When President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly this week, he lumped people warning about artificial intelligence together with the people warning about climate change. They were, he said, the same people who claimed “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” when “nobody was dead.” Those fears would not, he added, be allowed to stifle the technological transformation he expects to be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.
Four weeks earlier, a glacier collapse sent a flood down Nepal’s Trishuli River that has killed more than 1,400 people, according to the latest Nepal Police count, with about 6,000 still missing and search teams still combing damaged hydropower projects along the river. A World Weather Attribution analysis found that glacier loss and permafrost thaw driven by warming temperatures, as well as damage from the 2015 earthquake, had destabilized the slope.
The impacts of the two scares that Trump dismissed — climate change and the AI boom — overlap routinely in the energy system. One afternoon in mid-summer, far closer to Trump’s backyard than the Nepali floods, was a clear example. On July 2, PJM set an all-time peak load record, estimated at 168.2 gigawatts, using every single generator available to serve it.
Two days before, Energy Secretary Chris Wright had signed emergency orders letting PJM push large users, including data centers, onto their own backup generators and letting power plants run past their pollution limits, as temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit across the mid-Atlantic. During the event, PJM issued a backup generator warning, telling large loads to be ready to switch to backup power with just 15 minutes of notice.
According to the Washington Post, July’s heat domes killed at least 70 people in the U.S.
The extra power that week came almost entirely from fossil plants. Average midday coal output in PJM rose from 14.3 GW to 24.2 GW week over week, and gas output went from 43.6 GW to 55 GW, according to the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a nonprofit focused on oil and gas markets. At the same time, wind and solar held flat. PJM estimates about 3.25 GW of generation ran beyond its permit limits during the event.
Two grids, two fuel mixes
But the longer-term picture for the grid — not just in PJM but nationwide — is cleaner than that one hot week suggests. Developers plan to add a record 86 GW of capacity in 2026, and solar, batteries, and wind are slated to make up 93% of that, versus just 6.3 GW of gas.
What gets lost in that number is who is doing the building. Latitude Intelligence matched planned generator data from the Energy Information Administration for 2026 through 2030 against our own database of utility procurement, limited in both cases to projects that have made it past the earliest planning stage. Nationally, about 211 GW of capacity clears that bar — and 15% of it is gas.
There’s a stark divide in who owns what kind of capacity. Independent developers, meaning companies that build power plants and sell the output, mostly under long-term contracts with utilities or large buyers, account for 169 GW of the total, and only 4% of it is gas.
Utilities, however, who build generation with a commission’s approval and recover the cost through customer bills, are far more gas-happy. Of the industry’s 42 GW in planned projects, gas represents 59%.
Much of that independent clean build is being bankrolled by the companies driving AI demand. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft signed 49% of global corporate clean power contracts in 2025, according to BloombergNEF. Their data centers, however, still largely get their power from utilities.
The ownership split isn’t the whole story since utilities buy much of their solar and storage from independent developers rather than building it themselves. So, counting what utilities contract as well as what they own, Latitude Intelligence tracked 62 GW of new supply that 26 vertically integrated utilities have approved, contracted, or started building specifically to serve data center load. Nearly two-thirds, or 37.3 GW, is gas.
Of course, there are states where utilities no longer own power plants, including in most of PJM outside Dominion’s Virginia territory. There, data centers buy power from a competitive wholesale market instead of a utility’s own fleet.
Where the load lands
Over the past few years, utilities have written large-load tariffs that turn data centers into contracted customers, with long terms, minimum bills, and collateral. These contracts then become the load forecast used to justify new generation in integrated resource plans. When a utility has to show regulators it can serve a multi-gigawatt campus around the clock, gas has an edge on accreditation, since grid operators credit a gas turbine similarly in summer and winter, while solar’s value swings by season.
This dynamic shows up in filing after filing. Duke Energy has signed agreements with 7.6 GW of data centers and is building 14 GW of new generation by 2031, mostly gas. Evergy wants to delay roughly 2.8 GW of coal retirements by at least five years while building 3.9 GW of new gas, citing its large-load pipeline.
Meanwhile, projects that can’t wait for utility-supplied generation are building their own. BNEF tracks 126 GW of planned on-site gas generation that it estimates could raise power-sector emissions by about 20% if run at typical rates.
Utilities aren’t making the choice to lean in on gas and even coal entirely on their own. The tax law Trump signed in July 2025 ended wind and solar credits for most projects that didn’t start construction by July, which Evergy cited in its filings for shifting toward gas and delaying coal plant retirements. The Department of Energy used the same emergency authority that it invoked during July’s heat wave to keep coal plants open past their planned retirements.
Meanwhile, the administration also has announced plans to lease federal land for the 9.2 GW of gas that SoftBank’s SB Energy wants to build for OpenAI data centers in Ohio.
None of this means data centers alone are driving utility gas plans. Rather, the load the administration wants to accelerate is landing with utilities that are mostly choosing gas, with federal help.
Trump framed AI fears as the latest scare from the same people he says got climate change wrong, and asked the world to stop worrying about both. He’s right that two topics belong together, just not for the reason he gave. Both come down to what gets built to serve the fastest-growing load in a generation — and that’s a question that isn’t being settled at the United Nations this week. It’s being determined in rate cases, where state commissions approve gas plant for data centers one resource plan at a time.
