Somewhere in Hill County, Texas, a 110-megawatt solar plant just went live partly because people playing NBA 2K26 and PGA Tour 2K25 opted into a subscription add-on. Not a loot box, not a battle pass — a slice of a virtual power purchase agreement, bundled and sold to thousands of individual gamers by a company called SuperPower. Small dollar amounts, voluntary, transparent about what they’re buying: a fraction of 280,000 megawatt-hours a year. It’s a genuinely funny sentence to type, and also a real financing mechanism that apparently works.

Same day, Duke Energy announced it’s issuing $10 billion in equity to fund a gas-generation buildout, deploying over a billion dollars a month to meet what CEO Harry Sideris calls “record demand.” North Carolina advocates say the growth projections are inflated to justify the spending. Nobody gets to opt into that one — it lands on rate base, recovered from everyone whether the demand materializes or not.

I keep noticing this same fork this week: the Texas interconnection queue getting audited because 474 GW of paper demand doesn’t deserve the same trust as 474 GW of actual demand. Gamers funding a known project with money they chose to spend is the small, legible version of “who pays for new generation.” Duke’s ten billion is the large, illegible version, resting on a forecast nobody outside the company gets to check before the bill arrives. Same grid, wildly different epistemics.

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