From CFACT
When President Trump last May signed an executive order calling for deployment of 300 gigawatts (GW) of net new nuclear capacity by 2050, it had to come as a shock to those who just a few years earlier were plotting a very different energy future – one built on wind turbines and solar arrays, the abolition of coal and natural gas, and maybe a wink and a nod toward what was perceived to be unaffordable nuclear.
Back in 2011, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the future of the electric grid stated that “One of the most important emerging challenges facing the grid is the need to incorporate more renewable generation in response to policy initiatives at both state and federal levels.”
Signaling their own skepticism at this strategy, the authors added that “Much of this capacity will rely on either solar or wind power and will accordingly produce output that is variable over time and imperfectly predictable, making it harder for system operators to match generation and load at every instant.”
Nevertheless, solar energy has grown from 891 gigawatt-hours in 2009 to 218,538 GWh by 2024, while wind energy rose from 73,890 GWh in 2009 to 453,450 GWh in 2024. Combined, these two sources in 2024 generated less than the 782,000 to 816,000 GWh from the nation’s 94 nuclear power plants, which unlike wind and solar, operate round the clock at consistent outputs.
The push toward intermittent wind and solar has continued during the first year of President Trump’s second term. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reported that of the 15+ GW of new electricity generation resources added in the first five months of 2025, 11.5 GW was solar, 2.3 GW was wind, and 1.3 GW was natural gas – with no new nuclear at all.
That trend has continued despite Trump Administration efforts against offshore wind and ongoing opposition to new wind and solar farms. FERC listed 136 GW of “high probability additions” through August 2028, with solar and wind accounting for nearly 84% of that projected new capacity.
While battery storage has been hailed as the “solution” to the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy generation, Francis Menton reported in 2024 that battery storage facilities might not be a safe bet – or safe at all. They are subject to large and dangerous fires on a regular basis.
Menton recently atated that, in January 2025, the 300 MW facility at Moss Landing south of San Francisco, which held about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries, saw about 55% of those batteries damaged by a fire – the third at the facility in a 4-year period. He also said there were at least three major battery storage facility fires in New York State in 2023, followed by a major fire in Warwick, New York, last December.
Imagine the damage, he said, from a fire at the planned 315 MW battery storage facility in Queens, just across the East River from the Upper East Side and adjacent to the nation’s largest public housing project.
Despite the popularity of wind and solar with power companies today (as evidenced by their orders), large data processing centers, healthcare facilities, high-tech artificial intelligence, and national security operations cannot rely on intermittent power. The Trump White House, taking note of the concerns of those entities, prefers to invest in nuclear.
Trump’s goal of quadrupling U.S. electricity generation parallels the vision of economist Timothy Taylor, who in a September 2023 article stated that, to supply the massive increase in planned electricity generation “there will also need to be a dramatic expansion (maybe a tripling or quadrupling) in electricity lines to distribute the electricity where needed.”
But, he added, that is the rub.
While ratepayers crave cheaper electric bills, noted Taylor, “Shareholders are not likely to want the company to make major increases in the electric grid.” Many registered utility companies are owned by shareholders, and taking on new debt does not improve shareholder returns, largely because of government regulation of their pricing and investment plans.
On January 15, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas [ERCOT], which operates the Texas power grid, announced a new process for evaluating multiple large-load interconnection requests simultaneously. Texas is not generating enough electricity to supply every desired project immediately. Built for a large-load queue of 40 to 50 projects, the state’s queue is being overwhelmed by the 225 new interconnection requests submitted to ERCOT in 2025.
But who’s kidding whom? There has to be another solution to the problem of more demand than supply for grid electricity. Corporate giants like Google, Meta, CenterPoint, Amazon, and OpenAI cannot wait forever.
As the growing power crunch threatens President Trump’s (and private industry’s) plans for rapid growth of the U.S. economy, neither the Texas nor the national grid is ready for the explosive growth of power-hungry artificial intelligence and other high-volume users. The solution, said Jacob DeWitte, CEO of nuclear startup OKLO, is for large energy users to add grid power through private investment.
To that end, OKLO and Meta entered into a new partnership in which OKLO will build small modular reactors to power Meta facilities and sell any excess electricity to the grid. Energy Secretary Chris Wright is recommending such partnership for power, in line with President’ Trump’s December 2025 statement that every AI plant built in the U.S. must be self-sustaining with its own electricity.
On January 15, President Trump announced that the National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of several northeastern states served by the PJM Interconnection had agreed to push for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that will compel technology companies to effectively fund new power plants. That action was aimed at capping residential electricity rates that have been soaring as demand from hyperscalers and data centers has soared past supply.
The goal is to urge PJM to build more than $15 billion of reliable baseload power generation and to accelerate development by providing a 15-year revenue certainty for new power plants. The plan requires data centers to pay for any new generation built on their behalf and protect ratepayers by limiting the amount existing power plants can be paid in the PJM capacity market. It also opens the door for large users to build dedicated facilities.
Today, PJM is one of the eight (out of 13 total) regional power markets already below critical spare capacity levels. Peak demand across its system is expected to increase by another 17% by 2030. Without active intervention, brownouts could become a frequent irritation.
Based on his own statements, Trump hopes that much of this new electric generation capacity will come from new nuclear power plants (of all sizes). The OKLO-Meta deal is but one of many in some stages of negotiation. And the PJM challenge is likely to spread nationwide.
While growing user demand and competing potential sources of supply are tempered by trepidations about the ability of intermittent electric generation sources to satisfy these high-end users, Trump knows that the cost of nuclear energy (hence the cost of building new nuclear capacity) must come down.
That said, his bottom line is simple: “I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers.”
This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy
You must be logged in to post a comment.