Power systems are not fixed by pause. They are fixed by building. Growth forces investment, infrastructure, and modernization. Stagnation delays solutions and compounds risk.
Freezing new projects does not lower costs. It prevents new supply from being built, locks in scarcity, slows scientific progress, and shifts costs onto existing customers over time.
The United States is not running out of energy resources. In fact, over 2000 gigawatts of power is in permitting and connecting backlogs. The constraint is institutional, not physical.
Studies show that new large loads do not increase prices when supply is allowed to expand and can reduce long-run costs by accelerating investment in new generation. Today’s price pressures stem from constrained supply, not demand growth itself.
Nearly 2,600 GW of generation and storage capacity is queued for grid interconnection. That amount is more than double the current U.S. grid’s capacity.
New generation and transmission projects often face delays of 5 to 10 years due to permitting and interconnection queues.
Since 2010, the U.S. has retired significant coal and nuclear capacity while failing to replace it with equivalent firm power.
Grid operators like NERC began issuing reliability and capacity warnings years before large-scale data center expansion.
Large data centers typically fund their own interconnections, on-site substations, and required grid upgrades rather than shifting those costs to households.
Historically, electricity demand growth led to lower long-term prices when new generation was built alongside it.
Average U.S. retail electricity prices rose roughly 30–40 percent between 2019 and 2023, before most AI-era data center demand came online.
U.S. electricity generation grew by less than 5 percent between 2005 and 2022, even as population and electrification increased.