Posted on April 3, 2025 by Hillary O’Brien and Mitch Kersey
These days, we hear a lot about the rapid increase in global energy demand due to various factors like growing economies, widespread electrification, and the rise of data centers as AI expands. And it’s true. Here in the United States, after 15 years of static growth, our electricity demand is rising at an accelerated rate. Researchers estimate that by 2030, we will need 20% more energy - a total of 5 million gigawatt-hours of electricity each year.
“5 million gigawatt-hours.” That sounds like a lot. But what does that really mean?
Let’s start with the basics. A watt is a measure of power in an instant. For example, the 60-watt light bulb in your lamp at home requires 60 watts of power to turn on. A Watt-hour is a measurement of that power usage over time.
So, let’s say you turn on your lamp to read a book for two hours, you use 120 watt-hours of electricity. Easy enough.
Now, let’s take a look at a few other examples, going in order from smallest to largest. But first a reminder about unit prefixes: there are one thousand watts in a kilowatt, one million in a megawatt, and one billion in a gigawatt.
While you’re reading your book, your lamp might only use 120-watt hours of electricity, but the average American household will use 2.4 kilowatt-hours during that time. That’s your lamp, the AC, the TV playing, and so on. Scaling up - with 150 megawatt-hours - you could power 42,000 American households for three hours while they watch a Sunday afternoon football game… or you could use your 150 megawatt-hours to power the NFL stadium itself. In the same amount of time, a large city like Washington D.C. would consume 25 times that much electricity, almost 4 gigawatt hours.
Currently, the U.S. needs around 4 million of these gigawatt-hours a year - again that’s 4 million billion watt-hours - or 4 with 15 zeros after it - and those needs are met with a mixture of 60% fossil fuels, 30% renewables, and 10% nuclear energy. And to get us 20 percent more energy - up to 5 million gigawatt hours a year - we would need the equivalent of 1,500 Hoover dams in additional generation. That means we are going to need a lot more of ALL of these energy sources to keep up with expected demand.
And, we don’t just need more energy, we need energy that is affordable, reliable and clean. In other words, we need to take a pragmatic, all of the above approach to U.S. energy development. To keep the lights on - at a price that consumers can afford, we need more baseload energy – the 24/7/ 300 and 65 days a year electricity sources that provide clean power. That means things like advanced nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas with carbon capture.
Ultimately, in order to generate and move all this energy around, we are going to need more than 15,000 new energy projects in this decade alone, and every single one of those projects starts with a permit. Unfortunately today in the United States, you can get a college degree faster than you can get a permit to build a clean energy project. That is why we all must work together to streamline federal permitting processes and unleash American energy.
ClearPath’s answer to the power demand challenge? It’s time to Let America Build.
