In a single year, the wholesale electricity market serving 65 million Americans became $28.8 billion more expensive. The utilities responsible for delivering that power are not the cause of the problem. They are the catalyst for fixing it.
The pressure utilities are absorbing is real. In PJM (the largest market operator that operates throughout 13 states) total market costs jumped from $51.7 billion in 2024 to $80.5 billion in 2025. That’s a 56 percent increase in one year. Capacity costs alone went up 285 percent. Transmission congestion (the cost we pay when cheap power can’t physically reach the people who need it) climbed 78 percent to $7.3 billion in PJM alone. Nationally congestion cost reached roughly $7.9 billion in 2024.
Utilities don’t set the pace of AI buildout, they don’t write federal permitting rules, they don’t decide where hyperscalers site a 500-megawatt campus, and they don’t design the regulatory frameworks that determine how new transmission gets approved and paid for. What they do is keep the electrons flowing inside a system being reshaped around them in real time — and by every operational metric that actually matters, they’re doing it well. The blame narrative is easy. It’s also wrong, and it gets in the way of the conversation we actually need to have, which is about giving utilities the tools and the policy room to stay ahead of what’s coming.
That demand has a name everyone knows: data centers. S&P Global’s 451 Research expects U.S. data center grid demand to hit 61.8 GW by the end of 2025 and 134 GW by 2030 — more than doubling in five years. Virginia is on track for 12.1 GW of data center load this year; Texas, 9.7 GW. Utilities did not ask for these loads to land in their service territories on a two-year clock; the AI boom delivered them. The good news is that operators across the country are actively redesigning how they serve them — running interconnection studies in months instead of years, piloting new cost-allocation models, deploying technologies that didn’t exist when most of their service plans were written.
But the grid was being asked to do more before any of this. More than 70 percent of U.S. transmission lines and large transformers are over 25 years old. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. energy infrastructure a D+ in 2025. Demand is projected to rise about 25 percent by 2030 after nearly two flat decades, and the country is meanwhile bringing on natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, and storage faster than the wires can move the electrons. The country built just 888 miles of new high-voltage (345 kV+) transmission in 2024. Utilities want to build more but permitting, siting, and supply chains move at their own pace.
Then there’s everything trying to take the grid down.
Wildfires now ignite roughly half of California’s most destructive fires on record when sparked by utility equipment — a risk that has driven utilities to invest tens of billions in undergrounding, advanced weather forecasting, and grid hardening, and to deploy Public Safety Power Shutoffs as a last-resort safety measure when winds and dryness combine in ways no system was designed to handle. Ice storms knock out the Carolinas. Derechos flatten the Midwest. Hurricanes work the Gulf. Air conditioners hammer the Southwest in August; electric heat pumps hammer the Tennessee Valley in January. The same conductors get pushed to thermal limits by both.
Alongside the weather, the grid is fending off a growing number of deliberate attacks. In 2023 the Department of Energy logged at least 185 physical attacks or threats on grid infrastructure, the most ever recorded, and substation attacks climbed by about 50 percent. Some of it is startlingly brazen: this past November, a Tennessee man was arrested for trying to take out a Nashville substation with a drone rigged with explosives. The digital side looks no better, with cyberattacks on utilities up roughly 70 percent year-over-year in early 2024 and NERC reporting that the grid adds around 60 new points of vulnerability every day.
Utility security teams are managing to keep pace, but only just, against a target list that grows faster than anyone can shrink it. And while you might expect an issue this consequential to harden into a partisan fight, it largely hasn’t — grid security is one of the few areas where both parties have actually been working the problem together, which means utilities aren’t facing it alone.
The Department of Energy in March announced a $1.9 billion funding opportunity called SPARK — Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades. SPARK is the third round of funding under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021. The first two rounds went out under the Biden administration. This third round WAS ANNOUNCED LAST WEEK under the Trump administration. Same statute, same money source, sharpened focus on getting more out of the lines we already have. Awards range from $10 million to $250 million across three topic areas.
You don’t see a lot of programs survive a change in administration intact. SPARK did, because the underlying problem doesn’t care who’s in the Oval Office. A blackout in Cleveland is not partisan. A wildfire ignition risk in the Sierra foothills is not partisan. A new factory that can’t get an interconnection in time to break ground is not partisan. The program transcends the administration, instead focusing on the largest issues in the energy sector.
And the coalition behind smart grid investment keeps getting broader. The Bipartisan Policy Center has been pushing for years to mainstream grid-enhancing technologies. The 47-member Problem Solvers Caucus put out a permitting reform framework in September 2025. Multiple bills with sponsors from both parties are moving through Congress to streamline transmission siting and require minimum transfer capacity between regions. If you’d told me five years ago that grid policy would become one of the few places left in American politics where the parties still talk to each other, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are.
The reason that consensus has held is that utilities themselves have been laying the groundwork. They’ve spent years pushing regulators on dynamic line ratings, partnering with national labs on advanced conductor pilots, and showing — project by project — that you can squeeze meaningful new capacity out of existing rights of way if the policy environment lets you. SPARK is, in a real sense, a federal response to a case utilities have been making for years.
And the technologies utilities are considering are increasingly focused on getting more value from the infrastructure already in place. Fiber sensing, for example, can turn existing communications infrastructure along transmission lines into a source of continuous information about conditions on the system — from wildfire risk and ice loading to equipment problems and potential security threats. It is one example of a broader shift toward adding intelligence and visibility to existing grid assets rather than waiting for entirely new infrastructure to be built.
That’s what SPARK is really about. It’s the unglamorous middle of the curve — reconductoring, advanced sensing, dynamic line ratings, topology optimization — the kind of work utility planners have been queuing up and now have a meaningful federal partner to help accelerate.
It also isn’t enough. SPARK is $1.9 billion against a demand picture that PJM alone has repriced upward by almost $30 billion in a single year. The IIJA authorized up to $10.5 billion total over five years for GRIP; about $7.4 billion had been announced by late 2024. Whoever holds Congress next year is going to have to decide whether to continue this, and the honest answer is they should — and probably bigger. Utilities are doing extraordinary work with the tools and timelines they have. They deserve a policy environment that matches their ambition.
The grid is the platform American competitiveness runs on. The utilities have been clear about what they need; SPARK shows that, when Washington listens, the politics can actually work. The next round of load growth needs to be bigger, faster, and built on the same bipartisan footing.