Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers—each with the electricity needs of entire cities or states—to serve AI is rapidly transforming electricity markets and our electricity grid.   

As The Wall Street Journal recently observed, utilities are receiving requests for extraordinary amounts of power: “Take American Electric Power, a big utility that serves 11 states, and Sempra’s Texas utility Oncor. Combined, they have received requests to connect projects, many of them data centers, to the grid requiring almost 400 gigawatts of electricity. That is an astronomical amount that represents more than half the peak electricity demand in the Lower 48 states on two hot days in July.”

Whether all this potential demand turns into firm commitments remains to be seen but the demand growth already locked in requires not just building new generating capacity but getting more power from the dispatchable capacity already on the grid.

The Trump administration’s recently released AI Action Plan includes as its leading energy policy recommendation to “prevent the premature decommissioning of critical power generation resources and explore innovative ways to harness existing capacity.” The coal fleet is the critical infrastructure with excess capacity able to meet the moment—it’s gigawatts of additional capacity hiding in plain sight.

Watch our new video on the AI power demand challenge and the role the coal fleet should play in meeting it.