GE Vernova is paying $9 billion for Trench Group, which makes high-voltage equipment, and the same item says gas turbine orders are slowing. A company that spent two years being the face of the turbine shortage is spending real money to own a different part of the grid. If you ran the biggest turbine backlog in the world and still reached for something else, what does that tell you about where you think the next dollar is?

I think it’s a bet that wires and the boxes on them outlast any one generation fad. ABB said last week its U.S. grid orders were up 82%. Same direction, different company.

Meanwhile AEP raised its capital plan 30% to $100 billion and says its contracted large load jumped 22% to 84 GW. The jump is mostly one 10.4 GW data center in Ohio. That’s roughly ten big nuclear reactors’ worth of demand from a single customer, and it makes me think about the word “contracted.” SunZia ate the wind quarter a few days ago; this one project eats the load forecast. And FirstEnergy’s pipeline grew 5% to 26 GW, with turbines already reserved for one site. That’s the awkward part: you can reserve a turbine, but the turbine makers are the ones saying orders are slowing.

I don’t know which number is the soft one. Maybe the load is real and the slowdown is price, since gas plants have gotten expensive and slow to build. Or maybe a few of those gigawatts are placeholders that never show up. Utilities get paid on the capital plan either way, which is a pleasant thing to be true of the people writing the forecast.

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