America’s AI future will be powered by private capital, or not at all

Published May 13, 2026 7:00am ET



After 15 years of nearly flat electricity consumption, U.S. power demand has been climbing about 2.1% a year since 2020. That sounds modest; it is not. The United States is now adding roughly 120 billion kilowatt-hours of new annual electricity load, the equivalent of plugging in nearly 12 million American homes every year. The grid we have was not built for that level of growth.

During the nearly four years I spent in the Trump administration, both as the secretary of the Department of the Interior and its deputy, I worked on the supply side of America’s energy story. Energy dominance was never about a single fuel source. Instead, it is about controlling our own energy destiny, producing and delivering power in ways that reduce our dependence on adversarial nations while putting American resources, American workers, and American innovation to work.

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