America’s Future of Rationing Electricity

Over the next two decades, global electricity demand is expected to double, growth we haven’t seen since post-World War II. We can’t meet the needs and are probably looking at rationing electricity in the future, even as Democrats push electric cars, complain about “extreme heat” while telling us to ration our A/C.

To meet historic projections, we need to generate abundant, reliable and affordable energy at a massive scale. But new generation won’t be enough. We must dramatically modernize the country’s electrical grid infrastructure, the invisible backbone of our entire energy system.

The Energy Department reinforced this view last week, saying in a report: “Electricity demand from AI-driven data centers and advanced manufacturing is rising at a record pace. The magnitude and speed of projected load growth cannot be met with existing approaches to load addition and grid management.”

Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection’s territory, which covers 13 states – from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey – serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world.

PJM operates in 13 states in the Northeastern US, including parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia, according to its website.

AI-Driven Chatbots Are Taking Over Pennsylvania’s Grid

The situation is so bad in Pennsylvania, where businesses are seeing a 29% increase, that its governor is threatening to abandon the service if it cannot bring prices down. PJM CEO Manu Asthana announced in April that he will step down at the end of 2025.

PJM, America’s largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built.

When ChatGPT’s popularity exploded in 2023, tech giants began placing enormous bids in annual power grid auctions to secure capacity for their data centers. In PJM’s 2024 auction, the going rate for power plants jumped 800%, from $269.92 per megawatt-day, compared to $28.92 the year before. The “proliferation of new data centers, [is creating] major pockets of significant load growth,” PJM wrote in its 2024 annual report.

PJM says the supply and demand crunch has been caused largely by factors outside of its control, including state energy policies that closed fossil-fuel fired power plants prematurely and data center growth in “Data Center Alley” in Northern Virginia and other burgeoning hubs in the Mid-Atlantic.

Across the nation, officials have shut down coal plants and nuclear power and tried replacing them with the short-lived solar and wind. In New York, Indian Point, shut down by then-Gov. Cuomo and Lt. Gov. Hochul shut down Indian Point Power Plant.  Now, Hochul is considering building a new nuclear power plant. They won’t let us increase natural gas, which we have in abundance.

All of this was easily foreseeable. We’ve warned of it at the Sentinel repeatedly, but we elect complete fools.