In a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy this morning, expert witnesses and lawmakers focused on a critical bottleneck: the pace of project interconnection, amplified by a disconnect between federal energy ambitions, and regional energy realities.
Witnesses acknowledged the necessity of new generation capacity, in part to power data centers and domestic manufacturing. However, those testifying — which included representatives from PJM and Southern Company — also emphasized that simply adding power plants won’t fix the problem, if electricity can’t be transported efficiently to where it’s needed.
The hearing, titled “Scaling for growth: Meeting the demand on reliable, affordable electricity,” underscored the rising tension between surging energy demand and the aging grid infrastructure tasked with meeting it. Its core disagreement centered on the appropriate role of the federal government in accelerating grid expansion. At moments, witnesses and lawmakers clashed over whether top-down mandates or regional solutions are best suited to address looming electricity challenges.
Republicans at the hearing voiced concerns about what they perceive to be federal overreach in national energy goals. “In recent years, we have witnessed the failure to ensure that there is power when our communities need it the most,” said committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.).
She attributed that to “the loss of huge amounts of reliable baseload and dispatchable generation across many regions of our nation, following misguided regulations and without adequate replacement for those resources.” It was a sentiment echoed frequently throughout Republican questioning of the witnesses, laced with heavy skepticism about federal policies prematurely retiring fossil fuel plants and overly favoring intermittent renewables, thereby jeopardizing grid reliability.
Democrats, meanwhile, argued for a stronger federal role in driving grid modernization.
Florida Democrat Kathy Castor criticized the Trump administration for “taking a sledgehammer to the Department of Energy and especially the initiatives that strengthen and modernize the grid.” Especially harmful is the breakdown of grants and loans that make energy “safe, reliable and affordable,” she added.
“The real barriers to getting new power online for data centers for large scale manufacturing or just everyday American families is the limited capacity and disjointedness of our power grid,” Castor said.
A shifting system
The hearing’s expert witnesses, however, painted the picture of a complex, rapidly evolving energy landscape — testimony that didn’t neatly align with either party’s framing.
PJM Interconnection’s Asim Haque, for instance, described a supply-demand imbalance, testifying that the regional transmission organization expects its summer peak to climb by about 70 gigawatts over the next 15 years. Haque said PJM anticipates approximately 40 GW of generation to retire by 2030.
“Supply is coming off of the system, and new supply additions are not keeping pace,” Haque said. He added that PJM has cleared about 50 GW of primarily renewable resources through its interconnection queue — but developers still face hurdles beyond the grid operator’s control, including “project financing, global supply chain, and permitting/siting lag or refusals.”
Haque said generation is leaving the system largely because of “state and federal decarbonization policies in tandem with some economics.” That said, PJM characterizes the current reality as an “all-hands-on-deck event” that will require “all of our resources in order to meet both the opportunity and challenge that this demand increase presents.”
Meanwhile, Noel Black, senior vice president of government affairs for Southern Company, emphasized the importance of regional and state-level decision-making.
“Electricity and energy are highly regional in nature,” Black said. “The weather, resources, state and local politics, geography, and the region’s load profile and market structure greatly impact the physics and finance of delivering electricity.”
A “one-size-fits-all” energy strategy isn’t appropriate for energy policy, he added: “That’s because of this intense regionalism that drives energy outcomes.”
Duke University researcher Tyler Norris testified that with modest flexibility from large loads like data centers, “the existing U.S. power system could accommodate up to four or five Project Stargates,” referring to the $500 billion data center initiative announced by President Donald Trump the week of his inauguration.
Norris also cited ERCOT’s streamlined interconnection process as a model, noting that Texas “has taken a different approach, and it’s achieving significantly greater interconnection performance” by permitting interconnection first and managing grid impacts in real time. This approach, he testified, enables ERCOT to connect new generation “twice as fast as every other market.”
When Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) asked about the impact of repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits, Norris cited economic studies showing electricity rates would increase by “7% for residential customers, 10% for commercial customers in 2026.”
