Electricity demand is rising as data centers expand and artificial intelligence becomes embedded in everyday services. Power policy fights are also shifting from abstract climate targets to practical questions about generation, transmission, permitting, and household utility bills.
Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future, says that policymakers are racing ahead with electrification and tech buildouts while ignoring the infrastructure required to keep the grid reliable and affordable.
Turner founded Power the Future “because of rural energy workers,” and he describes the organization as a way to speak “authoritatively and aggressively” about energy policy without being tied to a company or product.
According to Turner, the current data-center boom is a familiar local-government mistake scaled to the national grid. He likens the infrastructure challenge to what happens when a developer turns a farm into hundreds of houses. Turner says a county sees revenue and growth, then residents discover “your little dirt road” becomes “bumper-to-bumper traffic,” classrooms swell, and public services strain. “That’s what data centers are doing. We’re building these things so quickly, but the infrastructure needs around all of it are not being considered. It’s catching up to us… and it’s very expensive.”
Turner also links the AI surge to rising electricity consumption that many people do not see. He says older internet-era growth never produced today’s sense of strain, then he points to how search has changed. “Now when you Google something, you don’t get websites. You get answers,” and he argues that shift carries a hidden energy cost. He says the new approach “requires eight times the amount of electricity,” then he warns AI will operate “on an enormous scale.”
Electrifying everything without expanding supply produces predictable sticker shock, according to Turner. He describes a push for “electric everything—electric stoves, electric cars,” then he says higher costs follow when production does not keep pace. “If we don’t produce more electricity, then all you get are higher electricity costs. That’s where we are.”
He also points to plant retirements he blames on recent federal policy choices. “The Biden administration shut down 100 coal-fired plants nationwide,” he says, then he argues the grid lost “baseload power” that “was replaced with nothing.”
Turner says ordinary families now feel utility bills in a way Americans did not for much of the country’s electrified history. “We’re at a point now that electricity bills are considered crippling,” he says, calling that “new for us” after decades of expansion. He says the blame rests with “people who don’t know how the grid works,” adding, “We got here because people who don’t know how the grid works introduced their ideology.”
Turner says nuclear power is a practical answer to the scale problem, and that the politics around “renewables” often obscures workable options. “If you believe that fossil fuel emissions [drive warming], then you should be pro-nuclear.” He describes nuclear as “cheap electricity,” and argues the country should build far more plants. “We should be building hundreds of them,” he says. “I would put a little nuclear plant in my backyard if we could.”
He also points to institutional familiarity with nuclear technology. “The largest nuclear fleet in the world is the United States Navy,” he says. “We shouldn’t be afraid of nuclear power.”
According to Turner, permitting reform offers one of the few realistic bipartisan opportunities, even if political incentives often block progress. He says permitting changes “benefit everybody,” and he calls it an area where lawmakers could “work together.” He also describes a political culture that he thinks rewards obstruction. “We make policy to screw the other guy come campaign season. That’s all we do now.”
The immediate agenda matters less than locking in durable reforms before political control shifts again. Turner says a future administration could use existing structures to clamp down on energy production, and that legislative fixes need to happen while the opportunity exists. “We have a very narrow window to make legislative fixes for the future. I am petrified of permanence.”
