The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over

A drone photo shows sustainable energy being generated in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region,
July 17, 2025.   Yin Tianjie/Xinhua via Getty Images

Ma, a renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, took her team on the road to get a firsthand look at the country’s AI advancements. She told Fortune that while she isn’t an energy expert, she attended enough meetings and talked to enough insiders to come away with a conclusion that should send chills down the spine of Silicon Valley: In China, building enough power for data centers is no longer up for debate.

“This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations,” she wrote on X.

The stakes are difficult to overstate. Data center building is the foundation of AI advancement, and spending on new centers now displaces consumer spending in terms of impact to U.S. GDP. That’s concerning since consumer spending is generally two-thirds of the pie. McKinsey projects that between 2025 and 2030, companies worldwide will need to invest $6.7 trillion into new data center capacity to keep up with AI’s strain.

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EVs and the US Power Grid

Over half of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2030 are expected to be electric vehicles. That could put a major strain on our nation’s electric grid, an aging system built for a world that runs on fossil fuels.

Domestic electricity demand in 2022 is expected to increase up to 18% by 2030 and 38% by 2035, according to an analysis by the Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Analysis Toolkit, or REPEAT, an energy policy project out of Princeton University. That’s a big change over the roughly 5% increase we saw in the past decade.

“So we’ve got a lot of power demand coming to this country when we really didn’t have any for the last, like, 25 years,” said Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, a transmission policy group.

While many parts of the economy are moving away from fossil fuels toward electrification — think household appliances such as stoves, and space heating for homes and offices — the transportation sector is driving the increase. Light-duty vehicles, a segment that excludes large trucks and aviation, are projected to use up to 3,360% more electricity by 2035 than they do today, according to Princeton’s data.     READ MORE...

Magic Balls & the US Power Grid

High-voltage power lines in the United States will soon be monitored by “magic balls” from Norway.

Heimdall Power is rolling out unique technology in the form of sphere-shaped sensors that have increased power-line capacity by 30% in Europe, according to a story on the tech from Electrek.

Better yet, early users of the sensors are reporting that they are saving money because transmission lines are better utilized in their networks.

“This summer … We were able to disconnect one of two parallel lines and ‘overload’ the other because we had full control of the temperature,” Trond Are Bjørnvold, department manager of Network Development at Arva in Norway, said in a Heimdall press release.  READ MORE...