(The Epoch Times)—America’s artificial intelligence (AI) boom is colliding with an older, slower-moving entity: the nation’s aging electrical grid.
From Virginia’s data-center corridor to multi-state electricity markets, analysts, government agencies, and AI insiders say the scramble to handle technology’s expanding power demands will be an uphill battle.
At the same time, big tech companies and data centers are working to reduce the impact of AI’s expansion on the United States’ grid infrastructure. Some experts believe changes and significant investment are needed to reduce grid stress and possible energy shortages.
A primary driver of this concern is the explosion in data centers being built across the United States to support rapid AI buildout. In 2024, energy consumption reached an all-time high, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency expects 2025 and 2026 consumption to be even higher.
Presently, energy demands from data centers account for about 4 percent of electricity use in the United States and 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity use, EIA data show.
Although AI’s current computing needs represent just a fraction of total energy consumption, the rate of growth has raised the question of whether the United States’ energy infrastructure can keep up.
A significant portion of America’s power grid network dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, according to the Department of Energy. As of 2023, the agency observed that 70 percent of transmission lines were more than 25 years old and nearing the end of their lifecycles.
“This has major consequences on our communities: power outages, susceptibility to cyberattacks, or community emergencies caused by faulty grid infrastructure,” the agency stated.
And that’s without any added energy demands.
The Energy Department’s Grid Deployment Office has awarded $14.5 billion in grants to improve electrical infrastructure, according to Bank of America research, which also indicates that an additional $36.9 billion in private sector investments to U.S. grid upgrades have been made over the past couple of years.
The Bank of America analysis noted the United States is going through a period of power “load growth” primarily driven by building electrification, data centers, industrial demand, and the rise of electric vehicles (EVs).
“If load growth forecasts continue to rise, utilities will need to invest to meet required reserve margins and increase spending on both power generation and transmission and distribution capacity,” the July report said.
Perfect Storm
Even after two years of modernization efforts, the U.S. power grid network remains in a race to continue upgrading while consumption demand surges. Due to data center growth, researchers at S&P Global expect power grid requirements to increase 22 percent by the end of this year and nearly three times by 2030.
“People keep saying the lack of chips is the problem, and it’s not. It’s a lack of power,” Tyler Saltsman, CEO of Seattle-based EdgeRunner AI, told The Epoch Times.
Part of the conversation surrounding unsustainable AI growth in recent months homes in on structural shifts in support sectors.
A Rand Technology analysis called graphics processing units, high-performance memory, and networking integrated circuits the “bedrock of AI infrastructure.” The demand for these components is rising faster than suppliers can deliver.
However, Saltsman believes a shortage of microchips is moot if the power grid can’t support AI’s rapid buildout.
Working at the intersection of AI and energy, Saltsman’s company has three active research and development contracts with the U.S. military. From his perspective, alarm over AI and U.S. energy infrastructure isn’t overstated.
“If anything, it’s downplayed. Our grid is pretty fried … nationwide, you see a lot of lazy [maintenance] practices,” Saltsman said.
While he hasn’t encountered any power-related issues while working on the front lines of AI, Saltsman said he expects to if data center growth continues at the current rate.
“We can make chips much faster than we can make power,” he added.
When asked what could be done to safeguard U.S. power grids, Saltsman said, “We need to commit to building nuclear reactors, and we need to do it now, but that isn’t a quick fix.”
On average, a nuclear power plant takes more than five years to build, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Meanwhile, some energy experts believe concerns over AI and power demands are legitimate, but aren’t being framed correctly.
“The risk isn’t that AI will ‘break’ the U.S. grid, rather the risk is that outdated planning, cost-allocation rules, and inflexible load assumptions will force inefficient solutions like emergency peakers or deferred retirements despite smarter and cleaner alternatives that exist,” Gaurav Shah, managing partner at Trident Renewables, told The Epoch Times.
Emergency peakers are peak demand power plants that act as quick-start power generators that supply electricity to a grid during times of unexpectedly high demand. Incidents such as extreme weather events or power failures from other sources are often the impetus for their use.
Despite the relatively small portion of America’s total electricity consumption for which AI is responsible, energy demand growth has been enough to require the use of peaker plants.
Peaker plants contribute about 3 percent to the country’s electricity use, but have the capacity to produce 19 percent, according to a 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office.
“There are a ton of peaker plants that could operate more,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Reuters in an interview in September.
Shah has spent nearly 20 years working with U.S. energy infrastructure, including renewable energy, grid-connected assets, fuel transition projects, and, most recently, AI-linked energy strategy.
“This is a governance and market-design challenge more than a physics problem,” he said.
“The grid struggles with concentrated AI clusters in places like Northern Virginia, Texas, and parts of the Southeast,not because power doesn’t exist but because deliverability, redundancy, and timing don’t align,” Shah explained.
“Reforms like faster permitting for transmission upgrades and incentives for siting data centers near retiring industrial sites with existing grid headroom are much needed,” he said. “Without reforms, we are likely to see higher costs, delayed retirements of older plants, and localized reliability stress.”
“With the increase in EVs, it’s a perfect storm of factors,” Saltsman said.
He believes AI has the potential to be dangerous for U.S. electrical infrastructure. With the power grids already stressed and in need of upgrades, sudden surges in power loads—or even a rogue AI agent—could tip the scales for the worse.
“If you were to attack our power grid, you could potentially bring this country to its knees,” Saltsman said.
Regional Challenges
Shah said AI’s energy footprint is “hyperlocal,” and power grids will likely fail locally, not nationally.
He said a 100 megawatt data center in a congested area can cause more stress than 1 gigawatt of overall national growth in power demand.
Energy grids in the United States are broken down into different sections instead of a seamless power supply. Most of these subgrids are part of the Eastern Interconnection, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), or the Western Interconnection.
The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland (PJM) Interconnection serves what’s known as “data center alley” in Virginia, which is currently experiencing unprecedented data center growth alongside soaring energy demands, according to PJM Inside Lines.
Officials for the PJM Interconnection warned that an energy capacity shortage could affect its systems as early as June 2026.
“The demand for electricity is growing at the fastest pace in years, primarily from the proliferation of data centers, electrification of buildings and vehicles, and manufacturing,” the agency stated.
“Regions like ERCOT and PJM face different challenges. Texas has generation but not transmission constraints. The Northeast has aging infrastructure and limited siting options. AI load growth is geographically concentrated, capital-intensive, and fast,” Shah explained.
“National averages hide the fact that a single county can suddenly need the equivalent of a mid-sized city’s power demand. Planning frameworks were not built for this,” he said.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Big tech companies are well aware they’re in the hot seat when it comes to data center energy consumption, which is why many are rapidly adopting more energy-efficient practices to reduce their load demands. Companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are among the top purchasers of renewable energy, which amounted to nearly as much as the entire state of Florida last year, according to an annual report by the American Clean Power Association.
Major players in tech are investing in multiple strategies to blunt the impact of data center-related power demand spikes, including energy-efficient hardware, advanced cooling systems, and power management systems, according to NZero and Flexential.
Saltsman said with the current rate of AI expansion, it’s “not going to be a pretty sight … unless you also plan to build a power plant in that same area.”
“We need a unified plan on modernizing the grid,” he said.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
