The Frog Is Dead: North America’s Power Grid Faces Its Biggest Reckoning in a Generation

<div class="bodyItems-wrapper"> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">For much of the 21st century, the North American power sector drifted along on near-zero demand growth. Utilities retired aging coal plants, developers filled interconnection queues with wind and solar, and investors looked elsewhere for excitement. Then came the data center boom—and seemingly overnight, the industry found itself in a full-blown supply crisis. In a wide-ranging conversation on The POWER Podcast, S&amp;P Global Energy’s Hill Vaden and Doug Giuffre laid out the forces reshaping electricity markets and why the next year and a half may be the most consequential period for energy investment in decades. Their message was clear: the power sector is growing faster than it can fund, build, or permit new supply, and every player in the market—from hyperscalers to regulators to gas turbine manufacturers—is scrambling to adapt.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Vaden, S&amp;P Global Energy’s Executive Director of Energy Capital Insights, framed the crisis with a vivid metaphor. For more than a decade, he suggested, the industry has been slowly retiring baseload generation while adding population at roughly one percent a year and building intermittent renewables without the dispatchable generation needed to back them up. The temperature, so to speak, kept rising—and then data centers arrived all at once. “The water’s boiling, the frog is dead, and now industry is having to respond, and having to respond quickly,” he said. Giuffre, the firm’s Executive Director of North American Power Markets Analysis, put numbers to the disruption. Just a few years ago, 10-year load growth projections sat below one percent annually. Today, S&amp;P Global Energy’s forecasts call for two-and-a-half to three percent growth or higher. In Ohio alone, he noted, data centers are visible across the Columbus metropolitan area, with a wave of new facilities set to hit the grid within three to four years. At least two percent growth, he said, is very real. The question is how much higher it goes. Crucially, data centers are not the only driver. Reshoring of industrial manufacturing, continued electrification of transportation, and growing air-conditioning loads in warming climates are all compounding the demand picture.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Perhaps the most dramatic market signal is the sudden resurgence of natural gas. After years when gas-fired generation attracted little investor attention, 2025 saw a cyclical high of 43 GW in U.S. gas turbine orders. “We haven’t seen those type of numbers in 20 years from the last merchant power boom in the early 2000s,” Giuffre said. The consequences have rippled through supply chains. Giuffre noted the cost of building a new combined cycle plant has effectively doubled—or more. With turbine backlogs stretching to five years, some developers have turned to gas reciprocating engines, which have also developed their own backlogs. Vaden noted that this cascade has even opened a window for an unexpected technology: natural gas fuel cells, particularly the Bloom Energy boxes, which are available now and may win market share in behind-the-meter applications for hyperscalers, many of which are willing to pay a premium for immediate, reliable power.</p> </div> <div class="read-more-wrapper" style="display: none" data-testid="read-more"> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">When it comes to investments, geography matters. While the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and PJM Interconnection markets dominate headlines, Giuffre pointed out that the largest share of 2025 gas turbine orders is actually destined for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), Southwest Power Pool (SPP), and southeastern U.S. regions. Regulated utilities in those areas offer a more predictable permitting environment and clearer investment signals than the deregulated markets grappling with auction uncertainty. Vaden suggested that the patchwork of U.S. regulatory environments is itself an asset. Different markets enable different kinds of innovation: ERCOT’s flexibility, Arizona’s solar potential, Pacific Northwest hydropower, and favorable policy regimes in states that may lack natural resource endowments all create distinct opportunities. “What makes sense in one part of the country isn’t going to necessarily make sense in another part of the country,” Vaden said.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Nuclear energy enjoys rare bipartisan political backing, checking the boxes for both clean-energy advocates and those prioritizing firm, reliable generation. In the near term, the actionable levers are plant restarts and capacity uprates. S&amp;P Global Energy estimates more than 5 GW of uprate potential across the existing fleet, with 1 to 2 GW of announcements already on the books. Vaden was candid about the longer-term challenge: equity financing for advanced nuclear concepts flows freely, but project financing remains much harder to secure. Government support, such as the Department of Energy’s billion-dollar loan commitment for the Crane Energy Center—that is, the Three Mile Island restart—will be essential. So will streamlining what Vaden described as a somewhat Byzantine approval process. “It’s harder to build a nuclear power plant than it is to build a nuclear power point presentation,” he quipped. Small modular reactors and advanced designs remain a post-2030 story, and both experts noted that many things must go right—especially on the regulatory front—for those ambitions to become reality.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Battery storage deployment hit a record in 2025, and the trend shows no signs of slowing. Hyperscalers signing hybrid power purchase agreements (PPAs)—solar paired with storage—has become a dominant contracting pattern, and Giuffre expects that trend to accelerate. Advanced geothermal drew enthusiasm from both speakers. Vaden highlighted Fervo Energy’s Nevada project and Sage Geosystems’ work in Texas, where shale-era drilling science is being applied to geothermal wells. However, a geographic mismatch complicates things: the strongest geothermal resources sit in the West, while the largest data center loads are concentrating in the East.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Federal policy changes under the Trump administration have meaningfully altered the outlook for wind and solar. The accelerated phase-out of Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits has prompted S&amp;P Global Energy to lower its deployment forecasts for both technologies. Onshore wind, already facing rising local opposition before any policy changes, is entering a particularly difficult stretch that could last two to three years, according to Giuffre. Offshore wind faces even steeper headwinds, and not only in the U.S. Globally, the complexity and cost of these projects require high electricity prices to pencil out. Yet, Vaden struck an optimistic note overall. Dramatic cost declines in solar panels and batteries mean that the economics of solar-plus-storage work in many markets even without subsidies, a testament, he said, to the innovation cycle that public incentives were designed to catalyze. “That’s the way subsidies work—they help to incubate an industry, and then they are withdrawn. And we may be getting to that point in some of these technologies,” said Vaden.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">The mergers-and-acquisitions (M&amp;A) market has been red-hot, particularly for gas-fired generation assets. Vaden noted that as recently as 18 to 24 months ago, existing gas plants could be acquired for about $800/kW, compared to $1,500/kW for new-build. Even with acquisition costs now climbing toward $2,400/kW, the roll-up opportunity attracted intense deal activity through 2025. One notable example: a collection of gas assets that changed hands twice in just 18 months. Looking ahead, Vaden sees the solar sector as the next fragmentation opportunity. He pointed to the recent $11 billion take-private deal involving Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), EQT Infrastructure VI fund (EQT), Qatar Investment Authority, and AES as a harbinger. Private ownership, he argued, allows infrastructure developers to move faster and operate with fewer constraints than public markets impose, and there is no shortage of capital ready to deploy.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Giuffre flagged what he called the affordability question or crisis as the issue most likely to generate unpredictable policy responses. As electricity costs rise, he warned, states with deep decarbonization ambitions may be forced to backtrack on some commitments to ease the rate burden on consumers. “We will see some political compromises to address affordability,” Giuffre predicted. He cited PJM’s capacity market as a case study. Price collars imposed on recent auctions are politically understandable, but they risk muting the investment signals the market needs to attract the enormous volume of new supply required. If investors don’t see adequate returns, the supply gap only widens.</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">Asked to identify the trends they would be tracking most closely, each expert offered distinct picks. Vaden highlighted two. First, the natural gas fuel cell market, which he sees as a potentially significant behind-the-meter play for high-margin hyperscaler customers. Second, he predicted a wave of initial public offerings (IPOs) from innovative energy companies—geothermal developers, small modular reactor firms, and distributed generation players—seeking to access public capital markets over the course of 2026. Giuffre kept his focus on affordability and its downstream policy effects. He warned that states rolling back energy-efficiency investments to manage near-term rate increases could set the stage for even higher costs later, and that capacity market price ceilings risk discouraging the very investment the grid urgently needs. For people interested in diving deeper into the hottest topics affecting the power industry today, S&amp;P Global Energy is hosting its Global Power Markets Conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, April 13–15, 2026. To learn more and to register, visit: <a href="https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/events/conferences/global-power-markets?utm_source=partner&amp;utm_medium=display&amp;utm_campaign=q2_2026_pe612_global_power_markets&amp;utm_id=701cm00000DB7y0AAD&amp;utm_content=power_podcast&amp;utm_term=conferences">spglobal.com</a>. Use the code POWERPOD at checkout to get a 10% discount on registration. To hear the full interview with Vaden and Giuffre, listen to The POWER Podcast. Click on the SoundCloud player below to listen in your browser now or use the following links to reach the show page on your favorite podcast platform:</p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-755104578">The POWER Podcast</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-755104578/205-s-p-global-energy-podcast">205. S&amp;P Global Energy - Hill Vaden and Doug Giuffre</a></p> <p class="yf-1fy9kyt">For more power podcasts, visit <a href="https://www.powermag.com/the-power-podcast/">The POWER Podcast archives</a>. —Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor.</p> </div>