Energy policy has snapped into a strange alignment: Washington is trumpeting nuclear, states are quietly building incentives for it, utilities are warning that data-center demand is outpacing the grid’s ability to interconnect anything, and the federal load forecast just shifted upward again. This is the closest thing to an inflection point the American grid has seen since shale. The question now is whether the country can build fast enough to meet an industrial boom that isn’t waiting around for regulators to catch up.

DOE Secretary Chris Wright visited Idaho National Laboratory this week, reiterating the administration’s push to dramatically expand U.S. nuclear generation and accelerate advanced reactor development. INL remains central to siting, testing, and licensing next-gen designs. Wright’s visit came alongside new reporting that the administration is considering customer-side backup generator requirements as part of its grid-resilience strategy.

Why It Matters - The nuclear push is real: INL is becoming the center of gravity for advanced reactor demonstration, and federal rhetoric has shifted from “supporting innovation” to “deploying capacity.”

But backup-generation mandates would be a very different kind of grid policy: a shift toward pushing resilience responsibilities onto commercial and industrial customers.

Grid Take - Wright is pushing to break a rigid system that has discouraged new energy infrastructure for decades. His willingness to rethink resilience signals a shift toward practical solutions that match the scale of the challenge. The key now is pairing customer-side flexibility with the real fix: faster deployment of firm power and the freedom to build it.

EIA’s latest short-term outlook shows U.S. power demand hitting record highs in 2025 and 2026. The driver: AI clusters, hyperscale campuses, and data-center expansions across PJM, MISO, the Southeast, and the Mountain West. Industrial electrification continues slowly, but large load centers are now the swing factor in every regional forecast.

Why It Matters - For the first time in two decades, forecasts are consistently missing in one direction — underestimating load. Data-center demand is proving to be firm, not flexible, and utilities are revising planning assumptions that long treated commercial load as flat.

Grid Take - We just entered the first real demand boom of the century, and our planning models still think it’s 2014. Data-center developers build in 18 months; permit reform takes three presidencies. Something has to give, and it won’t be Nvidia.

Multiple reports this week highlight escalating tension between huge incoming loads and the interconnection system meant to serve them. In PJM, watchdog complaints argue that approving more data-center connections without parallel transmission expansion could strain reliability for existing customers. Utilities nationwide warn that large loads are arriving faster than planning timelines can accommodate.

Why It Matters - This is no longer a “resource adequacy” issue — it’s a timing issue. The grid cannot process, study, and interconnect large loads at anything close to the speed demanded by AI-scale growth.

Grid Take - PJM spent five years rewriting its interconnection process to deal with renewables. Now the real fight arrives: billion-dollar loads that expect firm service yesterday. This is where policy fantasy collides with physics. Until permitting reform accelerates transmission, the queue is just a national dead end for economic development.

A bipartisan bill in Wisconsin would introduce tax credits for new nuclear construction — including advanced and small modular reactors — aimed at reshoring firm generation and stabilizing long-term power prices.

Why It Matters - States are now competing for nuclear investment, and they’re doing it with tools that actually move capital: tax credits, siting support, and permitting prioritization.

Grid Take - If Wisconsin is leaning into nuclear, the political map has already changed. For decades the Midwest treated nuclear like an aging artifact. Now it’s becoming a growth strategy. Washington may talk about a “renaissance,” but states are the ones quietly building it.

NextEra Energy Resources is partnering with Basin Electric to explore pairing new generation with incoming data-center load across the Plains.

Why It Matters - This reflects the emerging model: data centers as anchor tenants for new power development, not opportunistic loads trying to tap cheap power.

Grid Take - Hyperscalers have become sovereign grid actors. They move faster, spend deeper, and plan on 20-year horizons. If they start pairing load + generation + transmission in integrated deals, they may accidentally invent the planning model regulators couldn’t.

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Pew’s new survey cuts through the noise: Republicans and Democrats disagree on everything in energy policy — except nuclear power. On solar, wind, coal, offshore drilling, and fracking, the partisan gap is a canyon. But on nuclear? It’s a crack in the sidewalk.

This chart shows it clearly:

In a country fracturing along nearly every energy axis, nuclear is the one place where both sides are at least in the same ZIP code. Democrats like the climate upside; Republicans like the firmness, the industrial logic, and the national strength it implies. That overlap is tiny, but historically rare — and politically potent.

Grid Take: If you’re looking for the coalition that actually builds the next generation of American power infrastructure, this is it. Every other energy source is locked inside a partisan trench war. Nuclear is the only one still standing on common ground… and that makes it the most expandable, investable, and governable source in the entire portfolio.

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