Failure to meet surging energy demand will jeopardize economic growth,

The largest utility companies in the U.S. are warning that the nation is facing a surge of electricity demand unlike anything seen in decades, and failure to rapidly increase power generation could jeopardize the nation’s economy.

After a more than decade-long period of largely flat growth, electricity demand is poised to skyrocket by 2030 as the artificial intelligence revolution, the expansion of chip manufacturing, and the electrification of the vehicle fleet all coincide as the U.S. is trying to address climate change.

The tech sector’s build out of data centers to support AI and the adoption of electric vehicles alone is expected to add 290 terawatt hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade, according to a report released by the consulting firm Rystad Energy this week.

The expected demand from data centers and electric vehicles in the U.S. is equivalent to the entire electricity demand of Turkey, the world’s 18th largest economy, according to Rystad.

“This growth is a race against time to expand power generation without overwhelming electricity systems to the point of stress,” said Surya Hendry, a Rystad analyst, in a release following the report’s publication.

The major tech players – Amazon, Alphabet’s Google unit, Microsoft and Meta – are urgently requesting more power as they bring data centers online that in some cases require a gigawatt of electricity, said Petter Skantze, vice president of infrastructure development at NextEra Energy Resources. To put that in context, a gigawatt is equivalent to the capacity of nuclear reactor.

NextEra Energy, parent of Skantze’s subsidiary, is the largest power company in the S&P utilities sector by market capitalization and it operates the biggest portfolio of renewable energy assets in the nation.

“This is a different urgency coming. They need this load to drive the next iteration of growth,” Skantze told the Reuters Global Energy Transition conference in New York City this week. “They’re showing up now at the utility and they’re banging on the door and they’re saying I need to put this resource on the grid,” the executive said.

A big challenge will be whether enough resources are available to connect those large data center projects to the power grid, Skantze said. The stakes are high for the U.S. economy, the executive said.

“If I can’t get that power capacity online, I cannot do the data center. I cannot do the manufacturing. I can’t grow the core businesses of some of the largest corporations in the country,” Skantze said. “The stakes are really, really high. This is a new environment. We have to get this right.”

NextEra CEO John Ketchum told investors earlier this month that U.S. power demand will increase by 38% over the next two decades, a fourfold increase over the annual rate of growth in the previous 20 years….