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The United States needs a lot more power — and fast.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, increased domestic manufacturing and growing electrification of vehicles, appliances and more, electricity demand in the U.S. is expected to soar in the coming years.

A recent projection from consulting firm ICF International estimates a 25% increase in electricity demand by 2030 and an eye-popping 78% by 2050. That’s a dramatic shift from just a couple of years ago, when electricity demand was both stable and rather boring.

“Fundamentally, we are in a super cycle of electrification right now,” said Vincent Petit, senior vice president of climate and energy transition research at the global energy and technology company Schneider Electric. This is “a race to access affordable power.”

The stakes have arguably never been higher: the U.S. is engaged in a global race to develop artificial intelligence and exploding demand could push residential electricity bills higher, all while climate risks mount and policy changes cloud prospects for clean energy growth. In just the past year, electricity prices increased 4.5%, double the price increase of groceries, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But as urgent as the need is, the obstacles are just as great. The U.S. builds new electricity infrastructure really slowly. And with no single entity controlling system-wide improvements and cooperation, the country will have to get creative — and motivated.

In conversations with energy experts and leaders, several essential solutions (and challenges) emerged to meet the moment. Here is a summary.

Build solar and batteries

Solar and batteries are the obvious fast and cheap answer because they can be mass produced and installed quickly, according to interviews with former leaders in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“The only way to meet our economic load growth goals is through solar and battery storage,” said Jigar Shah, former head of the Loan Program Office at the U.S. Energy Department under former President Joe Biden. Shah recently launched a green startup advisory firm called Multiplier.

Neil Chatterjee, a former energy regulator in President Trump’s first administration, agreed in an interview with Cipher in May (he also said some natural gas will be needed too).

Other types of power generation tend to have much longer lead times. Supply chains for new natural gas turbines are overloaded and backlogged until 2030, for example, and building a new nuclear power plant takes years to permit and build.

But the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are taking steps that could make it harder to build renewable energy projects. The “Big Beautiful Bill” — Trump’s legislative agenda currently under consideration in the Senate — could choke off valuable tax credits for clean technology.

That uncertainty is compounding existing economic challenges for the renewables industry. A residential solar company and a primary lender to that market have both filed for bankruptcy.

Embrace flexibility

Existing electricity infrastructure could meet more demand if the nation’s power system were more flexible in any number of ways.

The nation’s energy infrastructure is built to withstand peaks in demand, when air conditioners, lights, data centers, manufacturing facilities and more are all turned on at once. But, historically, in practice, these demand peaks only happen rarely and for short periods at a time.

Shifting electricity usage by big new customers like data centers to times when demand is low and supply is coming from low-emission sources could improve the reliability, cost and cleanliness of the current grid. It would also free up more capacity to meet growing demand with existing infrastructure.

Another way of adding flexibility would be utilizing networks of smaller distributed energy resources, called DERs. This might include electric vehicle charging stations, home solar generation, smart water heaters, smart thermostats and energy storage at industrial sites. These devices and systems can provide energy locally and controlling and coordinating their energy use can free up more electricity on the grid when needed. Sometimes DERs can even send energy back to the grid.

Taken together, a large number of connected DERs make up a virtual power plant, or VPP. Many utilities across the country already have small VPP programs.

“A big part of realizing this potential involves more utilities implementing and scaling up VPP programs, and efforts to enroll more customers and their smart devices,” said Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, an energy and climate-policy think tank.

But widespread adoption of such efforts to boost flexibility would require investment, motivation and coordination among utilities, corporations and individual customers.

Put demand and supply near each other

Locating an entity that needs power, like a data center, close to where that power is actually generated could help satisfy new demand quickly and cost effectively.

This is an especially appealing option for tech companies looking to power up data centers in the AI race.

In December, Google, energy developer Intersect Power and climate investor TPG Rise Climate announced a partnership to develop data centers near sources of clean energy. They aim to have their first project operating in 2026 and fully completed in 2027.

That proximity would mean fewer, therefore faster, infrastructure upgrades.

In some cases, connecting data centers directly to power sources and bypassing the grid altogether would fully sidestep the slow process of building new transmission lines.

But such moves can be controversial and at least one project has come under regulatory scrutiny. In November, federal regulators rejected an effort by Amazon to plug a data center directly into a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, and Amazon ultimately reverted to a more conventional power purchase agreement.

Regulating this kind of power generation won’t be easy, said Chatterjee, the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Trump’s first term. In an energy-constrained world, leaving some power generation off the grid could cause reliability and affordability issues for the rest of the region, he said. Today, Chatterjee is the chief government affairs officer at Palmetto, a clean energy provider.

Grid-enhancing technologies

Building new transmission lines is an epic bureaucratic and permitting slog, which is one reason to utilize excess transmission capacity during off-peak hours. But there are other ways to maximize current infrastructure.

New types of wires can carry more electric current faster and less expensively than many existing power lines. Retrofitting systems with these efficient wires could increase the electricity flow.

Large scale rewiring could quadruple transmission capacity by 2035 and save $85 billion in energy-system costs, according to a study published last year from Energy Innovation, non-profit GridLab and University of California, Berkeley.

Google announced a partnership earlier this month with an advanced conductor company CTC Global to accelerate the deployment of this technology.

Another way to get more out of the existing grid is with sensors that assess real-time conditions, such as whether it is cool enough outside for a transmission line to handle more electricity. They can be deployed in two or three months — lightning speed in energy infrastructure timescales.

Using these technologies on a large scale would require utilities to embrace something new. “The biggest barrier to adoption is inertia,” said Hudson Gilmer, co-founder and chairman of Line Vision, a company that installs power line sensors.

Ultimately, meeting soaring demand will require both new power generation and maximizing existing capacity.

This country will “have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” Shah said.