Duke Energy filed its Carolinas resource plan this week, and the thing that jumps out isn’t any single number, it’s that there’s no single number. 18.5 gigawatts of new solar, 14 gigawatts of gas, 13 gigawatts of storage, and 4.5 gigawatts of new nuclear, all in the same fifteen-year plan. And almost as an aside: an effort to stretch its existing reactors’ operating licenses out to 80 years, plants built in the Nixon administration running past the point where anyone who commissioned them is still working, maybe past the point where anyone who designed them is still alive.

That’s not really a strategy, it’s a refusal to pick one. Given how badly single bets have gone lately (hydrogen’s second funeral in California, Texas pausing an entire data center pipeline because nobody trusted the interconnection queue numbers), it reads less like indecision and more like the sane response to a genuinely unknowable forecast. Nobody knows whether it’s solar or gas or storage that clears the bottleneck first, so you buy all three and hope your permitting office survives the paperwork.

The electric co-ops want the opposite kind of hedge this week: not more supply, but fewer rules on the gas plants they already own. Same justification, data centers, surging demand, no time to waste, pointed at deregulation instead of construction. One industry’s “we can’t predict what we’ll need” turns into a fifteen-year build-everything plan. Another’s turns into an argument for less oversight on what’s already running.

The smallest good thing today: SPP got FERC’s approval to ease grid congestion by reconfiguring which lines carry power, instead of paying plants to ramp up or down to compensate. No new steel, no new poles. Just better routing, which is the kind of fix that never makes headlines because it’s boring and it works.

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