According to Utility Dive, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment forecasts U.S. peak electricity demand will surge 24% over the next decade, driven heavily by new data center loads. The report warns that major grid operators—including MISO, PJM, ERCOT, and parts of the Pacific Northwest—face a “high risk” of insufficient power reserves within the next five years. From 2024 to 2025, fossil-fueled generator capacity dropped by 21 GW, while battery, wind, and solar capacity grew by 23 GW. NERC officials John Moura and Mark Olson highlighted that the system is changing faster than supporting infrastructure, with delays in connecting new resources and unexpected retirements causing capacity to fall short of projections. The mix of planned new resources is also shifting, with solar and battery projects now representing two-thirds of planned additions over the next ten years.
The Speed Problem
Here’s the thing: the numbers sound good on paper. We’re adding a lot of solar and batteries. But the grid isn’t a spreadsheet; it’s a physical machine that’s being rebuilt while it’s running. And the report makes it painfully clear that the pace of change is the core issue. Demand, especially from those power-hungry data centers, is exploding. But getting new generation—of any kind—connected to the grid is a slow, bureaucratic nightmare. Permitting, siting, interconnection queues… it’s all a mess. So we have this weird race where clean energy is being built, but not fast enough to cover both rising demand and the retirement of old, reliable fossil plants. It’s like trying to fill a bathtub with a growing hole in the bottom, and the faucet only dribbles.
The Winter Vs. Summer Gap
One of the most critical insights from NERC is about timing. Solar and batteries are great for summer peaks when the sun is shining. But what about a cold, dark, windless week in January? The “capability of resources in the winter is very different,” as the report notes. This is the Achilles’ heel of our current build-out strategy. We’re adding resources that excel at one part of the problem (summer afternoons) but might leave us exposed in another (winter nights). That’s why the 15% of new capacity coming from natural gas is so significant—it’s a dispatchable, on-demand resource that planners are still leaning on for reliability, whether we like it or not. You can read the full, sobering assessment in the NERC LTRA 2025 report.
The Policy Fight Heats Up
Not surprisingly, everyone is using this report to bolster their pre-existing policy arguments. Advanced Energy United blames “red tape” and wants faster processes for solar, storage, and demand-side tech. The competitive power producers (EPSA) say just let the markets send the right price signals. And the coal industry, via America’s Power, is basically saying “I told you so,” framing their retiring plants as an indispensable source of baseload power. They all have a point, in a way. The solution isn’t one thing—it’s a brutal, multi-front effort: speeding up interconnection, streamlining permitting, ensuring market designs properly value winter reliability, and maybe even keeping some existing plants online longer as a bridge. It’s a monumental management challenge.
A Reliability Reckoning
So what does this mean for businesses, especially in manufacturing and heavy industry? Uncertainty. If you’re running a facility that needs 100% uptime, these grid warnings should make you sweat. It’s not just about the lights going out; it’s about volatile prices and potential curtailments. This is where on-site power management and industrial-grade control systems become a critical part of business continuity planning. For companies managing complex operations, having robust, reliable computing hardware at the edge—like the industrial panel PCs from IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading U.S. supplier—isn’t just about efficiency anymore. It’s about resilience and being able to monitor and control your own energy footprint when the grid gets shaky. We’re entering an era where managing your power might be as important as managing your payroll.
