Nick Zenkin is the head of research at Latitude Intelligence.
In a historic midterm election that won Democrats control of the House, Senate, and many governors’ mansions across the country, data centers were on the ballot too.
Local restrictions passed in 44 of 45 referendums, a sign of how wary many communities have become of data centers moving in next door. In Georgia, that backlash handed Democrats a majority on the Public Service Commission for the first time in 30 years. The five-member panel regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, including setting Georgia Power’s rates and approving its plans for new power plants.
Voters may have turned on data centers, but the officials elected in the midterms are inheriting the data center load already under contract. While only 12.8 GW of Georgia Power’s reported 80.1-GW large load pipeline is under signed contract, for example, that 12.8 GW still needs power.
Of course, Georgia isn’t the only state with signed data center load to account for. Latitude Intelligence — Latitude Media’s new research arm, which launched this week — tracks signed data center load at every covered utility. At vertically integrated utilities, which build their own supply, resource plans through 2035 leave about a quarter of the electricity that those data centers will require with no planned supply.
That’s a gap most utilities haven’t started to address. And it’s those newly elected officials, many of them skeptical of data centers, who will play a key role in deciding what power those utilities ultimately rely on.
What counts as a signed contract
Even the amount of data center load under signed contracts takes work to pin down. On October 30, Dominion Energy told investors it had 54.9 GW of “data center contracted capacity” in Virginia. Only 12.2 GW of that is included in electric service agreements, the contracts that commit a customer to take power. The rest is represented by construction and engineering letters, which pay the utility to start work, but don’t commit the customer to take service.
AEP Ohio, meanwhile, counts only the service agreements, which brings its load total to 26.9 GW. Latitude Intelligence applies its own definition to every utility it covers, counting data center load as signed when the customer has an executed agreement to take power. And under our terms, AEP Ohio has signed more than twice as much as Dominion, even if the topline numbers show the reverse.
Across the utilities Latitude Intelligence tracks, just over half have signed less than a tenth of the data center load they report. Nearly a quarter have signed none of it.
Who supplies what is signed?
Under the resource plans of the vertically integrated utilities that Latitude Intelligence currently covers, new gas will supply the largest share of power, which squares with Latitude Media’s reporting earlier this year.
If the data centers with signed contracts at those utilities draw 65% of their contracted capacity, which is close to the reported median rate by utilities, the 69 GW of gas plants currently planned or under construction would cover about 45% of the electricity their signed data centers will need in a year. Every carbon-free project these utilities have proposed — counting solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and hydro as carbon-free — would cover about 30%.
That leaves about 120 terawatt-hours, or a quarter of the total, with no planned supply at all.
And that assumes that every carbon-free project that utilities have proposed gets built. Counting only the projects that regulators have approved, that carbon-free share falls to 15%, and the unplanned share grows to 40%. Filling the gap with new wind or solar would take roughly 40 to 60 gigawatts in the first scenario, and 60 to 90 GW if only the approved projects do.
Why filling the gap with renewables is harder than it looks
Part of the problem comes down to math.
One GW of wind or solar doesn’t serve one GW of data centers; over the course of one year, the latter takes about 1.9 GW of wind or 2.8 GW of solar at U.S. average output. Data centers also need power during the few hours a year when demand on the grid peaks, such as during winter evenings when solar panels produce little. In PJM’s capacity auction for 2027-28, every 100 megawatts of solar counts for just 8 MW at peak, against 58 MW for a four-hour battery and 74 MW for a combined-cycle gas plant. Adding batteries to cover that peak means each GW of data centers needs about 2.3 GW of wind and batteries, or 4.1 GW of solar and batteries.
The 120 TWh of signed load without planned supply may be even higher in reality. That estimate assumes that data centers draw 65% of their contracted capacity over a year. If they draw 90% instead, they would need about 170 TWh more electricity a year. Planned plants would cover only about 70 TWh of that — and so far they are mostly gas. That means the amount of load without planned supply could nearly double, from about 120 TWh to 225 TWh.
Utilities have not started buying much of the renewable capacity that they say they plan to. At nearly three-quarters of those Latitude Intelligence reviewed aren’t even set up to produce enough wind and solar in a year to power their data centers alone, much less all other types of demand. And 63 GW of the solar, wind, and batteries in these respective resource plans hasn’t gone out to bid, including most of what’s due by 2030.
What comes next
State law so far hasn’t forced the issue. Most signed data center load (59%) sits in states that don’t require utilities to add more carbon-free power.
And large load tariffs also don’t encourage clean energy use, as those focus largely on contract terms. Meanwhile, data centers customers are planning to bring 73.7 GW of their own generation, almost all of it using gas.
Some of the questions of who and what supplies the power for these data centers may get decided over the next few months. PJM plans to file rules this month on data centers that want to bring their own power, and regulators in Nevada and North Carolina are due to issue final orders on utilities resource plans by year-end. Meanwhile, Georgia Power’s quarterly large load report, expected later this month, will determine whether its 80.1 GW pipeline is shrinking.
None of those decisions are about whether data centers are going to get built. They’re instead about what will power the facilities that already have contracts, and whether that carbon-free share power ends up nearer 15% or 35%.
While the current outlook favors gas, it can’t be ignored that the policy landscape just became decidedly friendlier to clean energy. This is just the start; the decisions that follow, in 2027 and beyond, will land in front of the officials who just got elected.
Latitude Intelligence’s Terms of Power II First Look report has the national findings, and the full edition, included with the Latitude Intelligence subscription, covers every utility we track.
