Rapid electricity demand growth from data centers and other large loads threatens grid reliability and affordability. Utilities typically build generation and grid capacity to serve all loads at all times, spreading costs across all customers. This approach is too slow and expensive to meet the pace of demand.

Since fall 2024, the Clean Air Task Force and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability have led in-person and virtual meetings and one-on-one dialogues with Southeastern energy and environmental regulators, utilities, consumer advocates, and businesses to discuss clean firm generation and how it could help meet electricity demand growth.

In the United States, the current system for interconnecting large electric loads, like data centers, to the grid has left all sides frustrated. Data center developers are mired in slow interconnection processes. Meanwhile, electricity customers face rising rates and threats to grid reliability as the nation’s grid operators struggle to interconnect new power plants and batteries to the system quickly enough to meet rising demand. This brief outlines policy considerations for FERC to evaluate and highlights processes and mechanisms that grid operators would need to develop in order to maximize the benefits of load flexibility for electricity consumers. FERC has docketed the DOE Advanced Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking (RM26-4) and requested an initial round of comments by November 14, 2025, and reply comments by November 28, 2025. UPDATE: FERC has extended the initial comment period to November 21, 2025, with reply comments due by December 5, 2025.

The Nicholas Institute's Tim Profeta contributed an essay to "How to Advance Environmental Protection During a Turbulent Era," a special section in the March/April issue of Environmental Forum. The Trump administration is expected to take up a deregulatory agenda—which environmentalists anticipate with trepidation but which businesses generally welcome as an appropriate relaxation of regulations they say inhibit a creative free market and stymie investments in needed projects.

A key solution to the United States' soaring electrical demand—driven by unprecedented electricity needs from large commercial customers, particularly data centers and their booming artificial intelligence workloads—is load flexibility. This analysis provides a first-order estimate of the potential for accommodating such loads with minimal capacity expansion or impact on demand-supply balance.

Electricity demand growth has accelerated significantly, a trend that is expected to continue for at least the next 5 to 10 years and is driven by new technologies such as data centers and the expansion of the manufacturing and industrial base in the United States. This analysis uses a variety of integrated resource plans from utilities and other groups to estimate how overall electricity demand may change over the next decade in several scenarios.

This paper provides a high-level overview of chaining, an emerging concept that marries two highly consequential provisions of the tax code established by the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): Transferability of tax credits and direct (also known as elective) pay to nonprofit or public entities in lieu of tax credits.

Besides unlocking additional capital, chaining could reduce the cost of capital, ease cash flow, and allow for different parties to share risk. The US Department of the Treasury is actively accepting comments on chaining until December 1, 2024. Through those comments, Treasury is seeking to ascertain, in part, how much more capital chaining can enable and how chaining would be executed.

Energy Pathways USA, an initiative of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability at Duke University, has released a report that offers new insights into US energy transition investments. This report comprehensively models the intersecting effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, clean electricity development cost increases, and the impacts of proposed US Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas regulations for fossil fuels.

This report by the Nicholas Institute and the Center for the New Energy Economy highlights several specific policy priority areas relevant to infrastructure proposals in regards to climate issues.

Building our nation’s resilience is an urgent priority. Our vulnerability to the stresses and shocks of climate change threatens US food, energy, water, transportation, and health security, imperiling our economy and our very well-being as a nation. The Resilience Roadmap project seeks to offer actionable recommendations to inform the federal government’s national resilience efforts.