Opinion

The machines that keep America alive are failing. We forgot how to replace them

We've finally admitted that electricity is as essential as water, but we did so too late to avoid disruption

By Brian Tochman Fox News

Published August 7, 2026 5:00am EDT

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For 20 years, electricity was the most boring business in America, and our industry built its whole infrastructure strategy around the assumption that things would stay that way.

The numbers tell the story. From 2010 to 2020, U.S. electricity consumption fell by roughly 1%. LEDs, efficient motors and tightening appliance standards quietly cancelled out the electricity used by every new subdivision, factory and data hall, and then some. Demand was flat, and planners treated this as a permanent fact of life rather than as what it actually was: an intermission.

No-growth industries make choices that are perfectly rational, yet corrosive. You don't fund apprenticeships when there's no new capacity to staff. You don't keep spare metallurgical know-how on the payroll when nobody's ordering. You don't recruit ambitious 25-year-olds into a sector whose pitch is "stable, essential, and never going........

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