LEARN / REINDUSTRIALIZATION
Why Electricity Demand Is Growing Again
After roughly two decades of flat American electricity demand, forecasts have turned sharply upward and have been revised upward repeatedly. How much of that reflects load that will actually energise is genuinely disputed, and one utility produced a measurement rather than an opinion.
Key points
- NERC has raised its ten-year summer peak growth forecast across four successive assessments, from 55 GW in 2022 to 224 GW in 2025.
- ERCOT reported monitoring roughly 226 GW of large load interconnection requests in December 2025, against a historic system peak near 85 GW.
- When AEP Ohio required a firm financial commitment to hold a queue position, its large load queue fell from about 30 GW to 5.6 GW.
- A queue figure, a utility forecast and committed load are three different quantities, and the gap between them is where the dispute sits.
- The strongest counterargument is that the firms filing today are capitalised differently from the speculative developers who created the generation queue problem.
The turn
American electricity demand was close to flat from the mid-2000s through the early 2020s, as efficiency gains offset economic growth. Planning organisations built forecasts and reserve margins around that assumption, and both generation investment and transmission planning adjusted to a system that was not expected to grow much.
That assumption has been abandoned. The scale of the revision is visible most clearly in NERC’s own successive assessments, read in sequence rather than one at a time.
Data55 → 80 → 132 → 224 GW
Ten-year summer peak demand growth as forecast in NERC Long-Term Reliability Assessments for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The 2025 figure is a 69 percent increase over the prior year. Source: NERC, 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment.
Series and provenance
- Agency
- North American Electric Reliability Corporation
- Program
- Long-Term Reliability Assessment
- Series
- 2025 LTRA, published January 2026
- Measure
- Ten-year summer peak demand growth forecast
- Units
- Gigawatts of peak demand growth over ten years
- Adjustment
- Committed projects only
- Period
- Assessments of 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025
- Latest
- 224 GW in the 2025 assessment, against 132 GW in 2024, 80 GW in 2023 and 55 GW in 2022
- Source tier
- Primary
- Retrieved
- August 9, 2026
NERC counts a large load only once a project advances from speculative and exploratory stages into development commitments, so the series lags real but uncommitted load.
Utility filings moved the same way. Grid Strategies found that the total of five-year forward summer peak growth forecasts published by utilities rose from 38 GW in 2023 to 128 GW in 2024. NERC attributes most of the increase to data centers, with industrial electrification and manufacturing contributing.
The measurement problem
Three different numbers circulate and are frequently treated as one. A queue figure counts interconnection requests submitted. A utility forecast counts load a planner expects to serve. Committed load counts projects with a signed agreement and financial exposure behind them. Each is larger than the next.
The gap arises from how large load developers behave. A firm evaluating a site files requests with several utilities across several states for what is functionally one project, negotiates, builds in one location, and frequently leaves the other applications sitting in their queues as live megawatts. The result is the same campus counted in several places at once.
Data30 GW → 5.6 GW
AEP Ohio’s large load interconnection queue after the utility introduced a tariff requiring firm financial commitments to hold a position. More than 80 percent of submitted load did not survive the requirement. Reported by Carbon Direct.
Series and provenance
- Agency
- American Electric Power Ohio
- Program
- Large load interconnection tariff
- Series
- Large load queue before and after a financial commitment requirement
- Measure
- Effect of a commitment requirement on queue volume
- Units
- Gigawatts of requested load
- Period
- Before and after the tariff took effect
- Latest
- About 30 GW falling to 5.6 GW; more than 80 percent of submitted load did not survive the requirement
- Source tier
- Utility tariff outcome, retrieved through a secondary compilation rather than the utility filing
- Retrieved
- August 9, 2026
The Institute has not read the underlying tariff filing or the queue reports directly, and this figure is marked at lower confidence than an agency data release. It measures commitment under one tariff at one utility. A queue that collapses under a financial requirement does not establish that the demand was never real, only that it was not committed there.
Measurement noteThe AEP Ohio result is the closest thing available to a controlled test, because the only variable that changed was the cost of holding a queue position. It should not be generalised without care: it measures one utility, at one moment, under one tariff design, and a queue that collapses under a financial commitment does not establish that the underlying demand was never real, only that it was not committed there.
The scale question is visible in Texas. ERCOT reported monitoring roughly 226 GW of large load interconnection requests in December 2025, up from about 63 GW a year earlier, with roughly three-quarters from data centers. The ERCOT system’s historic peak is near 85 GW. A queue more than twice the size of the entire system is not a forecast of anything.
Institute analysisThe useful discipline is to ask which of the three quantities a figure represents, every time one is cited, and to prefer committed load with financial exposure behind it. Where a source will not say which it is using, the figure describes how many applications were filed rather than how much load will arrive, and those two are separated by everything at issue.
Common misconceptions
That queue volume forecasts demand. A queue counts requests. Requests are cheap to file, are filed in parallel across territories, and are rarely withdrawn promptly when a project sites elsewhere.
That phantom load means the growth is not real. Duplicate counting inflates the gross figure and says nothing about the firm component underneath it. Both a large phantom share and substantial real growth can be true at once.
That flat demand for two decades predicts flat demand now. The efficiency gains that offset growth were largely one-time conversions, and the new load is a category that did not previously exist at this scale.
What the evidence says, and where it is contested
ContestedWhether current forecasts overstate is genuinely unsettled and both sides have real evidence. One position points to the AEP Ohio collapse, to ERCOT queue volume exceeding system peak, to utility executives describing double and triple counting, and to a Berkeley Lab study finding that most of twelve Western utilities overestimated demand in the mid-2000s. A second position holds that the queue-realisation record comes from generation interconnection, filed largely by thinly capitalised developers chasing tax credits, and that large load requests from firms with committed capital are a different category with a higher realisation rate. NERC counts only committed projects and has revised upward four times running, which is more consistent with a forecast lagging reality than leading it. The question will be settled by which loads energise.
Related Institute research
How Electricity Demand Is Measured
Why peak, energy and load factor are not interchangeable.
Why Reindustrialization Requires More Electricity
What this means for industrial siting.
Powering the Buildout
The Institute’s demand projections across three sources of new load.
Sources
- North American Electric Reliability Corporation, 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment, January 2026. nerc.com
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Data Centers and Large-Scale Electric Growth: The Virginia and Texas Experiences, citing ERCOT large load reporting. belfercenter.org
- Carbon Direct, Rethinking load forecasting for a changing grid, reporting the AEP Ohio queue result. carbon-direct.com
- World Resources Institute, Powering the US Data Center Boom, on forecasting electricity needs, citing Grid Strategies. wri.org
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Hourly Electric Grid Monitor, form EIA-930. eia.gov
Reference entry maintained by the Institute for American Manufacturing & Technology. Figures are drawn from primary sources and cited above. Where the Institute states a position rather than a finding, it is marked as such.