There is a quiet revolution upending the trajectory of our energy future. For all the extraordinary challenges inherent with trying to stand up a renewable-dominant energy mix nearly overnight, perhaps none is beginning to loom as large as the breakneck speed electricity demand is growing all over the country.

Speculation about the impact that electrification, reindustrialization and big data might have on power demand is settling into an incredible reality. In wildly different states with wildly different industries and economic engines, power demand is exploding, and the U.S. electricity grid and our power supply are woefully unprepared. The case for building on the shoulders of the existing coal fleet – not trying to dismantle it for unproven and unbuilt solutions – is growing ever-stronger.

As the folks at the new education campaign Coal Hard Truth correctly observe, “fossil fuel power plants are retiring much faster than new dispatchable, reliable sources are being developed. This could lead to energy supply shortages, even rolling blackouts. Coupled with increasing demand… America’s bulk power system could be facing energy shortfalls – as soon as this year.”

It’s a remarkably tenuous situation that policymakers – especially the regulators at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – don’t seem to have their arms around and frankly don’t appear to have much interest in acknowledging.

But the ground in truth in places as diverse as Arizona, Texas, Georgia, New York, Virginia and California is surging demand and the need for a far more robust power system than the one we currently have. The era of flat power demand is as relevant today as a fax machine.

Our new reality is a scramble to keep the lights on, homes warm and the gears of industry churning. We need every megawatt of capacity we can get our hands on and that’s doubly true for the dispatchable, fuel-secure capacity anchored by the coal fleet.

Driving the Demand

New semi-conductor and battery plants are remarkably energy intensive, and they are rising from blueprints to productive capacity at breakneck speed. The Electric Power Research Institute examined the impact of industrial demand growth across the economy in a recent white paper finding that, as of March, more than 155 new or expanded manufacturing plants had been announced or had begun construction or operation since 2021.

In transportation, electrification is hitting its stride. The data across the auto industry and from dealerships tell a bullish story. Sales of battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the third quarter of 2023 showed the strongest year-on-year growth since the fourth quarter of 2021. Purely EV sales have been doubling about every 14 months. Overall, annual sales of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the U.S. surpassed 1 million in September for the first time and will likely exceed 1.4 million by year’s end.   

Big data is also having a profound impact on electricity demand. As The Wall Street Journalobserved, “data centers are one of the biggest new power consumers, and demand from them could double by 2030. Some new data centers requesting grid connections are as large as 500 megawatts, as much as it takes to power hundreds of thousands of homes.”

Consider what is happening in Virginia. Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, has connected 75 new data centers since 2019 with electricity demand jumping 7% since then. Dominion expects electric demand to grow by about 85% over the next 15 years. Virginia is hardly alone.

PG&E in California expects electricity demand to rise 70% in the next 20 years. And New York’s grid operator, NYISO, recently reported that electricity demand in the state will more than double by 2050 and that New York will need to more than triple installed generating capacity by 2040. 

Arizona Public Service, which sells power to 1.4 million customers, has told regulators it needs a “prodigious” 19,000 MW of new resources to meet expected demand over the next 15 years.

That level of new supply, Politicoobserved, needed to “power data centers, two new semiconductor plants and a growing population, rivals the entire fleet of another Mountain West utility: Xcel Energy in Colorado.”

Georgia Power filed a new resource plan this October, less than a year after its last plan was approved by state regulators, to account for a projected 6,600 MW growth in electricity demand over just the next seven years. That growth rate is 17 times greater than what Georgia Power projected in 2022.

And in Texas, the nation’s largest electricity producer, electricity sales grew at five times the national rate for the past decade, a total addition equivalent to Louisiana’s power demand. This summer, the state’s main grid operator, ERCOT, saw power demand set 10 records as power supplies were repeatedly pushed to the breaking point.

This is a new era of electricity demand. Energy policy must account for the clear danger of accelerating fossil fuel power plant retirements as the challenges to building renewable generation and its enabling infrastructure compound. The Coal Hard Truth is that the nation needs the affordable, reliable power provided by the coal fleet more than ever.