America’s electric grid is in grave danger. After decades of relatively flat national electricity demand, a surge of tech data centers, artificial intelligence, and other Big Tech electricity demand is threatening to overwhelm and crash America’s electric grid. Unless policymakers halt the shutdown of coal power plants and approve new baseload power generation, Third World-style electrical blackouts will become commonplace.

President Donald Trump is reviving an American energy revolution. His recent executive orders are removing bureaucratic barriers that have long hindered dependable energy development.

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According to the Clean Grid Initiative’s Grid Strategies Report, 2024, “The era of flat power demand is behind us.” Not only is electricity demand no longer flat, it is growing quite rapidly. According to the Report, “Nationwide electric demand is forecast to increase by 15.8% by 2029.”

The U.S. Department of Energy confirmed this crisis in a July 2025 report, “Evaluating U.S. Grid Reliability and Security,” warning that “if current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks within five years and the Nation’s electrical power grid will be unable to meet expected demand for AI, data centers, manufacturing and industrialization while keeping the cost of living low for all Americans.” It also states, “Modeling shows annual outage hours could increase from single digits today to more than 800 hours per year.”

Increasing our nation’s electric grid capacity 15% from the status quo in just five years is a daunting enough challenge; however, it is worse than that. We also need to add additional capacity to compensate for all the perfectly functioning coal power plants being shut down for political reasons.

The challenge is difficult, but there is a solution: halt the premature closing of coal power plants and prioritize new electric generation sources that score best on an affordable, reliable, clean scorecard.

The Heartland Institute recently released “Affordable, Reliable, and Clean: An objective scorecard to assess competing energy sources,” a policy brief that objectively grades biomass, coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, solar, and wind power according to affordability, reliability, and environmental impact.

The results are striking. Natural gas is the gold standard for new electric power generation, followed closely by nuclear, hydro, and coal. Biomass trails the top four by a decent margin. Wind and solar bring up the distant rear.

Natural gas dominates the economic equation. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Energy found that powering the electric grid on natural gas would be less than half the cost of any other source. Powering the grid on wind power would be seven times more expensive than natural gas, and solar power would be 10 times more.

Nuclear power presents a much better option for policymakers who prioritize the emissions component of environmental impacts. Nuclear is a zero-emissions energy source, causes less water and soil pollution, reduces animal kills compared to wind and solar, and is less than half the price of wind and solar.

Yet despite these overwhelming benefits, nuclear energy has long been targeted by radical environmental groups who claim to care about climate change. Activist organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club actively campaign to shut down or block new nuclear plants, labeling them as dangerous or environmentally unjust, despite their clear zero-emission advantages.

These same groups led the charge to shutter coal plants, leaving Americans with fewer and fewer reliable options.

Greenpeace, for example, states plainly that “nuclear power is an unacceptable risk,” and Friends of the Earth has fought reactor license renewals. Meanwhile, Beyond Nuclear’s mission is total nuclear abolition.

The Sierra Club remains “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy,” citing radioactive waste and safety risks, claiming nuclear diverts resources from “truly safe, affordable and renewable energy sources.”

These groups advocate eliminating not only fossil fuels, but also nuclear, leaving wind and solar as the only acceptable options, no matter how unreliable or expensive. 

Wind and solar power don’t make up any ground on the environmental front, either. Though they do not emit carbon emissions during generation, wind and solar are very poor performers in other environmental categories, such as land development, water and soil pollution, and direct animal kills. Environmental impact is more than just emissions, and wind and solar perform quite poorly across the board.  

The tragic irony is the same Big Tech that is threatening to break the grid with its unquenchable electricity demand has vandalized that same grid for years. Big Tech routinely and directly lobbies policymakers to forego reliable energy avenues and instead impose intermittent and unreliable wind and solar power on the grid. When private individuals and public policy organizations point out the inconvenient truths about wind and solar power, Big Tech routinely censors, blocks, and deplatforms such voices.

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First, Big Tech vandalized the grid with its bullying tactics. Now Big Tech is breaking the grid by imposing electricity demand that unreliable energy cannot meet.

Policymakers must act immediately to avert this dangerous but preventable electric grid crisis. America needs more affordable, reliable, and clean natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro power, and fewer subsidies and preferences for expensive, unreliable, environmentally destructive wind and solar.

James Taylor is President of The Heartland Institute.