forecast load to double by 2035, “primarily” due to data centers’ demand for electricity.
But there may be some reason for skepticism about these load growth projections from data centers, Jon Koomey, a veteran information technology and energy researcher, told me. The particularly energy intensive large language models may not win out as a business, which would slow the growth in data center electricity demand, he said. And even if data centers continue to grow, they could also get far more efficient in how they use electricity — and might just end up using less than what they ask for from utilities.
“You don’t want to get caught short,” Koomey said, explaining why requests for power will be biased on the high end. “There’s an incentive for everyone to request more.”
But still, it’s no surprise that the companies at the heart of the data center boom — Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI — have shown an interest in finding ways to match that constant electricity demand with non-carbon-emitting power. Their facilities need to be powered 24/7, which existing renewable sources largely struggle to provide. (It’s neither windy nor sunny 100% of the time.) This has led to a flurry of investment and dealmaking by these companies to develop and procure “clean firm” resources. Google has a deal with Fervo, the enhanced geothermal startup, to purchase power generated by its operation in Nevada, while Microsoft signed an agreement with Constellation to purchase nuclear-generated electricity for its Virginia data centers to complement its existing renewable power. Silicon Valley Power also said in its planning documents that it’s looking to acquire more geothermal resources. And OpenAI’s Sam Altman has invested in a fusion company.
“If we want to grow our manufacturing base we need the energy to make that work, we need to get that energy to those new manufacturing plants,” Fishman said. “It would be bad if we had a bunch of companies who said, ‘We want to build a factory,’ and can’t because they don’t get enough electricity.”
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Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.
They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.
This week, since this edition of The Fight was so heavy, I tried something a little different: I interviewed one of my readers, Heiko Burow, an attorney with Baker & Mackenzie based in Dallas, Texas. Burow doesn’t work in energy specifically – he’s an intellectual property lawyer – but he’s read many of my scoops over the past few weeks about attacks on renewable energy and had legitimate criticism! Namely, as a lawyer who is passionate about the rule of law, he wanted to send a message to any developers and energy wonks reading me to use the legal system more often as a tool against attacks on their field.
The following conversation has been abridged for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So Heiko, you reached out to me after my latest scoop about how the Trump administration is now trying to create national land use restrictions on wind projects through the Department of Transportation. In your email, you said the Trump administration “cannot invent a setback requirement by executive fiat.” What does this mean?
Something you need to understand from my point of view is, there’s all these things coming out of the White House, the executive. Like the setback requirement: If the law says they have the right to do that, then okay. But the viewpoints of the administration do not replace the law.
There’s no requirement in the law that the Secretary of Transportation can require a setback. He can’t just come in and say here’s a required setback. The government can only do what the law allows a government to do.
For example, a CEO can’t come into a company and say all the contracts are null and void. The president, in the same way, can’t say everything that’s legally binding is no longer legally binding. There are two ways that creates a problem: one is that it is a breach of contract, and the courts will say there’s a different remedy for that. But there’s also a constitutional problem with that.
Why did you reach out to me about this story, in particular?
I’m just concerned about the environment, and our country, and our democracy.
As someone who works with corporations navigating the legal system under Trump, why do you think companies – like renewable developers – aren’t suing left and right in this moment?
I think they’re timid.
It’s not just companies – it’s stakeholders in general. In 2017, there was pushback on Trump. That is missing. Look at the tech industry – and a lot of investments in renewable energy come from the tech area – and how they lined up with Trump on Inauguration Day.
That is fear. I’d say other stakeholders too are now ruled by fear.
As someone who advises companies in other areas of law, what posture do you think renewable energy companies should take?
Band together. Renewable energy companies, you don’t have much to lose. He’s persecuting you.
I know people stay under the radar, like community solar entities that he could have forgotten about. But he didn’t forget about them. So they need to band together and fight.
Everybody’s just lying low and being afraid. But how much more can renewable energy companies lose? Right now they’re still surviving, because the business case for renewable energy works and states are supporting it. But they’re quiet about it on the national level.
If people start believing what Trump says is the force of law, then it’ll just be that way. And I don’t see a coordinated response to that.