From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

Less than a year ago, Elon Musk sounded the alarm that “people are going to start hitting challenges with power generation by the middle of next year, end of next year.”

That’s just months down the road.

And Musk is hardly the only voice crying out in the politically charged Mad Max atmosphere that features calls for shutting down existing power generation facilities before new power generation is in place. Such people are begging for a disastrous collapse.

President Trump, by contrast, has called for a quadrupling of nuclear electric power generation to meet the demands of artificial intelligence, data centers, and national security. That call followed his cancellation of electric vehicle mandates as unsustainable and threatening a national electricity shortfall.

But Trump was wise enough to demand that data centers serving big tech companies build out their own generation capacity rather than tax the already overstressed grid. “We have an old grid [that] could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity that’s needed,” he said.

Cybersecurity expert Fred Bailey last fall reported that many still-active U.S. power lines were built in the 1950s and 1960s and have already reached or exceeded their original 50-year design life. Many miles of high-voltage transmission lines have been operational for over 25 years.

Bailey says key components of older transmission lines — conductors, insulators, even steel towers — are showing signs of wear. Metal fatigue can cause conductor sag; corrosion of tower foundations can accelerate — and if minions delay maintenance, faulty components increase their risk of sparking wildfires.

Failure to constantly monitor and upgrade existing transmission lines can be fatal, as many in California found out in 2018 (and many times since). In the aftermath of the notorious Camp Fire, evidence surfaced that Pacific Gas & Electric had admitted to the U.S. Forest Service months earlier that 59 aging steel towers on one of its transmission lines needed replacement, as did hardware and aluminum lines on another 57 towers.

But PG&E reportedly decided that giving shareholders $5 billion in dividends was far more important than repairing aging transmission lines, including some that were 80 years old. Instead, unchecked fires wiped out the entire town of Paradise, killing 85 people; one insurer reported overall losses of $16.5 billion.

Over in Texas, winter storm Uri (2021) exposed the fragility of the Texas grid, independently operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Uri left operators unable to import power when they needed it most, thanks to the absence of modern, flexible interregional connections.

A year later, winter storm Elliott forced rolling blackouts across much of the South despite an oversupply of generation in the plains states. Had there been sufficient interregional transmission ties between the two regions, blackouts could have been prevented, saving billions of dollars and many lives.

Bailey cited a mix of policy, permitting delays, and market dynamics as problems the U.S. needs to overcome to strengthen what is as much a national security threat as it is a burden on underserved electric utility customers.

As high-voltage transmission lines often cross multiple jurisdictions, winning approval from each jurisdiction and completing construction can take up to a decade. And, as economist Timothy Taylor wrote in 2023, shareholders in utility companies are often unwilling to invest in grid maintenance and upgrades because taking on new debt does little for short-term returns.

Simply put, caps on pricing and profit have little impact on shareholders but are major impediments to modernization — a problem that heavily regulated utilities share with actual government entities. That fragmentation of the utility industry also inhibits any effort for a coordinated nationwide transmission planning framework.

But that’s America, the land of the free.

Besides, giant megaliths are often no more efficient (and just as often totally wrong-headed) than even the stingiest of local utilities. Big government under previous administrations went about shutting down “polluting” generation stations and building intermittent wind and solar power willy-nilly — virtue signaling rather than focusing on growing real-world energy demand.

The Trump administration, however, has taken a proactive, national security-focused approach to expanding and upgrading America’s electric grids that goes far beyond his push for nuclear energy and self-funded localized grids for big tech and AI data centers.

Just last month, the Department of Energy announced a $26.5 billion loan package, funded by the Working Families Tax Cut law, to two wholly owned subsidiaries of the utility Southern Company to develop over 16 gigawatts of grid power — whether from natural gas, nuclear (via upgrade licensing), hydropower modernization, or battery electric storage.

The White House claims the DOE loan will save Americans $7 billion in energy costs while creating thousands of jobs and increasing grid reliability in Alabama and Georgia. It also allows data center development, which in turn will support reshoring of American manufacturing and prevent price jolts for ratepayers.

DOE Energy Dominance Finance Director Greg Beard says that this partnership can be replicated across the nation. “What we’re looking for is partners, business partners that are competent and good at what they do, will deploy their own capital and just partner with them if their overriding agenda is to hold flat or drive utility prices and enable growth in the capacity of the grid so more industries can locate” in their service areas — whether AI or modern manufacturing.

The loan package aligns with President Trump’s centrist policy of collaborations between public and private institutions that serve the national interest, augment national security, and add value measured in personal incomes and affordability — and on recoverable loans rather than open-ended grants.

That policy Trump outlined on the first day of his second term via an executive order on Unleashing American Energy. There he cited “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” that worked against ensuring sufficient reliable energy at affordable prices and instead drove up costs of heating, transportation, utilities, farming, and manufacturing while weakening national security.

The Trump initiatives specifically excluded support for wind and solar projects, which Beard said would create a less reliable grid and raise energy costs due to necessary redundancy. Critics, like Georgetown University sustainability professor Roshanak Nateghi, complained that up to $24 billion in canceled renewable energy projects was a sign that Trump would continue Washington’s pattern of investing too little in the national grid.

But if Trump continues to promote public support for long-term private grid projects, his critics will have little to whine about. This single loan is by itself larger than the $24 billion in lost renewable “investment” lamented by Nateghi.

And it could be just the first drop in a very deep bucket.