The publication summarizes high-level takeaways from a working session about implementing Virginia's new grid utilization law (HB 434/SB 621), which aims to lower energy costs by better using existing infrastructure. Participants in the convening—organized by Deploy Action Labs and Duke's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and moderated by Tim Profeta—included private sector leaders, advocates, researchers, regulators, and legislative staff. 

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.

Flexible demand response offers the potential to significantly reduce the amount of new capacity needed to meet rapidly growing electricity demand from data centers over the next 5 to 10 years. Without flexibility, the additional electricity may largely be provided by new gas units; with flexibility, the capacity mix shifts more toward renewables.

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.

Affordable, reliable electricity is essential for productive, healthy and thriving communities. Achieving this goal at least partly requires understanding the dynamic relationship between electricity prices and consumer demand is critical for utilities, regulators, and governments seeking to deliver affordable, reliable, and efficient energy. This paper presents updated estimates of a standard measure of price responsiveness in the US residential electricity market—price elasticity of demand for electricity (PEDE)—and explores how it varies across states. 

In fall 2025, ACORE, Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, the EFI Foundation, and the World Resources Institute convened technology developers, finance providers, large-load customers, and legal and policy experts to explore how to keep finance flowing toward clean electricity sectors. 

Participants defined three central challenges to keeping capital flowing into these projects:

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing has dramatically increased global data center energy consumption, challenging existing low-carbon infrastructure development. This study addresses a crucial gap by comparing the Levelized Cost of Electricity for wind, solar, solar plus battery storage, nuclear, and natural gas technologies tailored explicitly for meeting Meta’s data center energy demands through 2030. Our custom model incorporates detailed capital and operational costs, capacity factors, site-specific data, and sensitivity analyses of key variables.

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.

Hyperscalers are large-scale cloud computing providers that operate massive data centers to support global digital services. The rapid expansion of hyperscale data centers is driven by increasing demand for cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and digital transformation across industry and government. These data centers can provide services such as computing and storage at enterprise scale but consume large amounts of energy and water to do so, posing sustainability challenges.

Increased need for electricity is driving elevated demand for power companies to rapidly build out their generation capacity. But Nicholas Institute research shows that, with strategic timing of load use, such demand could be met by the existing power grid.