AI Power Demand and US Energy Policy

Guest

Michelle Solomon

Senior Policy Analyst, Energy Innovation

Transcript

Michelle Solomon: Most of the utility companies in the United States have clean energy goals. Clean energy is a cheap source of electricity. It’s a reliable source of electricity. So all of the market forces are pushing us towards clean electricity, and I don’t really think there’s a turning it around.

Bill Loveless: The race to power artificial intelligence is dramatically reshaping America’s electricity landscape. What was once a steady, predictable growth in US power demand has accelerated into a dramatic surge. Recent analysis from the power consultancy firm grid strategies shows between 2024 and 2029 US electricity demand will grow at five times the rate predicted in 2022. A pace of expansion not seen since the 1980s. This surge comes as artificial intelligence and data centers reshape power markets with tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon pursuing direct power purchase deals, sometimes bypassing traditional utility structures entirely. At the same time, the recent change in the US administration has dramatically shifted the policy landscape. President Trump’s declaration of an energy emergency and appointment of new leadership at key agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission signal potential upheaval in how we approach grid reliability, renewable energy integration, and climate goals. So how do we meet this demand growth while navigating a complex political environment? And what role will emerging technologies like advanced nuclear enhanced geothermal and energy storage play in our energy future?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, the weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless today on the show, Michelle Solomon. Michelle is a senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation focusing on electricity policy. She brings a distinctive background combining technical expertise with policy experience. Before joining Energy Innovation, she earned her PhD in material science and engineering from Stanford University and she served as a Congressional Science and engineering fellow working on energy policy in the US Senate. I asked Michelle to help us understand the challenges and opportunities facing the US electricity sector. We discussed the surge in power demand, the role of artificial intelligence and reshaping energy markets and how utilities might adapt to meet these challenges while pursuing clean energy goals. We also explored how recent policy shifts might impact the sector’s trajectory and what options exist for meeting growing demand while maintaining grid reliability. I recorded my conversation with Michelle before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission launched a review on co-locating large loads such as data centers at existing power plants on February 20th. Here’s our conversation. Michelle Solomon, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Michelle Solomon: Thanks so much, bill. It’s great to be here.

Bill Loveless: Well it’s great to have you here as well on a topic that’s so timely right now. There’s so much being written about it. Talked about electricity, the electric grid, so I look forward to getting into it with you. But first, tell us a little bit about yourself. Academically, you are a material scientist and an engineer, but you’ve also dabbled in energy policy including working on Capitol Hill. How has that combination of experiences made you what you are today?

Michelle Solomon: It’s been an interesting journey for me. Started out as a scientist doing material science and really in that timeframe I realized that we have a lot of the solutions that we need and we’re just having trouble getting them out there and deployed in the world. So that’s kind what inspired me to move over into the policy space. So I think it’s really, I dunno, I’ve kind of found my niche in this area of bridging the gap between the technical side and the policymakers and helping make sense of what’s going on in the clean energy transition for those who are a little bit less on the technical side of things.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, I find that so important to have that technical background. It does. It’s so enabling in terms of how you can explain how things apply in a political sense or in an engineering sense rather. But the political comes up too because having spent time on the hill and all, you have a sense of policy, politics, those sorts of things, which is an important part of the entire equation. We read a lot about the surge in demand for electricity in the United States today. The numbers vary, but not assumptions that this trend seems real. How do you see the outlook for electricity demand in the US and what other reasons for this increase?

Michelle Solomon: So electricity demand in the US is definitely growing. We know that for sure, and to be honest, we’ve known it’s going to grow for a while due to electrification of things like vehicles, industry and buildings. But now in the past couple of years, the electricity demand from data centers has really accelerated things and pretty significantly so grid strategies in the end of the year. Last year I had a report that found that peak demand was projected to increase by around 128 gigawatts over the next five years. It’s about a 2% growth a year, and they highlight that this isn’t necessarily an unprecedented level of growth, but it’s something that we haven’t seen in quite a while and so we’re not quite used to it. There is a line in the report that I really liked where they said these numbers may be an underestimate or an overestimate and it’s really the greater uncertainty in these numbers that creates challenges makes it difficult to agree on planning scenarios and things like that. So I think the big takeaway here is that there’s a really big uncertainty in exactly how fast demand is going to grow even though we know it’s going to grow and that makes it a little bit hard for us to figure out exactly what our next steps are.

Bill Loveless: And also, I mean that same report also said that we haven’t seen this level of demand growth since the 1980s.

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, exactly. So one of the biggest hurdles right now is that utilities are kind of out of practice with growing quickly and are tending to trend towards wanting to find these knee-jerk reactions of what they’re used to doing to grow demand. So a lot of them are proposing things like building natural gas plants, whereas if we were to look at the least regrets approaches for customers and for the costs of electricity, we would be thinking a lot more creatively at things like getting more out of the grid. We have today taking advantage of flexibility in operation of the loads that are coming on the grid and really prioritizing energy efficiency are a few of those least regret solutions.

Bill Loveless: And I want to get into some of these options more deeply, but we’re just bombarded these days it seems by these big headlines, bulletins among them, the deeps seek the China-based deeps seek created turmoil in tech and power markets recently with information about its AI systems, including their high performance and low cost. Some state undermined the idea that the US has a big lead in AI and more relevant to our conversation requires less energy to operate. What do you think when you hear that news?

Michelle Solomon: I mean, like you said, I think it is kind of one of the first proofs of concept that there’s a big way to go on efficiency of these models and AI products and things like that. So when you’re making electricity forecasts based on the early stages of these models that are the least efficient, that’s not necessarily going to be where you end up actually with electricity demand. So we’ve been saying since April or May of last year that efficiency is going to be one of the most important things to take into account in these load forecasts. And I think this is, while deep seek itself may not be the all end all in where AI is going, I think it’s just showing that there’s so much more room for innovation.

Bill Loveless: Let’s talk about these options a little bit more. What are they will interest in building new gas fired base load take precedence over solar, wind and storage options? For example?

Michelle Solomon: I think if we’re not careful, we’re in real danger of gas taking precedence over some of these cleaner electricity options. Something that I thought was really telling though was, I believe it was in a recent earnings call where they were talking about the feasibility of bringing new resources online and in the call they talked about the fact that solar, wind and batteries are the resources that are being built right now. In 2024, I think over 90% of new electricity resources added to the grid were wind, solar and batteries. And in the call they said that gas, if you start planning for a new gas plant today, it’s not necessarily going to come on until the early 2030s. So there’s still a mismatch in the speed there. And the things that can come online fastest are the things that are already being planned, which is wind, solar, and batteries.

So if we want to be able to meet this load quickly, we should look at what the market is doing right now and try to accelerate those projects and lean into those forces to help things move along versus try to build a big new plant that is going to face a lot of the big issues with permitting that other projects face. Communities don’t want a gas plant next to them, they’re going to be fighting that. So I think recognizing that gas isn’t this instant resource that you can just turn on is something that’s going to be increasingly more clear. I

Bill Loveless: Was reading recently a comments you made to a publication heat map, which you said that utilities are used to building gas plants more so than they’re used to building other things. It reflects a lack of creativity on their pot. What did you mean by that?

Michelle Solomon: Well, so when you think about it, the kind of paradigm for building a gas plant versus building a wind and solar is a little bit different because with the gas plant you just build one big resource, whereas with wind and solar, you have to build a bit of a more distributed system of resources that work together. So it just requires a little bit more planning and figuring out how each resource is going to come online versus just doing that one big project. So I think that’s kind of mostly what I was getting to there is just that, yeah, it may take a little bit of extra planning to get these resources out the door, but at the end of the day they can be a lot faster.

Bill Loveless: But it seems as though, and maybe again, I’m working off the reports, the news reports and all that, it seemed almost daily of what’s going on on the grid. And with the data centers and all, I mean just yesterday we saw energy transfer, a company with extensive gas pipeline network in the United States announced it as entered into a long-term agreement with cloudburst data centers to build to provide gas to cloudbursts flagship AI operations in Texas. The pipeline will send power directly to the data center bypass and existing transmission grids, and it’s the first of many such deals. Energy transfer expects. It just brings to mind two things. First is, what is tech company interest in enabling new power generation one and two? Gosh, I mean, it just seems as though the interest, the momentum, certainly the policy direction from Washington these is to build these big base load, or not big necessarily, but base load natural gas plants.

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, this is an interesting question because there are certainly some mixed messages from the tech companies and I think part of what it comes down to is that there are some big tech companies like Google and Microsoft that do seem to be serious about meeting demand with clean energy. They’re working with utilities on developing special tariffs that allow them to help bring new clean energy resources online without putting those costs onto other customers. But I think it’s important to recognize that a lot of data center proposals are not coming from those big companies. There are a lot of data center companies that are kind of these landlord companies that are building out sites in hope of finding a tenant to fill their rack space. And because these are more speculative, these aren’t the ones that are kind of making these big commitments to clean energy.

So there’s a few different types of players in the game that I think mix the messages a little bit. And then certainly the messages coming out of the federal government in the last few weeks are pointing more towards building out our fossil fuel infrastructure more. But as I said, if we really want to meet load growth and rising electricity demand quickly, one of the fastest ways to do it is with clean energy. And in addition to building new wind and solar plants, there are a few approaches that can help accelerate things even further. There’s something called surplus interconnection, which can help add new clean energy projects at existing energy infrastructure sites, whether that’s a fossil fuel plant or an existing renewable site. There’s extra space on that interconnection. So a report from uc, Berkeley last year found that there’s actually around a thousand gigawatts of space just at existing sites that you could interconnect more resources at. So that just falls back into that area of how can we be more creative about adding energy quickly.

Bill Loveless: And there’s efficiencies that again come to play too in the tech center and the data centers as well. There was a study released just this week from Duke University, Tyler Ris and other researchers at Duke, their study on how the US grid could integrate up to 100 gigawatts of data centers without major new infrastructure provided. There’s some load flexibility at the data centers, and they say that flexibility includes deferring workloads by a handful of hours, shifting workloads to other data centers and targeted reductions in power use. This study is getting a lot of attention these days. I read where varo server as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations described the findings as seismic. I don’t know if they’re seismic or not, but I do respect Varun, but nevertheless, it’s getting a lot of tension. What do you make of findings like that?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, I thought this was a really cool analysis from Duke and Tyler and it really just points to the fact, again, there’s a lot that we can get more out of our existing grid. So what he essentially looked at was not every resource on the grid is being used a hundred percent of the time. There are a lot of resources that are only used for a pretty small number of hours just during those peak times. So the utilization overall of the resources on the grid could stand to move up a lot more. And if you’re able to just not run during those peak hours when all the resources are being used, you really can reduce the number of new electricity resources that you need to bring onto the grid. So I think the big question here is, I think as Tyler pointed out, there’s a lot of opportunity for these data centers to be more flexible, but the question is, will they be more flexible? And I think as we’ve seen, they want to be able to connect to the grid quickly. And so if being flexible means they can connect to the grid quickly, I think that there is a lot of opportunity there for them to be flexible, take advantage of the resources that exist today without having to add so many new resources so quickly.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, it’s all a matter of timing and again, things are happening so quickly. I was reading fellow named Jonathan Kuy, who’s with something called K Kumi Analytics report, but he made a comment has stuck with me. He said the reality of actually building that scale of electricity infrastructure is that it can’t happen as fast as what the IT guys would love. He said the utility industry operates at a order of magnitude slower than the tech center.

Michelle Solomon: I think that’s right. It takes time to build physical things in the world, much more time than it takes to maybe develop a new software product or something like that. So there’s definitely a mismatch there. And I think that that is something that if the utility companies can kind of take advantage of the desire to come online quickly and help use it to get those data center companies to work with them to find those solutions that work best for both the grid and the data center, then that’s when we start to get into those win-win situations. And just wanted to point out that I think Jonathan Kumi has done some really interesting work on energy efficiency as well, on what the potential is for energy efficiency to bring those demand growth numbers down and hearkening back to the same type of exuberance around software that happened in the early 2010s or so. Huge demand growth was predicted. It didn’t end up materializing because there were so many efficiency improvements in the software. And a lot of that is driven by the need to come online quickly if it’s hard to build the electricity resources that quickly, you need to innovate in other ways. So I think that this is going to continue to drive innovation in the AI space and drive the need for power down.

Bill Loveless: Michelle, you listen to earnings calls, right? With utility companies. Do you hear these sorts of comments? I guess sometimes that’s the closest we can get to what’s the internal thinking of companies as the earnings calls? I mean they are scripted and all that, but interesting questions are raised. Do you hear conversations in those calls that suggest there’s this sort of attention to what you just described, the need to come up with innovative solutions to match the needs of the data centers with the capability of the grid?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, I think it varies a bit. I think there’s some interesting things going on with Google where they have tried to, in addition to doing, I guess, deals with utility companies, they are also to build new clean resources. They’re also procuring low income energy retrofits as kind of a strategy to create more headroom on the grid. So I think that’s a really creative solution because it not only creates more headroom on the grid by improving efficiency of other electricity users, but it also provides bigger benefits to the community. So I think that it varies a lot, but I think that there are some innovative, there is some innovative thinking out there.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, that’s certainly encouraging. Well, we talked, we touched on Washington. How does President Trump’s energy emergency as he declared soon after his inauguration defined US energy needs and how does it square with independent projections of US supply and demand?

Michelle Solomon: Like we said, electricity demand is growing in some places more than others, particularly those that are getting hit harder with the kind of data centers wanting to come and site in those regions. But we also have a lot of resources that are waiting to connect to the grid. We have about 2,600 gigawatts of clean resources or double the current capacity of the grid that’s waiting in line to connect. And like I said before, 90% of the electricity resources that were added last year were wind, solar, and batteries. So we have the resources we need in the queue. And I think what’s really unfortunate is that some of the language coming out of the White House limits what counts as energy to essentially fossil fuel energy when that’s not the resources that are being built largely because wind, solar and batteries are the cheapest resources out there. So at the end of the day, if we don’t prioritize these cheap sources of electricity, it’s going to be the electricity customers who end up paying for it. So I guess that’s what I would say is that I think some of this language is going to really come at the expense of the folks that are going to have to pay higher electricity bills as a result.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, yeah. And we’ve heard others in the administration, the new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright say that DOE, the Department of Energy will focus on growing base load and dispatchable generation to meet growing electricity demand. He mentioned fossil fuels. He’s even urged in the past day or so that existing coal plants remain online to serve what he sees as these needs. There’s no mention of solar or wind energy in the remarks that I’ve seen so far coming out of from him from the department of energy. So your concern is that all of these many hundreds upon hundreds of gigawatts of wind and solar energy and storage may just be left hanging because it can’t connect to the grid.

Michelle Solomon: Yeah. Left hanging or just not moved through the process as quickly as possible to get us the electricity resources that we need. And with the comments around needing baseload and dispatchable power, I think it’s kind of missing the point. Baseload power doesn’t necessarily mean more reliable power. There’s a lot of different things that contribute to grid reliability. And at the end of the day, grid reliability is a feature of an entire portfolio of resources and how they work together. And what we’re seeing is that actually one of the things we need most for reliability right now is a flexible resource, one that can ramp up and down quickly and help balance out the variations in weather and electricity use. So Baseload power is not really the type of resource that is going to help make our grid more reliable right now.

Bill Loveless: But yeah, that is what is getting the most attention right now. I mean, the perception is that Baseload dispatchable is so reliable in comparison to other options. I mean, that’s in the minds of many people, the conventional wisdom,

Michelle Solomon: I think that is the conventional wisdom. But what we’ve seen in the last few years, particularly with winter storms, is that it tends to be gas plants that have the highest rates of failure when you have extreme weather. So I think during winter Storm Elliot, in PJM, I think around 70% of the unplanned outages were at gas plants. And actually in Georgia, because of their proximity to Florida, they were able to import electricity from Florida and a lot of that electricity that they were able to import to keep their lights on during winter storm Elliott was solar. So what you see here is that at the end of the day, a more reliable grid is a more diverse grid that reduces the dependence on any kind of one certain resource. So I do think that that is a big misconception about base load power. There’s nothing about base load that inherently means reliable.

Bill Loveless: And from you, I hear that the US can meet demands for reliable in its clean energy goals or what have been its clean energy goals. Some wonder about that these days. You don’t. Why is that?

Michelle Solomon: Well, it’s pretty conclusive in the literature that we can reach 80 to 90% clean electricity while just adding technology that’s commercial today, wind, solar, and batteries, while still using the existing fossil fuel resources on the system, but kind of more and more sparingly, largely retiring coal and using gas less and less. So that research is quite conclusive. We can meet the clean energy goals with adding those resources. When you start to get closer to a hundred percent clean energy, that’s when you get a little bit more uncertainty as to what exactly is going to make up that last 10 to 20%. But there are a lot of resources in development that can help meet that last 10 to 20%. And we know what we need to do right now. We need to deploy more wind, solar, and batteries more quickly because as we’ve kind of mentioned already, it’s not the technical viability of these resources, it’s the speed at which we can deploy. So if we want to have a reliable grid, we need to make sure that we can bring more new resources online quickly. And I would say that accelerating the resources that are already looking to connect to the grid is going to be a win-win strategy.

Bill Loveless: As a manager of the electricity program at Energy Innovation, you work to accelerate the transition to a clean, affordable, and equitable electricity sector in the United States. Do you think that’s still possible?

Michelle Solomon: I do think it’s still possible. We have a lot of states who still are very committed to their clean energy goals. Most of the utility country, most of the utility companies in the United States have clean energy goals. Clean energy is a cheap source of electricity. It’s a reliable source of electricity. So all of the market forces are pushing us towards clean electricity. And I don’t really think there’s a turning it around. There’s also a lot we can do in kind of the somewhat restricted environment we are in now in terms of building out the grid faster. We all know that transmission capacity is one of the biggest barriers to bringing more clean electricity online. And we know that building new transmission lines takes a long time. So fortunately, we have a lot of short-term solutions to add capacity to our transmission grid while we work to build out those longer term transmission lines. So some of these things include things like advanced conductors. If you just restrain new wires that are made up of a higher performance conductor, you can essentially increase the carrying capacity of that transmission line by about two. So we have a lot of ability to add transmission capacity quickly and in a way that will allow us to add clean energy faster. We have a lot of solutions that can help accelerate the clean energy transition even in this kind of constrained environment we’re in.

Bill Loveless: But there are barriers to even implementing those sorts of solutions. You mentioned, right, funding and that sort of thing. The Department of Energy in the pastor administration was trying to enable some of this through funding and other incentives as we speak today. What are the barriers to the utilities and transmission companies taking those steps, those sort of more closer near term steps to improve the technology?

Michelle Solomon: There are a lot of barriers. I mean, a lot of it we’ve talked about how the utility companies like to do what they’ve always done, and so doing something new is not necessarily in their normal mode of operation. And I think that that kind of institutional inertia tends to be one of the biggest barriers. But we do have a lot of utility companies that are taking advantage of these new grid enhancing technologies and paving the way for others to do so as well. I think it’s also starting to happen out of necessity. These things, particularly grid enhancing technologies, tend to be something that is not super political because they have a lot of value in a lot of different ways. So in Montana, for instance, because advanced conductors, they actually sag less on transmission lines than traditional conductors. So Montana has been using them pretty widely for wildfire mitigation programs. So these technologies are just better in many ways. So I think that there is potential for getting around some of these political barriers

Bill Loveless: With the cause policy changes from one administration to another that’s not new. You look for areas where there may be some grounds for common interest or commitment. So while the Department of Energy in recent days has talked about fossil fuels as part of among their goals for affordable, reliable, secure energy supplies, they mentioned fossil fuels. They’re advanced nuclear geothermal hydropower, and they also want to prioritize things such as nuclear fusion. It seems that there’s some room for agreement among various parties, particularly in regard to things like advanced nuclear and geothermal.

Michelle Solomon: I think there’s more excitement about some of these other emerging technologies from both sides of the political aisle. And I think advanced geothermal in particular is quite interesting to some of the oil and gas producing states because it uses very similar technology to producing gas. So states more on the Republican side of the spectrum are I think, gaining more momentum around things like enhanced geothermal than they are around some other clean energy resources.

Bill Loveless: And of course, Chris Wright, the new Secretary of energy, I mean, he’s known for his work in natural gas and fracking it all, but he’s also been very much involved in advanced geothermal as well. We talk a policy, but there’s regulation too, right? Regulation matters. I think often it’s confusing to many people, especially when you talk about a place like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a place I covered many years ago as a reporter. I always said, having done that was sort of my bootcamp and covering energy was reporting on the FERC some years ago, what’s in store for the US grid with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is now headed by a new chairman, mark Christie, appointed by President Trump.

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, it’s hard to say exactly where FERC is going to go. I mean, they did pass orders just in the year before, in the years before the election to improve interconnection processes and expand regional transmission planning and the compliance with those orders and the processes for that are ongoing. So I do think that those processes are going to continue regardless of the administration, and certainly we’ll probably see some shifts. I think it remains to be seen a little bit on exactly where FERC goes.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. Yeah. I think one area I’ll be interested is the commission’s interest in or attention to proposals to link nuclear power plants to data centers. I mean, Christie was part of a two one vote that rejected an interconnection agreement that would’ve facilitated power sales from a Pennsylvania nuclear plant owned by Talen Energy to an Amazon data center. Tall has challenged FES decision in court that decision raises concerns that the agency might deny other proposals to co-locate data centers and nuclear plants. This nuclear plant option had been getting a lot of attention in recent months because of both that project and also some other considerations. Is that something you’ll be watching at the FERC?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, definitely. I think that those co-location concepts are something that we’re following quite closely at energy innovation, both in terms of the implications for data centers, but also in terms of industrial electrification and the potential for the electrification of industry more broadly for things like cement and steel and all of those existing industrial processes that we have today that use fossil fuels. So one of the ways that industrial customers can access lower electricity rates without putting additional burden on other grid customers is co-locating with energy resources and particularly clean energy resources like wind and solar. So we’re really supportive of trying to make it possible for those projects to be co-located, particularly for wind and solar and industrial customers in what we call kind of an energy park concept where you have multiple users including both generation and flexible load kind of behind the substation so that you can be able to both use cheap electricity, but also soak up cheap clean electricity when other areas of the grid are producing more, and then potentially even give some back to the grid using technologies like thermal batteries and things like that. So we think there’s a lot of really exciting space for co-location of industrial customers and clean energy, and we’ll be watching those proceedings really closely.

Bill Loveless: Is there any one or two or three examples of that potential that you guys are particularly interested in or impressed by?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, I mean, this is a bit of an emerging concept, and the pieces of this energy park concept exists in various places around the world. Thermal batteries exist, co-locating loads with wind and solar exist. So the pieces are all there, but finding places to put them together is kind of the stage that we’re at right now with this energy park concept.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, permitting reform, that was getting a lot of attention in Washington over the past year or so. It fell flat once again in Congress at the end of last year. It’s important in terms of linking these remote areas where wind and solar energy is abundant, linking it to urban areas where the power is needed. Do you hold out much hope that there could be anything done on permitting reform, and how important is that to some of the goals that your organization has identified?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, that’s a great question. It feels like a little bit of a Charlie Brown situation with the soccer ball with permitting reform for the last several years. And I think it’s become quite a loaded topic for both sides of the aisle. I don’t know, I won’t speculate on exactly where the political leanings of Congress will go on permitting reform, but I do think that there are a lot of things that we can do in lieu of permitting reform to help keep the clean energy moving. And that’s again, things like grid enhancing technologies and surplus interconnection, that process by which you can add new resources, add existing sites. That’s actually something that FERC, I think took up recently in regards to PJMP. JM had a pretty non-functional surplus interconnection process, and when PJM is one of the regions in the country where load is growing the fastest, that’s one of the regions where you would want to be able to do surplus interconnection the most. So I think FERC is taking on some of that and trying to make sure that that process works a bit better in PJM. So I think we have a lot of solutions in lieu of permitting reform. I’m certainly not going to hold my breath waiting for permitting reform to happen, and I think it’s important that we forge on with what we have today while also thinking about what we could do if our permitting regime was a little bit less limited.

Bill Loveless: We all look back on what we’ve been working on in recent years and circumstances change for all of us. Do you have a question? Some of the assumptions that you made about the grid and energy markets in general over the years?

Michelle Solomon: I mean, certainly just the pace at which we need to add resources right now is something that we didn’t anticipate just a couple of years ago. I think some of the other things that ended up being a bit different, I mean, certainly the kind of supply chain issues and interest rate issues following the pandemic have slowed down the deployment of clean energy more than we would like, particularly for the sake of meeting our clean energy goals. So I do think we’re in a spot in which the clean energy deployment is starting to ramp back up, and costs are starting to come back down a little bit. But yeah, I think that was a bit of an unforeseen hurdle for the clean energy transition and one that we’re having to grapple with. I think something else that’s been really cool to see is just how quickly battery storage has been deploying around the country, particularly in Texas and California. It’s doubled each year for the past couple of years, and that’s been really cool to see. And now in Texas and California, batteries are directly kind of taking the role of gas during peak electricity times at the end of the day. So just seeing how quickly that that’s happening and showing and proving that battery storage has a really significant reliability and capacity value in those regions has been, I think a really bright spot in the clean energy transition.

Bill Loveless: If I’m hearing you correctly in the conversation, Michelle, you feel as though while the policy matters, we’re a policy center, we pay close attention to these things, but I mean policy matters. There’s certainly a change in the commitments from Washington these days when it comes to energy supply in the United States. It seems as though you still see some upside that you see some potential for continued market growth when it comes to renewable energy in the United States elsewhere that certain market momentum can be maintained. Is that correct?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, I think that’s right, and certainly developing those markets in a way that treats resources fairly is an important part of policy design. So there are ways that those markets could be affected by the current administration that makes it harder for clean energy to deploy. But again, because these are the cheapest options, those decisions would hurt electricity customers. So we’ll see what happens, but I think that at the end of the day, the thing that I keep coming back to is just that these are the right resources for customers to reduce their electricity bills. So if the administration is serious about reducing costs for Americans, I think that that should be a high priority.

Bill Loveless: Before we go, let me ask you, what’s on your pad these days? Your to-do pad? What are you going to be keeping an eye on?

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, so like I said, we’re definitely keeping an eye on what’s going on at FERC with the kind of co-location, how they treat co-location of resources. We’re kind of pretty focused on this, trying to do some education around the reliability value of clean energy. I know we talked about that a little bit today, but we actually have a report coming out next week on grid reliability in the clean energy transition and how both clean resources contribute to reliability, and also how policymakers can be thinking about improving some of the current planning and market structures that we have to make sure that we have the reliability value that we need from the grid. So those are a couple of the big focuses for the coming year.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, we’ll certainly keep an eye out for that report. Michelle Solomon, thank you very much for joining us today on Columbia Energy Exchange. We appreciate and enjoyed the conversation.

Michelle Solomon: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Michelle Solomon, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordofff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pittman and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand is the sound engineer. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. If you’d like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way. We appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.

The race to power artificial intelligence is dramatically reshaping America’s electricity landscape.

Recent analysis from the power-consultancy firm Grid Strategies shows that between 2024 and 2029, US electricity demand will grow at five times the rate predicted in 2022. This surge comes as artificial intelligence and data centers reshape power markets, with tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon pursuing direct power purchase deals, sometimes bypassing traditional utility structures entirely.

At the same time, President Trump’s declaration of an energy emergency and appointment of new leadership at key agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission signal potential upheaval in how we approach grid reliability, renewable energy integration, and climate goals.

So how do we meet this demand growth while navigating a complex political environment? And what role will emerging technologies like advanced nuclear, enhanced geothermal, and energy storage play in our energy future?

This week host Bill Loveless talks with Michelle Solomon about the challenges and opportunities facing the US electricity sector.

Michelle is a senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation, focusing on electricity policy. She brings a distinctive background combining technical and policy experience. Before joining Energy Innovation, she earned her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University. She also served as a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow working on energy policy in the Senate.

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