The number in today’s top piece is the one I keep turning over: load growth between 2005 and 2019 averaged about 0.1 percent a year, and the EIA expects roughly 2 percent this year and 2.5 percent next. That’s nearly fifty times the old pace. Whole careers were spent in the flat part of that curve.

The piece’s real argument is that utilities, which used to design and build a gas plant every five or ten years, now have to behave like developers: sourcing turbines, signing offtakers, managing schedules. Most of them are regulated monopolies that were never rewarded for speed. Their muscle memory is a rate case, which is a very slow sport.

And look at the other items beside it. Hitachi is delivering the first small reactor in 2030. Edison’s CEO is still waiting on wildfire reform that now slides into 2027. A pair of experts wants states to look harder at gas plants proposed in place of clean energy. Each one is a story about someone who has to build something on a timeline the institution wasn’t designed for.

I notice the outage-map piece is quietly the same story. Utilities want their maps to answer “what’s happening around me?” instead of just “when’s my power back?”, because hurricanes, wildfires and furnaces all land in the same eight-to-twelve-week window. People are asking for situational awareness from organizations that spent decades being reactive on purpose, since reactive was cheap and nobody was complaining.

Meanwhile the climate side is all about bills. Democrats now pitch climate as an energy-bill issue, and a Senate permitting bill gets sold as a “good deal.” It’s the same vocabulary the utilities are using: affordable, reliable, fast.

Who’s going to be good at building, I wonder, when the skill hasn’t been exercised in fifteen years?

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