Proliferation and load growth
Dan Krueger is EVP for Infrastructure and Generation Planning at WEC Energy Group. Tom Flaherty is Senior Advisor at EY-Parthenon and author of Bright Moves: How U.S. Utility Innovation is Driving the CleanTech Transition.
Since 2022, the U.S. electric utility sector has experienced an unprecedented surge in load with impacts not seen in over seventy years – creating an entirely new customer archetype at scale. Multiple types of data centers emerged and grew: first, small facilities less than twenty megawatts focused on single entities, to cloud, retail, and network multi-tenants under fifty megawatts, then larger crypto companies seeking capabilities for advanced data mining approaching one hundred megawatts, to hyperscalers with several hundred megawatt facilities for specific customers, and now gigantic, mega-scalers with multi-building campuses of over one gigawatt of power to serve AI training and inference.
From just a few counties in Virginia, to metro Atlanta to a ten-by-ten square mile area south of Dallas to most primary and secondary metropolitan cities, data center proliferation has been the underpinning of power sector load growth, as well as the catalyst for sustained new, large scale power supply, into and likely beyond the 2030s. Advanced manufacturing, reshoring, electrification, and economic vitality further buttress demand growth and lead to even more gigawatts of required capacity.