Dive Brief:
- Annual U.S. electricity consumption will grow more than 55% by 2050, “with the strongest growth concentrated in the current decade,” the National Association of Electric Manufacturers said in a forecast released Thursday.
- The pace of potential growth is accelerating as data center expansion plans continue to be announced. NEMA’s analysis is an update of a report it published in April 2025, which predicted consumption growth of 50% over the next quarter century.
- The solution to meeting the new demand lies in grid enhancement technologies, demand response and behind-the-meter resources, the manufacturers’ group said. Electricity’s global share of final energy delivered to the US is expected to grow from 18% to 28% by 2050, he said.
Diving knowledge:
“A year ago, we sounded the alarm at the scale of what was coming,” NEMA President and CEO Debra Phillips said in a statement. “Today’s update makes it clear that the trajectory has only been pronounced.”
NEMA expects net US electricity consumption to grow from 3,936 TWh in 2024 to 6,130 TWh in 2050.
Electricity use is expected to grow at an unprecedented rate, NEMA said, including a 300% increase in data center energy consumption over the next 10 years and a 2,000% increase in the electric transport sector by 2050.
“Data centers alone are forecast to account for 38% of net electricity consumption through 2037, driven by aggressive hyperscale capital spending and accelerating energy intensity of AI workloads,” NEMA said.
The group’s 2025 study predicted a 9,000% growth in energy consumption for electric mobility by 2050. Policy changes have led the group to “modify” its expectations, but growth will continue to be significant, NEMA said. The group expects about 51 million light electric vehicles on U.S. roads by 2035, compared with more than 5.7 million today, according to Argonne National Laboratory.
The largest growth in data center demand will come from the Mid-Atlantic and Texas regions through 2035, while the Northeast and West will see the most significant EV growth through mid-century, according to the report. And a “seismic shift” in the generation mix is on the way: Storage, wind and solar generation are expected to increase by 300% and renewables will exceed 50% of generation capacity in the western US, New York and the Southeast, according to NEMA.
The group’s outlook for 2043 calls for 303 GW of stand-alone battery storage, 568 GW of solar and 408 GW of wind, accounting for more than half of the 2,395 GW of US grid installed capacity. NEMA’s outlook also foresees 533 GW of oil and gas capacity, 117 GW of nuclear and 57 GW of coal.
Along with generation resources, transmission technologies such as dynamic line ratings, topology optimization, power flow controllers and rewires will be essential to meet the growing demand, according to the NEMA report.
“Demand is growing faster than the grid can physically expand, creating costly and potentially dangerous transmission and distribution capacity constraints,” MacLean Power Systems President Mike Plaster said in a statement, commenting on NEMA’s findings. “The answer isn’t to stop building cables. It’s to deploy advanced conductors, power flow controllers, microgrids and other advanced systems to maximize the capacity of the infrastructure that’s already built and online.”
