America's Electricity Gap

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Thanks for reading! If you haven’t subscribed, please click the button below:Subscribe nowBy subscribing, you’ll join over 80,000 people who read Apricitas!America has entered another era of electrification—US power consumption has risen more in the last two years than over the previous 15 combined. Yet this hasn’t been nearly enough to meet demand, with electricity prices also rising more over the last 4 years than the prior 14. Demand from AI, heavy industry, heating, and transport is driving load growth but also outstripping growth in power infrastructure—leaving America with an increasingly large electricity gap that’s driving up prices. Projections from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) expect generation to accelerate slightly over the next two years, growing another 4.6% in total, but that’s still not quick enough to close the gap or prevent further price appreciation.The return of sustained load growth after more than a decade and a half of stagnation represents a fundamental change in America’s energy markets, with the source of rising demand shifting alongside its scale. Indeed, the EIA expects more upcoming load growth to come from commercial entities—a category that includes data centers—than from industrial and residential uses combined. If those projections hold true, commercial power consumption will have grown more in the 4 years since ChatGPT’s launch than in the two decades prior.The second fundamental change in electricity markets is how the US is meeting the new rise in power demand—by deploying record amounts of renewable energy, primarily s…