Electricity policy is moving out of abstraction and into mechanics. Large new loads are forcing regulators to confront who pays, who builds, and how fast capacity can actually show up. This issue tracks a subtle but important shift: away from managing scarcity through pricing and politics, and toward structures that allow supply to be built faster, closer, and with clearer accountability.

At a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing this week, lawmakers warned that U.S. power markets are entering a reliability squeeze as natural gas capacity faces mounting regulatory and political pressure. FERC officials confirmed that gas-fired generation still supplies roughly 40–45% of U.S. electricity and provides the majority of marginal capacity during peak demand events.

Several members pointed to over 100 GW of coal and gas retirements announced or completed since 2015, while replacement firm capacity has lagged. FERC commissioners acknowledged that permitting timelines for pipelines and power plants now routinely exceed 5–10 years, even as load forecasts accelerate. Regional grid operators have warned that reserve margins in parts of PJM, MISO, and New England are already falling below historical planning targets.

Why It Matters - Gas remains the backbone of U.S. reliability today. Policy hostility toward it is colliding with the physical reality that replacement capacity is not arriving at the same pace.

Grid Take - Markets can absorb fuel transitions. They cannot absorb capacity exits without replacements. Treating gas as temporary while relying on it for reliability is how price shocks get locked in.

According to Reuters, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is preparing rule changes to align licensing with the Trump administration’s nuclear deployment goals. The reforms focus on advanced reactors and would update safety assumptions written for large light-water reactors in the 1970s and 1980s.

Key changes under review include:

Today, nuclear projects typically face 10–20 year timelines from application to operation. NRC officials indicated the goal is to reduce early-stage regulatory timelines by several years, particularly for first-of-a-kind advanced designs.

Why It Matters - Licensing timelines, not engineering, are the binding constraint on nuclear scale.

Grid Take - You don’t get nuclear deployment by announcing ambition. You get it by making second, third, and fourth reactors easier than the first.

We flagged this briefly in Things to Read last issue, but the idea is now moving quickly enough in policy circles that it deserves a proper look. Consumer-regulated electricity, most clearly articulated in recent work from the Cato Institute, is emerging as a serious solution to two of the grid’s most urgent problems: rising electric bills and the challenge of serving large new loads like data centers without blowing up the system for everyone else.

At its core, the proposal allows electricity to be sold through contracts rather than monopolies. Instead of being forced to buy power exclusively from a regulated utility, large customers could opt into privately built power systems that generate and deliver electricity directly to them. These systems typically use private wires, not shared utility infrastructure, and are regulated for consumer protection and reliability rather than subjected to full utility-style rate regulation. Customers sign long-term contracts specifying price, uptime, penalties, and exit terms, while the utility grid often remains connected as backup.

What makes this model compelling is speed and accountability. Private providers can build capacity far faster than utility-scale projects mired in permitting and cost-recovery proceedings. Risk sits with investors and customers who choose the arrangement, not with captive ratepayers. As Travis Fisher has argued, this is a shift from regulating ownership and inputs to regulating outcomes. The existing grid remains intact, but its slowest bottlenecks are routed around rather than endlessly debated.

Why It Matters - Electric bills are rising just as electricity demand is surging, driven by data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification. Under the current model, utilities are forced to socialize the cost of new capacity across all customers, even when that capacity is built to serve a small number of large loads. Consumer-regulated electricity offers a way to serve those loads directly, relieving pressure on the broader grid and reducing the risk that everyone else pays the price.

Grid Take - Imagine your electric bill keeps climbing, and a privately financed wind and gas hybrid plant gets built a few miles outside town on low-value farmland. Instead of that power being forced into the regional grid and rate-based for everyone, you and a few hundred nearby customers sign a contract to buy it directly for 9¢ per kWh. You stay connected to the utility and to PJM Interconnection for backup and balancing, but most of your power comes from the private system. When it’s available, you use it. When it’s not, the grid fills the gap.

This doesn’t fix everything, but it fixes a lot. It adds capacity fast, keeps big new loads from driving up everyone else’s bills, and forces utilities to compete at the margin instead of relying on scarcity. You don’t lower prices by rationing power. You lower prices by building it and letting customers choose how to buy it.

The Tennessee Valley Authority said this week it expects electricity demand across its service territory to rise by up to 5% by 2035, driven primarily by data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification. TVA officials confirmed that new large-load requests already total more than 8 GW, roughly equivalent to adding multiple mid-sized cities to the system.

To meet that growth, TVA is evaluating a portfolio that includes:

TVA currently operates 7 GW of nuclear capacity, which supplies about 40% of its electricity, and has stated that intermittent resources alone cannot meet projected load growth without firm backup.

Why It Matters - TVA is planning for load growth explicitly, not assuming efficiency or demand management will erase it.

Grid Take - This is what alignment looks like: forecast the demand, size the supply, and accept that firm power carries the system during stress.

Upgrade to Grid Brief Premium to get extra deep dives into energy issues all over the world.

We rely on word of mouth to grow. If you're enjoying this, don't forget to forward Grid Brief to your friends and ask them to subscribe!