The past and future of American energy abundance

The return of load growth

Electrification, onshoring, and data centers have ended two decades of flat demand. The queue of generation waiting to interconnect is enormous, but the grid between new supply and new demand was not sized for either. That gap is where prices spike, and where storage earns its keep.

Flat demand let a generation of planners treat the grid as finished infrastructure — something to maintain rather than extend. The habits formed in that era, from interconnection study timelines to transmission cost allocation, are now the binding constraint on growth.

What the last buildout got right

The grid America built in the postwar decades was audacious: interconnections spanning regions, built ahead of demand on the conviction that supply would create its own uses. It was also slow, centrally planned, and paid for by captive ratepayers — a model that does not map onto competitive markets adding gigawatts of variable supply.

Storage as grid infrastructure

Batteries are usually discussed as a renewables accessory. We think that undersells them: storage is transmission you can build in fourteen months, sited where congestion actually bites. The abundance era will be won by whoever can put capacity where the grid needs it, fastest.

The next decade

The winners of the coming buildout will look less like utilities and more like logistics companies: disciplined about siting, ruthless about schedule, and instrumented enough to prove performance. Abundance is not a policy outcome. It is an operations problem, and operations problems get solved by whoever shows up with the shortest cycle time.