Half of all new American electric power will be consumed by artificial intelligence data centers by 2030, according to the Department of Energy (DoE), which warned in a report out Monday that the nation is facing an energy disaster unless it adopts innovative methods of power generation.
“Absent decisive intervention, the Nation’s power grid will be unable to meet projected demand for manufacturing, re-industrialization, and data centers driving artificial intelligence innovation,” says the DoE report mandated by a Trump administration executive order in April to assess the current state of energy in the United States.
“A failure to power the data centers needed to win the AI arms race or to build the grid infrastructure that ensures our energy independence could result in adversary nations shaping digital norms and controlling digital infrastructure, thereby jeopardizing U.S. economic and national security,” the report predicts.
The Energy Department estimates that the United States will need 100 gigawatts of new energy generation to power the nation in the next five years – half of which will go to data centers – but emphasized that currently planned power supplies will fall short of that total.
“Data centers can be built in 18 months, but it takes more than three times as long to add new generation required to service those data centers to the grid,” reads a DoE fact sheet.
In addition, generation “capacity is not being replaced on a one-to-one basis and this loss of capacity will lead to shortfalls during periods of low intermittent renewable power generation,” the report says.
Power plant retirements also pose a challenge with projected retirements and load growth, meaning that the risk of large-scale power outages affecting millions increases 100-fold.
Reliability is another contributing factor in power outage risk – and the report places some of the blame on renewable energy, such as wind and solar generation, noting that those sources are susceptible to weather conditions.
The Trump administration has made recent strides toward using coal-based and nuclear energy to meet power demands, claiming that renewables are far too costly and unreliable.
In January, President Donald Trump signed two orders to accelerate AI innovation and declared a national energy emergency to harness natural energy resources to address what he has called a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” amid an “increasingly unreliable grid.” In April, Trump also signed an order that directed agencies to power AI data centers with coal while bolstering nuclear energy development for similar purposes in a May order.
While the DoE report notes that “modern methods” of energy generation would be necessary in the future, Energy Secretary Chris Wright doubled down on boosting coal and natural gas plants.
“In the coming years, America’s reindustrialization and the AI race will require a significantly larger supply of around-the-clock, reliable, and uninterrupted power,” Wright said in a statement. “President Trump’s administration is committed to advancing a strategy of energy addition, and supporting all forms of energy that are affordable, reliable, and secure.”