Overview
- At a FERC-hosted meeting, NERC chief Jim Robb said mounting small outages and near misses tied to surging data-center load amount to a reliability 'five-alarm fire.'
- U.S. electricity demand is projected to rise about 25% by 2030, with AI facilities a major driver that could require accelerating new generation additions.
- Maryland’s public advocate urged PJM to curb speculative data-center interconnection requests that can double count demand and push higher costs onto consumers, Vox reported.
- Belgian operator Elia proposed placing data centers in a capped, separate category to prevent speculative reservations from crowding out industry, citing a nine-fold jump in requests and oversubscribed 2034 capacity.
- Private actors are securing near-term supply with measures such as AEP’s $1.6 billion DOE-backed reconductoring program, Brookfield’s $5 billion commitment to Bloom fuel cells, and Amazon’s plan to deploy over 5 GW of SMRs by 2039.