The grid’s 2026 personality so far: hyperscalers want their own power, politicians want someone else to pay for it, and states are trying to buy themselves a little breathing room with storage, virtual power plants, and carefully targeted rule changes.

A new Senate proposal would exempt fully off-grid power suppliers from the Federal Power Act and certain Department of Energy regulations, as long as the system is physically isolated from the bulk power system. The bill creates a new category of “consumer-regulated electric utilities” that can serve data centers and other large loads, provided the customer cannot rely on the grid even for backup.

This is a quiet but important reframing. Instead of forcing hyperscalers into an increasingly strained interconnection queue, the policy says: if you truly want to go it alone, you can. Utilities are already wary. Large, stable load growth has historically been how fixed grid costs get spread more efficiently, and sustained self-supply complicates that math.

Why it matters - Off-grid is no longer just an engineering choice. It is becoming a jurisdictional and political strategy that reshapes who pays for grid upgrades and who benefits from load growth.

Grid Take - This is the market testing the limits of cost causation. Islanding makes sense for some projects, but most large loads still value grid access. Expect hybrid approaches, creative compliance, and a lot of attention from state commissions.

Illinois has enacted a sweeping package aimed at reliability and affordability, directing utilities to deploy 3 GW of grid-scale storage by 2030 and expand programs that compensate customers for flexible demand. The state projects long-term consumer savings driven by reduced peak prices and avoided capacity costs.

The law also lifts Illinois’ moratorium on large nuclear reactors, expands community solar size limits, and increases energy efficiency and low-income program funding. The common thread is speed. Storage and demand response move faster than traditional generation and can soften price spikes while longer-term assets catch up.

Why it matters - Illinois is trying to turn flexibility into a visible affordability tool rather than a theoretical planning concept, and other Midwest states are watching closely.

Grid Take - Targets are easy. Dispatchability is hard. The real test will be whether these resources perform when the system is stressed, not just when incentives are flowing.

Meta announced deals with Oklo, Vistra, and TerraPower to supply up to 6.6 GW of nuclear by 2035 (all in PJM). The package mixes (1) near-term reality like power from existing fleets and uprates and (2) mid-2030s ambition via advanced reactor deployments. Some highlights:

Pattern check: this builds on Meta’s 20-year deal with Constellation announced last year, and it rhymes with other hyperscaler behavior: lock up clean firm power, get ahead of “who pays?” politics, and reduce the chance you become the villain in next summer’s rate-case theatre.

Why it matters - This is load growth behaving like infrastructure. Long-dated contracting stabilizes both sides of the market and signals that sustained demand growth can support, not undermine, grid economics.

Grid Take - The story here is not any single reactor design. It’s portfolio thinking. Large loads are anchoring supply instead of waiting for regulators and planners to catch up.

New Jersey lawmakers are advancing proposals that would place the incremental grid costs of serving data centers directly onto those facilities through dedicated rate classes and planning requirements. At the national level, rhetoric has sharpened as well, with calls for large tech firms to absorb the cost impacts of their electricity use.

This framing is gaining traction because it is politically clean. It turns a complex grid planning problem into a simple villain narrative, even as sustained demand growth has historically helped spread fixed costs and stabilize pricing for everyone else.

Why it matters - Once large loads are recast from economic assets to political liabilities, policy responses can move quickly and bluntly.

Grid Take - Load growth is good for grids and consumers when it is planned and priced correctly. The danger is not data centers themselves, but the temptation to weaponize them as a populist talking point.

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Year-over-year change as a share of total U.S. electricity generation

Source: U.S. EIA data via Canary Media. Percentages reflect change relative to ~4,300 TWh of total U.S. electricity generation.

Solar posted the fastest growth rate in 2025, fueling a popular narrative that it “burst onto the scene” to carry the grid forward. But when year-over-year changes are measured against total U.S. electricity production, the shift looks far more modest. Solar increased its share of total output by roughly 1.5 percentage points, less than coal’s contribution and dwarfed by the system’s overall scale.

Grid Take
The story of 2025 is not that solar saved the grid. It’s that solar was allowed to grow while nearly everything else was constrained. Nuclear remained flat, gas fell back, hydro declined, and new firm capacity stayed bottled up behind permitting and market barriers. Solar didn’t replace the system. It filled the only lane regulators left open.

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