A panel of power and utility industry stakeholders sat before Congressional lawmakers this week and detailed challenges related to exploding load growth and grid reliability.
A three-hour House Energy Subcommittee hearing, titled “Scaling for Growth: Meeting Demand for Reliable, Affordable Electricity,” saw representatives from PJM Interconnection, Basin Electric Power Cooperative, Southern Company and Duke University warn of the accelerating growth of electricity demand in the face of dwindling generation supply.
Asim Haque, PJM Sr. Vice President – Governmental and Member Services, emphasized the growing supply-demand imbalance in the power system. He told lawmakers that generation assets are retiring faster than new supply is being added, while demand from data centers, among other sources, is increasing significantly.
Notably, PJM expects its summer peak to climb about 70,000 MW, to 220,000 MW, over the next 15 years. More broadly, U.S. electricity demand could rise from 23 GW to 128 GW over the next five years, according to a recent report from Grid Strategies.
Haque said most of the generation projects in the grid operator’s interconnection queue are renewable, and there are concerns about not having enough dispatchable resources in the queue, especially as the territory has seen conventional generation assets retire.
“We do need our thermal resources: Nuclear, coal, gas to continue to run a power grid the size of PJM interconnection,” said Haque. “We need these dispatchable resources to find their way in the system.”
When asked whether their entities can meet the significantly increasing demand with renewables alone, both Haque and Noel Black, VP of Regulatory Affairs at Southern Company, replied that it wouldn’t be possible.
The March 5 hearing underscored the need for regulators to get involved in order to bring generation and transmission infrastructure online faster. The need for interconnection and permitting reform is not new.
Todd Brickhouse, CEO of Basin Electric Power Cooperative, emphasized the need for streamlined federal regulations, citing inefficiencies in environmental assessments.
For example, he said the co-op’s Roundup-to-Kummer Ridge transmission project required two separate environmental assessments through two agencies, both under the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI).
“This resulted in added time, expense, and of course, red tape,” said Brickhouse.
“We need more sensible permitting action coming out of Congress and, frankly, in some of the states we serve as well,” he added.
Tyler Norris, a James B. Duke Fellow at Duke University, stressed the need to maximize existing power system capacity and improve interconnection queue efficiency.
Norris said the ERCOT grid in Texas has outperformed other U.S. markets by allowing interconnections first and managing grid impacts in real time, rather than requiring costly upgrades beforehand.
While Norris said it’s “hard for other markets to fully replicate what ERCOT is doing, I think there are a lot of lessons there and things that we can do to enable generators that are willing to accept some risk of curtailment to be added to the grid much more quickly.”
Norris also emphasized the U.S. power system operates at only 53% utilization on average. If large loads like AI data centers had flexible energy strategies and could adjust power use during specific peak-demand hours, the grid could accommodate significant growth without major new infrastructure.
“The challenge becomes when the new loads end up triggering the need for substantial new grid infrastructure and new power plants are only needed to serve a limited number of hours in the year for peaking capacity,” he said.
Large-load customer flexibility could come in the form of on-site power generation or energy storage. It could also mean deferring AI model training workloads or shifting workloads to other regions during extreme weather.
This kind of flexibility was the subject of a paper released last month called, Rethinking Load Growth: Assessing the Potential for Integration of Large Flexible Loads in US Power Systems. The paper was co-authored by Norris.
Haque said PJM has had conversations with data centers trying to locate in the grid operator’s territory about their ability to be flexible. Haque said if this flexibility were possible, it could help with planning, which right now is based on peak demand.
“It is not clear whether or not these data centers can actually express the kind of flexibility that is described in Mr. Norris’s paper,” he said.
