The Latitude stage: Solving the AI load growth puzzle

28 snips

Aug 13, 2025

Guest

Anuja Ratnayake

Guest

Rob Gramlich

In this conversation, Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, and Anuja Ratnayake from the Electric Power Research Institute dive into the surge of AI investment impacting the energy sector. They discuss the challenges utilities face in planning for a future heavily reliant on data centers. With skyrocketing demands, they explore how to navigate uncertainties and the need for flexible frameworks to ensure grid stability. The duo also highlights the critical limitations of transmission capacity and the importance of proactive planning in managing this rapid load growth.

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INSIGHT

Sudden Surge In Electricity Demand

Rob Gramlich estimates ~120 GW new load by 2030, with roughly half from data centers and half of that AI-driven.
The surge breaks decades of flat demand and creates sudden planning challenges for long-lived grid assets.

INSIGHT

Interconnection Queues Are Inflated

Anuja Ratnayake warns interconnection queues overstate real projects because developers enter multiple queues.
Utilities must discount queues using project stage to avoid planning for phantom load.

ADVICE

Discount Projects By Project Stage

Discount projects in interconnection queues by lifecycle stage: early entry gets a lower probability.
Use milestones like land purchase, supply-chain investment, and engineering studies to weight forecasts.

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In the last two quarters, capital spending on AI has blown past all U.S. consumer spending. Investments in AI infrastructure have already eclipsed the telecom and dot-com booms. The top tech companies are pouring so much money into computing power that they may be single-handedly propping up an economy wobbling under chaotic tariff policy.

Gigawatts of new data center requests are flooding utility interconnection queues. And while the numbers are big, the uncertainty is even bigger. Which projects are real? Which are just phantom projects? And how do you plan a grid for a future where half of all new U.S. load could come from data centers by the end of the decade?

In this episode, recorded live at Latitude Media’s Transition-AI conference in Boston, Stephen Lacey talks with two experts watching the boom from different angles: Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies; and Anuja Ratnayake, an emerging technologies executive at the Electric Power Research Institute.They break down the scale of the AI-driven demand surge, the challenges of forecasting in a speculative market, and the implications for utility planning.

Registration is now open for the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas next January. Power Resilience Forum 2026 is the premier event on grid resiliency, bringing together leaders from across the power sector to address the new realities of planning and operating the grid in an era of extreme weather and wildfires.

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Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.