Sep 15, 2026 · 30 min · 13 segments
America's grid runs at about half its capacity. AI needs more power. What's the problem? Every new data center waits on a connection study, and the studies are still run by hand. The turbines and…
Jackie Snow
Marco PimentelHost
She covered AI for a decade, which, as she puts it, makes her an energy reporter now.
We build the grid to let everyone take as much energy from it that they could possibly want on the hottest day of the year.
And not even just like the hottest day of the year, but the hottest few hours of the hottest day of the year.
I talked to Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Lab.
He spent his career, as he puts it, hiding electricity from you so well that almost nobody sees the overbuild.
As an electrical engineer and power system engineer, I like to keep it that way, right? Like I don't want anybody to ever have to worry about their lights going on.
That's like my mission.
However, we've done such a good job for the most part of hiding electricity prices and the realities of how the grid works.
We hide things like we built hundreds and hundreds of power plants that only operate a few hours per year they may operate five percent of the year just so that we can meet the peak demand on that hottest summer day
they are power plants that maybe get turned on for in some places, 10 hours a year.
If you're having to build hardened infrastructure that is used for 40 hours a year, that is just inherently not an efficient use of CapEx.
This can't be solar because likely the day that you need it is going to be potentially really sunny, but you just happen to have a cloud kind of hanging out over the solar panels that you need, like, that can't work.
So it is almost always fossil fuels because that is the energy source that we understand the best.
An expensive thing to build because, again, since they are so worried about not ever hitting that 101% where bad things start to happen, they build it a little bit bigger than they think they need.
And it just becomes an expensive tool that is utilized less than 1% of the year.
Instead of saying, gosh, maybe instead of building another one of these peaker power plants, we should figure out if we can take advantage of the demand side, we could absolutely save people money.
She covered AI for a decade, which, as she puts it, makes her an energy reporter now.
We build the grid to let everyone take as much energy from it that they could possibly want on the hottest day of the year.
And not even just like the hottest day of the year, but the hottest few hours of the hottest day of the year.
I talked to Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Lab.
He spent his career, as he puts it, hiding electricity from you so well that almost nobody sees the overbuild.
As an electrical engineer and power system engineer, I like to keep it that way, right? Like I don't want anybody to ever have to worry about their lights going on.
That's like my mission.
However, we've done such a good job for the most part of hiding electricity prices and the realities of how the grid works.
We hide things like we built hundreds and hundreds of power plants that only operate a few hours per year they may operate five percent of the year just so that we can meet the peak demand on that hottest summer day
they are power plants that maybe get turned on for in some places, 10 hours a year.
If you're having to build hardened infrastructure that is used for 40 hours a year, that is just inherently not an efficient use of CapEx.
This can't be solar because likely the day that you need it is going to be potentially really sunny, but you just happen to have a cloud kind of hanging out over the solar panels that you need, like, that can't work.
So it is almost always fossil fuels because that is the energy source that we understand the best.
An expensive thing to build because, again, since they are so worried about not ever hitting that 101% where bad things start to happen, they build it a little bit bigger than they think they need.
And it just becomes an expensive tool that is utilized less than 1% of the year.
Instead of saying, gosh, maybe instead of building another one of these peaker power plants, we should figure out if we can take advantage of the demand side, we could absolutely save people money.
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