The era of stagnant electricity demand in the US is over. Data centres, electrification, and reshoring of manufacturing are driving a surge in demand that is stronger that anything that anyone currently working in the industry has yet seen in their professional lifetimes. The question of which market and regulatory structures are needed to respond to this new and fast-changing world is now at the centre of the policy debate.

Host Ed Crooks is joined by Drew Maloney, President and CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade body representing America's investor-owned utilities, which together serve more than 70 per cent of the US population. Drew argues that the current moment is exposing a fundamental divide in the US power system: vertically integrated, regulated utilities can plan generation, transmission, and distribution over 20-year horizons, while competitive markets like PJM are struggling to send the investment signals needed to get new power plants built.

The conversation starts with one of the hottest topics in US politics: affordability and household electricity bills. There are some misconceptions about electricity bills that have gained traction with the American public. Drew points to EEI research showing that 34 states have kept increases in electricity rates below general consumer price inflation over the past five years. And he adds that the states where prices are rising fastest tend to be in deregulated markets, where capacity costs are climbing but no new generation is being built.

Ed draws on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2025 study of electricity bills and data centres (You can read that study here.). That study found that demand growth alone did not explain rising bills, and that the drivers vary significantly by region, from wildfire mitigation costs in California to capacity market dynamics in PJM and New England.

They move on to another hot topic in the industry today: whether data centres and other large loads should go “off grid” and rely entirely on local on-site generation. Drew pushes back against the narrative that this model is now becoming widespread, arguing there is more talk than action. Building duplicative generation to create “five nines” reliability for a data centre is expensive, and can still be unreliable without grid backup. It also pulls investment and workforce away from the shared infrastructure that benefits all customers.

Most data centres want grid access, even if some are pursuing hybrid approaches in the interim until their hook-ups to the network can be connected.

The episode also covers FERC Chairman Laura Swett's emerging approach to market intervention, the prospects for bipartisan permitting reform in Congress, and the ratepayer protection plan brokered between the White House and the major hyperscalers. Drew closes with an optimistic long view: the current moment, though it needs careful management, could be an opportunity to transform the US grid for the better.

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The war with Iran has put a spotlight on the security and resilience of energy and supply chains around the world. In this second special episode from the ACORE Finance Forum in New York, host Ed Crooks explores what that means for the US power industry, at a moment when rising electricity demand was already putting the grid under strain.

Lori Ann LaRocco, a trade and supply chain expert and author of Trade War: Containers Don't Lie, explains the global impacts from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. She tells us that there are 70,000 products made from petrochemicals, including the components that go into solar panels, the chips for data centers, and your cell phone. Supplies of those products are being crunched because of the disruption to exports from the Gulf. Some are already in short supply. Even if the strait reopened tomorrow, the physical realities of repositioning tankers, clearing mines and restoring export infrastructure would mean supply chains would take at least a year to normalise. Her advice: know your supply chain not just to the first tier, but to the fifth, sixth and seventh.

José Antonio Miranda, chief executive of Avangrid, talks about the opportunities and challenges created by rising electricity demand. He says investment needs to start now and keep going. His one word advice for policymakers: certainty. Investors have the capital and the expertise to deliver the new grid and generation capacity that policymakers want, he says. What the private sector cannot work with is retroactive rule changes and unpredictable permitting outcomes.

Harry Krejsa, director of studies at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, is a former official in both the Trump and Biden administrations who is focused on the relationship between energy and national security. He argues that worries about depending on China for clean energy technology often conflate two issues: cybersecurity risk, and supply chain dependency. His principle is guard the smart stuff, buy the dumb stuff, and build the future.

Kara McNutt, Wood Mackenzie's head of power and renewables consulting for the Americas, shares her concerns about grid reliability. The share of dispatchable generation on the US grid is declining as coal-fired power plants shut down and new wind and solar capacity is added. Nuclear is genuinely exciting, with the global SMR pipeline nearly doubling in the past year, but it is a 2030s story rather than a solution for today.

Benoy Thanjan, founder of Reneu Energy and host of the Solar Maverick podcast, is a solar developer. He is seeing surging interest in behind-the-meter storage, driven in part by concerns about energy security and resilience brought to the surface by the Iran war. The FEOC (Foreign Entities of Concern) rules, intended to stop unfriendly countries benefiting from US tax credits, remain a real point of friction. Customers want US-manufactured equipment, but the price gap between compliant and non-compliant products is still very large.

Ray Long, president and chief executive of ACORE, closes by sharing his key takeaways from the forum. He says three things need to change to remove obstacles to investment: federal permitting reform, clear FEOC guidance from the Treasury, and faster approvals from the Departments of Interior, War and Energy for new projects.

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