The AI boom is colliding with America’s aging power grid

PG&E entered 2026 expecting a year’s worth of new electricity demand. Barely two months later, nearly all of it was already spoken for. Interconnection requests were piling up faster than planners had expected, overwhelming a regulatory system built for an era when electricity demand barely moved. That world is gone. Load growth that historically ran below 1% annually hit 4% at some grid operators last year, according to a report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Bain and Company projects that AI data centers alone could consume up to 9% of total U.S. electricity by 2030, adding more than 150 terawatt-hours of demand that the current grid was never really built to handle. A third of that new demand is concentrated in Virginia, Texas, and California, according to Pew Research Center, putting extraordinary pressure on regional systems already straining to keep up. AI may dominate the headlines, but it is only part of the story. EVs, new factories, and industries shifting off diesel and gas are all pulling from the same aging grid at the same time. At Southwest Power Pool, which oversees electricity across 17 states, officials compared last year’s surge in demand to two large nuclear plants suddenly appearing on a grid with roughly 56 gigawatts of capacity. By late 2024, more than 2,600 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage projects were waiting to connect to the grid, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than twice the country’s entire installed capacity. David Sawaya, PG&E’s director of rate-reducing load growth, says virtually every utility he knows has seen its interconnection queue swell by 50% to 150% in just two years. “The process does not move at the speed of business,” he tells Fast Company. “And right now, the business is moving very fast.” A decade behind and racing to catch up The utilities trying to manage this transformation are not exactly starting from a position of strength. Carlos Elena-Lenz, who leads dig