A major driver of rising energy bills is the cost of building grid infrastructure to serve new data centers, electric car chargers and manufacturing plants, but even as demand grows, there is a lot of unused capacity already on the grid, reports Latitude Media. Last year, Duke University researchers found across the U.S. there may be 100 gigawatts to spare, if only utilities and state energy regulators could both measure and unlock the extra room.

"If the energy transition is an engineering challenge, it is equally a capital allocation—and governance—challenge. And neither is simple," writes Nicholas Institute Director Brian Murray on LinkedIn. Murray's article offers several key takeaways from Duke's third "From Billions to Trillions" summit, which convened hundreds of business leaders, investors, policymakers, consultants, faculty, students, and practitioners.

A surge in AI-driven electricity demand is colliding with the United States’ push to decarbonize in a moment that requires both urgency and discipline, according to speakers at Duke’s third annual “From Billions to Trillions” summit. The Sanford School of Public Policy recaps two sessions focused on a central question: How can we scale infrastructure fast enough for AI while protecting affordability, reliability and climate gains?

A new Nicholas Institute report suggests the scale of new energy generation needed to meet growing demand could depend less on how much electricity data centers use than on when they use it. “At any given time there’s plenty of unused power on the grid,” report author Jackson Ewing told WRAL News. “The core challenge is those peak moments, which only happen a few times a year.”

New modeling by Nicholas Institute experts focused primarily on the economic benefits of data center load flexibility, but it also pointed the way to reducing high-emitting natural gas plants by replacing them with solar, wind and battery storage. Author Martin Ross spoke with The Energy Mix about some of the key findings of the analysis and what additional data is needed "to evaluate how the system will respond to the growth in data centers."

Building on previous Duke University research, a new Nicholas Institute report finds flexible data center operations could favor renewable development over gas and result in up to $150 billion in cumulative savings for energy customers. Authors Martin Ross and Jackson Ewing talked with Latitude Media about their analysis and the potential impacts of flexibility to other grid stakeholders—and the grid itself—in the next decade.

Demand flexibility among data centers could reduce the need for new gas-fired generation to supply their energy consumption while driving development of additional renewables and cutting electricity prices, according to a new Nicholas Institute report. Author Martin Ross dug into the details of the findings with RTO Insider.

Even modest measures to curb data centers’ energy use during peak hours could substantially reduce the amount of new generation capacity needed to meet growing U.S. electricity demands over the next decade, according to a new Nicholas Institute report. Modeling of a range of scenarios indicates data center flexibility could also shift investment from natural gas toward renewables and reduce electricity prices for both data centers and retail customers.

Data centers are coming to North Carolina, raising questions about infrastructure costs, energy sources and community impact. State Rep. Jeff McNeely (R-Iredell), Tim Profeta (Nicholas Institute) and Nick Jimenez (Southern Environmental Law Center) offered some answers during a roundtable discussion on PBS North Carolina's "State Lines."

The interim report puts forth a set of recommendations to ensure that North Carolinians have affordable, reliable and clean energy supplies amid rapidly growing demand for energy, according to a press release from Gov. Stein's office. Recommendations include developing "options to encourage load flexibility," an issue that Nicholas Institute expert and task force member Tim Profeta is studying with Duke University colleagues.

As artificial intelligence accelerates a wave of massive new data centers, North Carolina’s race to power AI is colliding with its climate goals and could reshape water use, emissions and electricity costs for decades, WRAL reports. “This is a statewide climate and infrastructure question,” said Nicholas Institute expert Jackson Ewing. “And it’s arriving faster than the regulatory framework designed to manage it.”

Duke postdoctoral fellow Dimitris Floros is working with the Nicholas School of the Environment's GRACE Lab to explore whether the existing grid could be run in a “smarter” way by analyzing, understanding and reconciling uncertainty and modeling it. An evolution of the GRACE work, the Nicholas Institute brings together modelers such as Floros with lawyers, market experts and policy scholars to answer a pressing question: How can massive new loads—especially AI-driven data centers—connect to the grid without wrecking reliability or affordability?

A World Economic Forum article suggests five priorities for the data center boom that could both enhance the value of digital infrastructure investments and address concerns related to hyperscaler data centers. The article quotes from a 2025 Nicholas Institute report: "Hyperscaler data centers are neither wholly boon nor wholly bane; they are a powerful force whose trajectory depends on choices we make today."

U.S. energy policy is colliding with explosive electricity demand from AI, rising power prices and growing political backlash. Nicholas Institute Director Brian Murray writes about how policy uncertainty, grid constraints and the Intelligence Age are reshaping the energy landscape in 2025—and what to watch next.

Price responsiveness informs utility forecasts of load growth and peak demand, regulatory evaluations of investments and rate structures and government analyses of energy policies and their impacts. A new report from Duke University experts presents updated estimates of one measure of price responsiveness in the U.S. residential electricity market—the price elasticity of demand for electricity—and explores how it varies across all 50 states.