The watchdog that keeps North America’s electric grid running is working faster than it ever has to keep the lights on as the country’s voracious appetite for electricity skyrockets.
The herculean effort by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. comes as a wave of power-hungry data centers, rising cyberattack threats and extreme weather driven by climate change are driving up electricity prices and threatening energy infrastructure.
“We’re working at a record-setting pace. We’ve never moved anything as quickly as we’re moving this right now,” said Jim Robb, CEO of NERC, the nonprofit company that is tasked with drafting and enforcing rules to keep the electric grid reliable.
Robb told POLITICO’s Energy Podcast that keeping pace with surging demand driven largely by AI data centers will require an additional 200 gigawatts of electricity over the next five to seven years. That’s enough to power the city of San Francisco 200 times over.
