ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — The Energy Department said Thursday that it will spend almost $2 billion to try to squeeze more electricity out of the nation’s aging and stressed power grid, as President Donald Trump’s administration steps up efforts to avoid blackouts amid skyrocketing energy demand spurred by artificial intelligence.
The money will go toward 31 projects across 26 states that are expected to produce more than 23 gigawatts of additional electricity capacity — enough to power 16 million homes. The projects will use new technologies such as sensors to measure real-time weather conditions to ensure safe transmission or direct power away from congested paths, the department said.
The upgrades could improve power reliability and lower electricity costs for about 100 million Americans, officials said.
“This is a quick way to lower electricity prices and increase reliability: using fibers that are already in the transmission lines to analyze what’s the temperature out, what’s the wind out, how can we use this transmission line to distribute more power, but safely and only in the right conditions,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a news conference promoting the grants Thursday at a PPL Corp. facility in Allentown.
The eastern Pennsylvania electric utility says two data centers in its territory came online this year and six more are under construction, with enough other data centers in the advanced planning stages that its peak electric demand could quintuple by 2032.
PPL said it is receiving $71.5 million to modernize an existing high-voltage transmission line across roughly 30 miles in northern Pennsylvania.
The announcement comes amid warnings that AI’s voracious demand for power is threatening to overwhelm U.S. power supplies, as massive new data centers come online faster than new power plants can be built. It also comes as electricity bills rise faster than inflation in many parts of the U.S., blamed in some areas on demand from data centers.
The snowballing opposition to data centers in communities across the country has thrown a wrench into the plans of the world’s richest companies and transformed the midterm election landscape.
Trump continues to stick up for data centers, even as politicians from both major political parties criticize them and many communities try to block them.
In the meantime, Congress and some states are trying to push utilities to expand their use of new technologies to make grids more efficient and to lessen the need to build new power plants.
Julia Selker, the executive director of the WATT Coalition, a trade association for grid-enhancing technologies, said both the projects and the scale of the investment are significant. Utilities in the U.S. are lagging places like Europe in adopting the technologies, despite federal investment in the past to develop and test them, Selker said.
Still, Drew Maloney, CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of for-profit utilities, said…
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