Understanding Load Growth and Energy Affordability

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) held a briefing on commonsense technologies and solutions to keep energy costs low and meet rising demand. The rapid growth in energy demand from data centers has raised energy affordability conversations in households across the country. And on Capitol Hill, energy affordability might be the major theme of energy policy discussions. This panel covered a broad portfolio of commercially-available technologies and resources—from energy efficiency to renewable energy to natural gas—that are essential to understand in order to ensure that the U.S. energy system can continue to grow and promote domestic prosperity, encourage innovation, and provide opportunities for economic development.

The briefing shared new findings from the 2026 edition of the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. The Factbook provides valuable year-over-year data and insights on the U.S. energy transformation. It examines trends in data centers and artificial intelligence along with the ways in which permitting and siting as well as federal appropriations impact the deployment of modern energy solutions. The report also features an in-depth look at key topics including demand-side energy resources, renewable energy, natural gas, energy storage, and sustainable transportation.

Highlights

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The 2026 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook provides up-to-date energy industry information and trends.
Energy sector policy was turbulent in 2025, but sustainable energy sources were resilient.
Nuclear and renewable energy made up 43% of U.S. electricity generation in 2025, followed by natural gas (40%) and coal (16%).
Energy storage is crucial to flexibility and generation value when it comes to renewable energy deployment, and it made up 25% of new capacity additions in 2025.

Lisa Jacobson, President, Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE)

The Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) is a coalition of companies and trade associations representing a diverse array of energy resources and technologies, with a focus on clean energy. BCSE and BloombergNEF published their 2026 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook in February 2026, which provides consolidated up-to-date energy industry information and trends.
The Factbook can help inform key issues in front of Congress, including permitting and siting reform, continued investment in the energy system to optimize the energy grid, and energy affordability, reliability, and safety.

Allison Hull, Director, Federal Government Affairs, Sempra

The Factbook came about when BCSE and its members realized there was a clean energy transformation underway in the energy sector, but there were few resources available to document and support it. The Factbook is invaluable to policymakers, companies, and media sources as an aid when talking about the future of energy.
As one of the largest energy networks on the continent, Sempra serves 22 million customers through gas and electric companies in California. Sempra constantly invests in new technologies, like those highlighted in the Factbook, to strengthen resilience and improve affordability.

Trina White, Senior Associate, North American Energy Transition, BloombergNEF

Energy sector policy was turbulent in 2025, but sustainable energy sources were resilient. Last year saw the greatest increase in new electric generation capacity since 2002, with most of that capacity coming from clean sources like solar and wind. Stationary storage was also a large and relatively new part of this growth. In total, about 90% of new capacity additions in 2025 came from renewable sources and storage.
Energy productivity, a measure of how much the economy (measured in gross domestic product) grows relative to how much energy is consumed, has gone up consistently over time, primarily due to efficiency gains.
Nuclear and renewable energy made up 43% of U.S. electricity generation in 2025, followed by natural gas (40%) and coal (16%). Coal generation has been replaced by renewable and natural gas generation but grew 13% last year due to the uptick in electricity demand.
Throughout the 2010s, electricity demand was relatively flat, but demand has risen in the past few years, leading to capacity additions.
Electricity demand is growing due to rapid electrification, growing manufacturing, and the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. Total power demand from data centers has quintupled in the past decade, with the most growth in Texas, the Southeast, and “data center alley” in Northern Virginia. Twice as much data center computing power is in the process of being built, introducing the need for more generation and new constraints on grid infrastructure.
The rise of electric vehicles (EVs), sales of which spiked 4% in 2025 as buyers sought to benefit from EV tax credits before their early repeal, also increases electricity demand. EVs make up 10% of new vehicles sold.
The raising and lowering of tariffs caused difficulties in planning for clean technology producers. Tariff rates on Chinese batteries, for example, reached a high of 150% and a low of 31% last year, so imports have shifted towards other partners in East and Southeast Asia. Tariff rates remain turbulent and uncertain, making planning difficult.
Many clean energy credits and incentives set up by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) (P.L. 117-169) in 2022 were eliminated or altered by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) (P.L. 119-21) in 2025. EV tax credits expired in 2025, renewable energy investment and production tax credits are being phased out at an accelerated pace, critical supply chains are being constrained by restrictions on purchases from Chinese suppliers and other foreign entities, and other clean energy subsidies are being partially or totally eliminated.
The United States is no longer part of the Paris Agreement, but its emissions have fallen by 15% since the Agreement’s establishment in 2015, with the main cuts coming from the power sector as gas and renewables take up a greater share of generation than coal. However, this decline has now flatlined, with a slight uptick in emissions from the power sector. Transportation is currently the largest source of U.S. emissions, so it should be one of the primary targets of emission reduction efforts.
Demand for sustainable energy is strong and resilient. Building new coal power generation is extremely expensive ($171 per megawatt-hour) when compared to cheaper solar and wind ($61 per megawatt-hour), which are also faster to build. Gas costs moved up to $66 per megawatt-hour as data centers try to gain access to an increasingly limited supply of gas turbines.
Intermittent sources of energy like solar or offshore wind generate electricity based on resource availability. Dispatchable technologies, like coal, nuclear, and some hydropower, are meant to run most of the time. Flexible providers, like utility-scale batteries, onshore wind plus storage, or open-cycle natural gas, can ramp up or down as needed. Multiple sources can be paired together to address demand.
Investment remained steady into 2025 for renewable energy, electrified transportation, and energy grids.

Charles Bolden, Senior Director of Congressional Affairs, Solar Energy Industries Association

In 2025, renewable energy deployment declined slightly. However, there were 47 gigawatts of solar installed in 2025, with 36 gigawatts being utility-scale solar and 11 gigawatts being rooftop solar. Solar is the leading technology for current and future grid deployments due to its low cost and fast deployment speed.
The expansion of solar has helped reduce price spikes in Texas in the midst of extreme weather events and strained grid infrastructure.
Solar has made up a majority of new generating capacity for the past three years. The Sustainable Energy in America Factbook shows that in 2025, there were seven times more solar installations than all other clean technology installations combined.
Energy storage is crucial to flexibility and generation value when it comes to renewable energy deployment, and it made up 25% of new capacity additions in 2025.
The lack of permitting policy clarity could hinder renewable energy deployment in 2026 and 2027. Most projects that came online last year were permitted before the Department of the Interior's July 15 memo announcing the review of all decisions related to wind and solar energy facilities. Going forward, further clarity is needed around permitting and the new OBBBA provisions to allow the industry to grow.

Charles Hernick, Head of Environmental Policy, Amazon

While data centers are a significant part of the energy demand surge, they are also the backbone of the present and future American economy, supplying data services to the federal government, large businesses, and the public.
A major driver of demand for data centers is not only AI but also conventional computing moving to the cloud. Estimates suggest that only 30% of all computing has moved to the cloud. As companies migrate workloads from on-site infrastructure to the cloud, benefits can include carbon footprint reductions of up to 99% as well as decreased cost and increased efficiency.
A major factor in rate increases is the age of existing grid infrastructure, which needs to be modernized to bring large customers like data centers online.
In the last decade, Amazon has invested in or built over 250 renewable and nuclear projects in the United States, representing over 20 gigawatts of power. Amazon was the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five years in a row, having recently been outpaced by Meta. Amazon plans to continue building both electric generation capacity and data centers.

Samuel Hodas, Vice President, Head of U.S. Government Affairs, National Grid

The Factbook shows a dramatic increase in venture capital and private equity investment in climate and grid-enhancing technologies up to 2022, followed by a pullback and eventually stabilization from 2023 through 2025. This trend follows a broader pullback in private equity and venture capital investment nationwide. From 2023 to 2025, there was a sharp increase in clean power investments and a decrease in energy storage investments.
Texas has replaced Massachusetts as the leading state in clean technology investments.
National Grid and its venture capital arm, National Grid Partners, have seen that while clean energy is continuing to drive venture capital investment, problems such as rising costs and aging infrastructure require additional, substantial investment across the energy ecosystem.
Unprecedented load growth has increased the need for flexible, resilient, and affordable energy technologies. Reconductoring (replacing existing electric cables with advanced ones) and dynamic line rating (taking real-time conditions into account to determine the safe carrying capacity of transmission lines) represent significant opportunities to increase the efficiency of the grid.

Christopher Young, Government Relations Manager, Johnson Controls

Johnson Controls is a building technology company with a focus on airflow and cooling and critical environments (spaces that need tightly controlled temperature and pressure).
Residential and commercial buildings together are responsible for 35% of total U.S. energy use, including direct energy use and electricity consumption.
Building energy codes are minimum efficiency standards for new and renovated residential and commercial buildings. They set requirements for insulation and energy-consuming internal systems.
ASHRAE sets codes for commercial buildings and the International Code Council sets an International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) for both commercial and residential buildings. Both organizations account for technological developments when developing new codes.
Most U.S. states have adopted these codes on a statewide basis, with others leave adoption up to individual municipalities. Codes are typically updated every three years by standard-setting bodies, producing significant energy efficiency gains of about 10%.
Between 1999 and 2019, ASHRAE building codes for commercial buildings have become 150% more energy efficient.
Around 20 states have adopted the newer 2019 ASHRAE codes and 25 states have adopted the updated IECC codes. This highlights the need for improved state adoption of energy efficiency codes.
Codes apply to new buildings and large renovations, while performance standards are geared towards existing buildings. Some states and 50 cities have adopted and enforce energy-efficient performance standards.

Jack Thirolf, Head of Energy Policy, NET Power

Net Power is a technology and product development company with the mission of transforming natural gas into the lowest-cost form of clean firm power. This is achieved through building gas power plants that capture emissions and then permanently sequestering those emissions underground. Companies like Google and Amazon have signed commitments to purchase natural gas power that is paired with carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The report, Climate Firm Electricity Technologies: What, Why, How, by Clean Air Task Force show that keeping some natural gas power on the grid to provide reliability can help deploy wind and solar and decarbonize the grid at a much lower cost.
There is a large effort to make gas plants with CCS technology eligible for renewable energy certificates (RECs), which could help unlock customer demand from those seeking to cut their carbon emissions.
NET Power is working on 80 megawatts of gas-plus-CCS generation, which will come online around 2029 in Texas’s Permian Basin.
There is a major push for the federal government to do a more efficient job in permitting CCS as well as in partnering with states to give them “primacy,” or the regulatory authority to oversee CCS development within their own state boundaries.
Right now, some carbon that is captured is used for enhanced oil recovery. Carbon dioxide is piped to West Texas and New Mexico, and used to extract more oil out of existing fields (the carbon dioxide expands and pushes the oil out; carbon dioxide can also reduce oil’s viscosity so that it can flow more easily).

Christina Baworowsky, Vice President of Policy & Advocacy, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions

In 2013, around 39% of U.S. power was coming from coal with 19% from nuclear energy. Technological innovation in renewables and the fracking boom have both shifted the dynamic in recent years.
Between 2020 and 2025, the share of renewables in the energy market grew from 20 to 26% due to technological innovations that lowered costs and building timelines. Between 2024 and 2025, the natural gas share of electricity generation shifted from 43% to 40% because cheap renewable energy absorbed part of its market share.
Nuclear has remained stable in its generation share because nuclear plants are large, slow to build, and provide consistent baseload power.
Meeting data center energy demand will require maintaining most preexisting generation assets while upgrading them to make them more efficient, along with reopening and building nuclear power plants. CCS and other technologies can potentially reduce some of the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels.
Permitting reform and stable federal policies are crucial for novel technology investments and deployments.

Q&A

Q: What are some policies for Congress to stay focused on?

Bolden

Permitting reform, grid transmission upgrades, and storage legislation are three things Congress could prioritize in the next few years.

Hernick

A transmission title in a permitting reform bill is needed.
The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act (H.R.4776) is a current effort to update permitting laws.
Amazon has invested heavily in nuclear power over the past decade. A half-billion-dollar investment in X-energy will help that company hire more staff and make it through red tape to deploy nuclear power. Policymakers could choose to fast-track regulatory approvals that would make it easier to bring nuclear power online.

Hodas

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could better work with different regional transmission organizations to design and implement plans to build out more grid infrastructure and generation.

Young

In addition to permitting reform, energy efficiency is a big part of the equation. The United States can more efficiently manage energy that is already being generated, and there are many effective bipartisan solutions that encourage energy efficiency in the commercial, residential, and industrial sectors, like energy-saving performance contracts.

Thirolf

Social acceptance of new infrastructure, like data centers, is just as needed as changes in policy. For people to accept new infrastructure, it must be helpful to local communities; if companies do not address that, changes in law will just paper over deeper issues.

Baworowsky

Process modernization in permitting reform is crucial, as is streamlining the National Environmental Policy Act, accelerating judicial review, and providing consistency through federal administration changes.
De-risking first-of-a-kind investments in new technologies in the United States is another important need. Making investment easier and more abundant for new nuclear fusion, carbon capture technologies, and hydrogen is crucial to stop them from becoming giant inflating cost centers.

White

From a cost perspective, propping up aging or expensive technologies (through “must-run” orders for coal plants from the Trump Administration, for example) is counterproductive.
Projects like offshore wind that are already under construction should be allowed to finish.
Data centers companies should invest in on-site energy generation and pay for grid connectivity to insulate regular ratepayers from price increases.
Remaining incentives passed under the IRA should remain intact.
More stability and clarity are needed from the federal government around trade barriers.

Hull

Affordability continues to be a key focus for the United States, and part of that is requiring data centers to pay their fair share of grid infrastructure upgrades.
Programs such as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are incredibly important for energy affordability, and it is important to keep these programs fully funded.

Jacobson

It would be beneficial to see continued bipartisan funding efforts and clarity from Congress about what it seeks in terms of research, development, and deployment of energy.

Q: What resources or approaches can help Congressional staff make sense of the evolving energy sector?

Jacobson

Understanding regional and state energy mixes is critical to understanding the U.S. energy sector. Ultimately, energy policy is geographic, and it is dictated largely by the natural resources an area has—for example, the Northwest has lots of hydropower while the Central United States has a diverse mix of energy sources.
The Factbook also contains information about where certain energy efficiency policies (e.g., building codes) have been adopted throughout the country.

Hull

Contact your regional utility companies and subject matter experts for information about how your region or state uses energy and how you could be using less of it through improved efficiency.

Hernick

Energy efficiency is key to keeping costs low and minimizing maintenance costs. To keep costs down for residents and households, finding big energy users such as data centers or new manufacturers that are willing to pay for grid upgrades and their intense energy use is a good way to lower costs across the board. Amazon, for instance, is interested in paying for investments in the grid and supply side of the energy sector.

Baworowsky

Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions does broad energy resource and grid education, which includes information about regional energy mixes and current permitting processes.

Thirolf

There is no single technology that will solve all energy and climate issues. The Factbook does a great job of laying out different technologies and solutions.
Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators is a great book about energy regulation for the public good.

Bolden

Congress.gov is an important resource.
Reach out to industry professionals, like those on this panel.

Q: If you could choose any grid-enhancing technologies to deploy tomorrow, which ones would they be? What technologies are still in progress that you would like to speed up the development of?

Hodas

National Grid proposes a substantial amount of investment to make the grid more flexible, by including, for example, edge computing management systems to accommodate distributed energy. However, these investments get stripped back by regulators when National Grid is accused of “gold plating.”
Large energy buyers, like a data center, can help finance developments on the grid.
Deferred maintenance costs will only be higher, so one way or another the country will have to upgrade the grid before we reach a breaking point.

Hernick

Every state and utility is different, so they have different tolerance levels for absorbing costs, but Amazon is willing to invest in the quick deployment of grid-enhancing technology.

Baworowsky

The Department of Energy Office of Energy Dominance Financing is working with American Electric Power, a power producer, to fund reconductoring work, which could increase the amount of energy on the grid. If the upgrades work, then the supply of reconductoring materials will go up and increase the scale of deployment. Having multiple successful projects will incentivize utilities to invest and justify projects to utility commissions.

Young

Federal and state governments help commercial buildings adopt energy-saving technologies through incentives like the 179D tax credit.

Q: Looking at the clean technology supply chain, what are the critical policy issues?

Bolden

The United States used to be the 14th largest manufacturer of solar modules in the world, but now we are third. The United States needs to continue to grow domestic manufacturing, despite the investments or tax credits that have been scaled back.

Baworowsky

The 45X advanced manufacturing production tax credit is great at incentivizing domestic manufacturing. For newer technologies like geothermal, industry needs additional guidance to use 45X because of confusing prohibited foreign entity rules.
Substantial investments are being made in the battery supply chain, triggered by the 45X credit. The challenge is that we need to onshore critical mineral mining and processing in the United States.
45X has been great for nuclear energy and can be used and expanded to address choke points in the future.

White

Page 66 of the Factbook talks about federal supply chain subsidies created by the IRA, some of which are still active (but at risk due to prohibited foreign entity requirements) and some of which have been canceled.
Page 67 talks about manufacturing investments made by the private sector since the passage of the IRA. Around 10% of these investments have been canceled, but investments in batteries largely remain. A lot of clean manufacturing investment has gone to red states, with solar investments concentrated in the South and electric vehicles in the Midwest.

Q: What will we be talking about in 2026?

Baworowsky

Energy is additive, so we are not going to wean off of any one source for the foreseeable future. The United States need more energy faster and more efficiently.

Hernick