The grid nobody planned for: public power, hyperscalers and the race to rewire America for the AI age
Interchange Recharged
Wood Mackenzie
4.8 • 535 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What two decades of flat demand means for a grid now expected to double in size
The US went from essentially zero load growth for twenty years to 3% national growth almost overnight. The supply chains, permitting pipelines, engineering workforce and regulatory processes were all calibrated for a different world. Bridget van Dorsten is joined by Tom Falcone, President of the Large Public Power Council, representing the 30 largest publicly owned utilities in the United States, collectively owning around 85% of public power assets and currently serving roughly 18% of all US data centre load.
Tom explains what makes public power structurally different from investor-owned utilities: locally governed, not-for-profit, and built to minimise cost rather than earn a return on equity. That governance model turns out to matter a great deal when trillion-dollar hyperscalers come looking for power. Public power utilities have no financial incentive to favour their own assets over a customer's, and their local accountability makes deal-making faster and more direct.
Bridget and Tom also work through the mechanics of how the industry is actually responding. Large-load tariffs are reshaping the interconnection queue, forcing hyperscalers to make long-term financial commitments rather than reserving capacity for free. About two thirds of speculative requests disappear once real commitments are required, which tells you something about the gap between announced demand and real demand. LPPC members are nonetheless planning to add around 60GW of new generation over the next ten years to meet load that is forecast to grow from 4GW to 18GW of data centres in their territories alone, in just five years.
The episode also tackles private use rules, a Treasury regulation from 25 years ago that nobody expected to become a bottleneck for the AI era, the capacity factor realities that make peak-day power so much harder to deliver than annual energy, the nuclear question and why federal involvement is probably unavoidable if the US wants to build at scale, and where CCS can and cannot realistically be deployed.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The whole industry was set up for a certain level of activity, and now that level of activity is doubled. |
| 0:06.3 | On average, the grid runs at 50% capacity utilization. |
| 0:10.3 | So we have a lot of capacity to serve energy, but we don't necessarily have extra capacity to serve it at peak. |
| 0:16.7 | It's a lot like buying a new car. |
| 0:19.0 | No one ever bought a new car expecting to save money. |
| 0:28.8 | Data center demand is huge, but can utilities build the power system fast enough while |
| 0:35.0 | keeping electricity affordable? |
| 0:42.0 | Well, we've been exploring this exact question over the past few months, but today we're going to look at the data center demand surge from the perspective of public power utilities, which |
| 0:47.2 | are structured a bit differently from the investor-owned utilities. |
| 0:50.3 | And we'll be looking at how that ownership model changes what gets built, how quickly, who pays, |
| 0:56.7 | and what's actually real versus speculative in the pipeline. |
| 1:00.8 | I'm joined by Tom Falcone, CEO of the large public power council, LPPC, |
| 1:07.0 | which represents 29 of the largest publicly owned utilities in the U.S., |
| 1:11.7 | collectively serving the power needs of about a tenth of the nation. |
| 1:15.3 | And topically relevant, these utilities currently power 18% of the nation's AI and data centers, |
| 1:21.1 | but they're planning to double that and capture 36% of new data center interconnections over the next five years. So they're punching well above |
| 1:29.1 | their weight in this space, and I'm happy to welcome Tom to the show. Thank you, Bridget. It's a real |
| 1:33.8 | pleasure to be with you. Yeah, happy to have you. And before we dive into the data centers, I wanted to |
| 1:39.4 | start with some of the basics for listeners who aren't utility operation experts. And I was wondering in one |
| 1:45.7 | sentence, what makes a public power utility different from a Duke energy or dominion? |
| 1:52.2 | One sentence is the challenge. But here's what I'd say. We're the same in that what we are doing |
| 1:57.7 | is still making the grid work. What's different is a governance and finance perspective. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wood Mackenzie, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Wood Mackenzie and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.