07-27-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

Our electric grid wasn’t built for this kind of demand

Speed-to-power is being limited by speed-to-build.

[Photo: Getty Images]

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BY Cameron Van Der Berg

The U.S. electric grid is the largest and most expensive machine on the planet. Its interconnected pathways cover nearly 7 million miles, serve 400 million customers, and its value is placed at about $1.5 trillion. To build it today, the grid would cost almost $5 trillion.

Despite that high price tag, the grid in its current form was built for a different era—one defined by centralized generation, shorter transmission distances, and long planning cycles aligned with steady, predictable load growth.

The grid is the bottleneck

The grid wasn’t designed for the rapid acceleration in power demand that we’re seeing today.

In addition, the industry that built the grid hasn’t changed how it deploys infrastructure in decades. Manual processes, legacy machinery, and construction methods have not fundamentally changed in decades. Expanding grid capacity has never been more urgent, yet we’re using outdated tools to do so.

The difference is not simply that grid demand has surged; it’s that the entire system architecture has changed: where generation is built, where load shows up, and how power is consumed. AI data centers, industrial reshoring, and electrification are driving a structural shift in U.S. electricity consumption, with federal forecasts pointing to the strongest multi-year growth since 2000.

What’s becoming abundantly clear is that power delivery—rather than power generation—is the biggest constraint on keeping pace with this new demand. New power generation can be built far faster than the network expansions and upgrades required to move power to where it is........

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