Following 15 years of stagnating electricity consumption in the US, demand is now on the rise, driven by a proliferation of power-hungry data centers and by the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps. As those technologies become more widely adopted and industrial processes are electrified over the coming decade, the US will need to increase its electricity-generation capacity by more than the amount currently available in Texas, according to Jeffrey Brown, managing director of the nonprofit EFI Foundation.
An assessment by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released in April identified 2600 GW of proposed wind, solar, and energy storage projects that are awaiting connection to the grid. Their capacity is more than double that of the entire nation's 1250 GW installed power generation. Renewable energy and batteries make up 95% of the queue, and 1200 GW were proposed since passage in August 2022 of the Inflation Reduction Act, which...
