The U.S. Energy Information Administration is predicting electricity generation will grow by about 1.7% this year, after a 2.4% jump in 2025. It’s significant because there was generally flat generation for the decade of the 2010s.

The increase is due to the significant demand for electricity by data centers, hubs for the ongoing explosion of artificial intelligence and activities such as cryptocurrency mining. Add large manufacturing, including reshoring, the proliferation of electrification, including vehicles, and general population growth, and it’s placing undue stress on the power grid.

Other sources confirm this using other data. In a recent Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), Young Research said that U.S. electricity sales will grow by 2.2% in 2026, consistent with 2025 but a jump from 0.8% from 2020–24. The increase is due to the addition of data centers in Texas, where the grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), and the mid-Atlantic states, where the grid is managed by PJM Interconnection.

The STEO also predicted that electricity demand in Texas will grow by 11% in 2026, with a 4% jump in PJM Interconnection’s territory, which ranges from New Jersey to Virginia and Illinois to Tennessee.

In a December 2025 article, Forbes referenced a Meta Platforms’ 1.2-million-square-foot data center located outside of El Paso, Texas, that will use nearly 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity (or 1 billion watts) to support thousands of servers managing A.I. demands. That’s enough power for 200,000 homes.

Though projects such as this provide vast opportunity for electrical contractors, they have also caught the attention of Congress. In December, three Democratic senators sent a letter to seven companies, including Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, which owns Google, to air their concerns that the energy needs of data centers were forcing utilities to spend billions to modernize the grid, and then passing the cost onto average homeowners.

While the future may not be dire, the United States Energy Association said in a November briefing that a “perfect storm” is developing, where supply demands on the grid may not match delivery capacity. Factors include not only the demand for more power from Big Tech, but also connection congestion, supply chain tightness, regulatory uncertainty and even factors like wind projects and increasing wildfires and severe weather.

Indeed, Forbes said in another article this month that while wind and solar power are growing, it’s not enough, because data centers require pinpoint reliability.