America added more electricity demand in the past eighteen months than in the previous fifteen years combined. The data centres came first, then the factories, then the fleets of vehicles that need somewhere to charge overnight. None of it was a surprise. All of it arrived faster than anyone had planned for.
The bottleneck is not generation. Solar and wind projects are queued up across the Midwest with financing secured and land under contract. The bottleneck is the wire — the high-voltage transmission lines that would carry that power from where it is cheap to where it is needed. A new interstate line takes between eight and twelve years to approve. A data centre takes eighteen months to build.
That gap is where the next decade of American industrial policy will be decided. Utilities are asking for rate increases to fund upgrades they should have started in 2015. Regulators are approving them, slowly, in fifty separate proceedings that do not talk to each other. Meanwhile the queue grows: more than two terawatts of proposed capacity waiting for a connection that may not exist until the 2030s.