Episode
A power producer’s view of keeping the lights on. What does rising electricity demand from data centers mean for the US grid?
- Podcast
- Energy Gang
- Published
- Mar 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4250
- Processing state
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Summary
Energy bills are rising, data centers are multiplying, and the grid is straining to keep up. What happens next? For two decades, electricity prices in the United States barely moved. Demand was flat, natural gas was cheap, and the system was largely stable. That era is over. A surge in data center construction, accelerating electrification, and the legacy of years of underinvestment in energy infrastructure have collided to create a system under strain. Nowhere is that more visible than in PJM, the largest wholesale power market in the US, stretching from Illinois to North Carolina, and home to some of the world's most active hot spots for data center development. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Paul Segal, CEO of LS Power, and Melissa Lott, Partner for Energy Technologies at Microsoft, to assess how the system can meet the new challenges it faces. LS Power is a leading developer and operator of electricity generation and transmission, so Paul is right at the heart of these questions. He is making multi-billion dollar decisions that shape the ways that America’s electricity gets supplied. He makes the case that competitive markets, given the right rules and durable signals, can deliver the solutions the grid needs. LS Power is pursuing demand response, battery storage, renewable projects, and gas generation simultaneously. And he warns that political interventions, such as price caps, risk weakening the signals that drive investment. The question of who pays is at the heart of the debate. A bipartisan group of state governors got together with the Trump administration to call for emergency procurement of new generation capacity in PJM, with data centers expected to bear the cos…