Overview

• The Department of Energy report finds planned retirements of coal, natural gas and nuclear plants will outpace firm generation growth over the next five years.
• Massive deployment of wind and solar cannot fill the reliability gap created by retiring baseload resources under current grid assumptions.
• Peak-hour electricity demand is expected to climb by at least 100 GW by 2030, with AI data centers accounting for about 50 GW of that increase.
• Without timely replacement of firm capacity, annual outage hours could jump from single digits today to over 800 hours by the end of the decade.
• The administration is urging accelerated deployment of baseload sources alongside grid-planning reforms to avert a doubling of blackout risk