Powerstack: Front row at Future Currence

We were at NYCW this week, hosting our flagship event, Future Currence. We had four utility CEOs, Google's data center lead, Greg Jackson, Tom Steyer, state regulators, and a live podcast recording of Energy Empire onstage. It was great to see so many of you there and throughout the week. Read on for the recap below.

We also shipped something new: Currence's API and MCP, giving clients direct programmatic access to the platform's data centers and power dataset. Check it out here.

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Future Currence 2026 brought utility CEOs, hyperscaler power teams, nuclear developers, grid startups, and state regulators into one room during NY Climate Week to work out what the power system will look like, or needs to look like, by 2030. It ran under Chatham House rules, so no names, but plenty is worth repeating. The room agreed on more than we expected, but disagreed on a few key areas. Here's the on-the-ground view.

The capacity exists, but nobody's paid to assemble it. Speaker after speaker came back to utilization. European grids run at roughly 11% average utilization, and Europe still plans about $1.5tn in new grid spending. Data centers draw about half their allocated power. By one analysis, PJM, MISO, and SPP queues already hold enough accredited capacity for 200GW by 2030. One speaker compared utility technology adoption cycles of roughly 35 years to Silicon Valley's 18 months.

Electricity bills started rising before the data center boom. Most speakers traced rising bills to other causes: electrification of vehicles and buildings, manufacturing, and defense. These were pushing costs up before data centers became a political flashpoint. About 70GW of the 166GW of expected demand growth comes from something other than data centers, as one speaker said. Consumer-side speakers reached the same conclusion from another direction. They blamed a regulated model that rewards utilities for building infrastructure whether or not anyone uses it efficiently, which one called "brutally inefficient."

Flexibility is the plan now, and pricing it is still open. Speakers treated flexibility as a permanent part of the system, and several pointed to ways to build it in, from generation designed to ramp on demand to loads that curtail at peak. By one estimate, many parts of the grid can already deliver about 90% of round-the-clock service for most of the year, so a load willing to flex at peak can connect with far less new infrastructure. Ask what a flexible megawatt is worth, though, and the answers vary: an accreditation exchange rate, revenue per megawatt of compute, or faster interconnection as the payment itself.

Behind-the-meter gas drew the day's sharpest disagreement. One side called on-site gas a real, if temporary, bridge while interconnection takes four to five years, and workable with the right reliability rules. The other side rejected the bridge label entirely. Running an island utility at gigawatt scale recreates the problem interconnection solved 125 years ago, and a 24/7 plant keeps earning whether or not the load ever reconnects. "Network effects still win every time." 

Trust is the binding constraint. In the audience poll, visibility into community benefit and local cost outranked AGI fears. The theme also surfaced unprompted in nearly every session. One speaker said that the power business has become a community engagement business. The open question is size and scale. More community benefits are needed, from visibility to more funds to clearer jobs. 

I left Future Currence more hopeful than I walked in.

In past editions, we’ve called the buildout the new gold rush. That the pace of the buildout and the constrained resources have put everyone in a state of anxiety, frenzy, or zero-sum mentality. That everything has to get built yesterday, and even that's too slow.

That frame still holds, but we’re starting to see just a bit of give in it. Speed without community buy-in eventually catches up with you. We saw this at Loudoun Digital Gateway and other projects, and it’s showing up in the upcoming election. This aspect of community acceptance and real, tangible, benefits came up in almost every session of the day.

But with the week before, where the AI conversation was about the end of humanity, why did I leave hopeful?

A couple things.

First, it’s not just AI. Again, roughly 70GW of the 166GW of expected load growth comes from electrification, manufacturing, and defense. Data centers take a lot of the oxygen, but they’re not the whole story. And the other themes, like broader electrification, can create positive outcomes for consumers.

Second, the supply mix. Yes, gas will meet a real chunk of new demand, and a fair bit of that will be behind the meter. But solar, storage, and even wind keep moving forward. They make up 93% of the record 86GW of utility-scale capacity EIA expects developers to add in 2026 and dominate our speed-to-power analysis, The Fastest MW. 

Of course, we’re just at the trailhead – the mountain is still ahead. Bills are rising, trust is threadbare, and nobody agrees (yet!) on what a flexible megawatt is worth. But the conversation seems to be shifting from build at any cost to build in a way that lasts.

Flexibility providers with an accreditation story. If regulators start paying for utilization, these providers earn revenue from capacity already on the system.

Utilities willing to connect flexible loads first. Offering 90% service with peak curtailment lets them sign large loads now without committing ratepayers to substations for speculative load.

Developers who show up with real community funds. When trust is the constraint, the size of the benefit check becomes a siting advantage.

Island-scale gas without a path to rate base. Speakers gave examples of data centers gone wrong, leaving stranded-asset risks.

Colos and neoclouds with thin utility experience. They face the same speed-to-power pressure as the hyperscalers without the contracting depth or balance sheet to absorb a bad bet.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

417-3 // The House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, but the Senate blocked it. Sen. Martin Heinrich stopped it from clearing the Senate by unanimous consent, calling its 100MW threshold and "consider" language too weak. Sen. Bernie Moreno then blocked Heinrich's counter, which would put FERC in charge of facilities pulling 150MW or more. With both bills stalled until after the pre-midterm recess, cost allocation stays a state fight.

7 bills // California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a data center package directing the CPUC to keep grid-upgrade costs off other ratepayers by January 2028 and making data centers carry a larger share of wildfire mitigation and liability costs. The wildfire piece is the one to watch, since no other state has assigned that cost category to large loads yet.

$584m // North Carolina regulators denied Duke Energy Progress's 255MW gas turbine next to Amazon's $10bn Richmond County campus. They called the cost "staggering," said Duke hadn't shown its data center-driven load forecast would materialize, and cited Duke's Ratepayer Protection Pledge. The pledge is voluntary, but it’s being used to reject a utility's generation request.

~96MW // Google will fund nuclear uprates for Georgia Power's nuclear plants, Vogtle and Hatch, subscribing to a new NU-1 tariff filed with the Georgia PSC on Sept. 21. Most hyperscaler nuclear deals so far, like Google's Duane Arnold restart with NextEra, are PPAs with merchant owners. This one runs through a regulated utility tariff, which opens a nuclear capacity play to hyperscalers in vertically integrated states, as long as regulators sign off.

580MW // Sunrun and Tesla dispatched 580MW via VPP, from more than 140,000 home batteries during California's Sept. 9 heat wave, which the companies call the largest residential VPP event on record. The same fleets also cover SCE's territory, and the companies say they could have delivered over 720MW if that dispatch had landed the same night. A big proof point for DERs.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Promising Senate permitting talks stall ahead of the midterms. Negotiators remain split over whether the administration will lift its solar and wind permitting ban, and Republicans missed their target for a deal this week. Neither side has walked away, so a lame-duck session looks likelier than a pre-election bill.

Virginia Gov. Spanberger releases data center rules. Her Data Center Accountability Framework bans state agencies from signing data center NDAs immediately and asks lawmakers in 2027 to require local approval above 25MW, shift more grid costs onto data centers, and end state subsidies. Projects that cut generator emissions 60% or bring clean energy early would get grid priority.

Pennsylvania and DOE both flag PJM reliability risk. A Synapse study released by the Pennsylvania PUC projects PJM's loss-of-load expectation reaching 13.2 by 2030 in a high-load scenario, more than 100 times PJM's 0.1 standard, driven by data center growth. DOE then issued its seventh Section 202(c) emergency order for PJM this year earlier this month amid high temperatures and load.

EU proposes efficiency labels for data centers. The European Commission's scheme would grade data centers above 500kW from A to G on power and water efficiency, energy sourcing, and grid flexibility, with the first labels due in August 2027. Parliament and the Council now have two months to review it.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

Inflection Point for Non-lithium Long Duration Storage. Currence's Lukas Karapin-Springorum finds that non-lithium storage technologies have hit cost parity with lithium-ion at eight-plus-hour duration for the first time, opening a lane that policy-driven offtake is starting to fill. We’re tracking the global LDES projects headed for financial close in 2026, a $6bn opportunity. Read the full analysis.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 Yotta 2026 // Las Vegas, 28-30 September // Network and learn at the biggest AI infrastructure conference of the year. With 6,000+ leaders across data centers, energy, compute, and capital, the conference is bringing industry leaders together to solve the cross-stack challenge of sustainable, scalable growth in the age of AI. Use code CURRENCE20 for 20% off passes

Don’t you just love New York in the fall? New York, the fall, always reminds me of this. So for the start of fall, NYCW, all of it – this week’s B-side is Dreams, by the Cranberries.

Full Powerstack B-Sides on Spotify.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.