Black Outs or AI Boom, Take Your Pick

At 9:34 p.m on July 13, 1977, New York City plunged into darkness. 

I’m not talking about lights dimming or a trivial brownout that involved some temporary reduction in voltage. 

Total blackout for 25 hours.  

For a full day, New Yorkers saw their elevators stop, lights blink out, and anything with an electrical pulse grind to a halt. 

What sparked this event was a cascade of failures that occurred after several lightning strikes hit key points in the city’s power grid.

And what followed was a power blackout that became a nightmare scenario for residents. More than a thousand fires were ignited, 1,600 stores were looted, and nearly 4,000 arrests were made as the city descended into utter chaos that night. 

New York learned the hard way that electricity isn’t a modern convenience, but rather an integral part of our society; when it fails, everything else turns feral.

Yet this power crisis shouldn’t be remembered as a crime story, but rather as an infrastructure one. 

Why? Because the lesson here isn’t that bad people do bad things when nobody’s looking. 

No, dear reader, the harsh message for us is that electricity is the quiet lifeblood to our society. 

Now take that memory and drop it into today as the country builds a new class of power customer whose demand never sleeps. 

Data centers don’t politely peak. 

Instead, they sit there like an industrial heart monitor that runs 24 hours a day and 7 days a week without so much as a cigarette break. 

All they demand is guaranteed power from a grid that is already strained in key regions.  

The question isn’t whether electricity demand is rising — IT IS!

Rather, the thing that should be front and center stage during this AI boom is whether the grid will be ready. 

And the uncomfortable truth is that we spent more than a decade building a grid which can’t satisfy that ever-growing hunger for baseload power.

Black Outs or AI Boom: Take Your Pick

Let’s be absolutely clear…

Too few people out there truly realize that the real Age of Electricity isn’t coming — it’s here. 

Look, everyone can draw a chart showing power demand rising. 

However, the hard part is making sure the wires, transformers, and generating capacity show up on time, in the right place, and with the right permits. And nearly every forecast out there is waving a giant red flag that U.S. power consumption will surge in 2026 and 2027, even after record power demand last year. 

The thing is, this growth isn’t being evenly distributed across the board. We know it’s clustering and gaining strength around the new digital and industrial buildout taking place right now. 

In fact, data centers are expected to account for roughly half of U.S. power demand growth over the next four years. For the record, that’s about 2% annually, or more than twice the pace we’ve experienced since 2016!

That’s why certain grid operators are starting to talk in a new language. 

Believe me, they aren’t simply saying “welcome, new customer.” Their tone has shifted to something more akin to “bring your own power” and “we may have to manage your load when the system is stressed.” 

If that sounds unusual, it is. Grid operators are yelling at the top of their lungs that demand is going to arrive faster than supply and infrastructure. 

But the grid is not “unready” because people lack ambition; it’s lacking due to bottlenecks that don’t take bribes or cut corners. Remember, transmission takes years to permit, site, build, and new load shows up on a much shorter clock.

That’s not to mention the fact that interconnection queues are jammed, which delays new generation and storage even when the projects exist on paper.

Big equipment is slow. Transformers and switchgear don’t materialize just because a spreadsheet says they’re needed.

Of course, communities push back even harder because — not surprisingly — they’re the ones who pay when large new loads arrive. See, the bill shows up on household rates long before new data center ribbon-cuttings feel worth it. 

That doesn’t take into account another reality regarding our power generations — the fact is that we’ve invested billions into new wind and solar generation over the last decade. 

Unfortunately, those two clean power sources will leave you hanging. Intermittency isn’t a moral argument, it’s a logistics problem when data centers and industrial electrification want steady, controllable power around the clock. 

Sure, battery capacity is improving, but the system is nowhere near the point where storage can universally turn variable generation into firm power at the scale we’ll need… not yet, at least. 

The good news is that there is a solution — two of them, actually. 

The Hidden War for Power

That’s where the AI story stops being glamorous and starts being profitable.

First, we’ve always pointed toward natural gas as the bridge fuel that can be built and dispatched faster, with the ability to meet load when the weather doesn’t cooperate. And it’s a good thing, too, because our domestic gas production is still on an upward trajectory. 

That’s not going to change anytime soon, and you can bet the market will take full advantage of that fact. 

If natural gas is the bridge, then it’s becoming clear to us that nuclear is shaping up to be the backbone of our power grid. 

Not only is President Trump aggressively pursuing an expansion of our nuclear industry, but capacity is expected to quadruple to roughly 400 GW by 2050. 

Granted, the more we embrace traditional nuclear power, the more we’ll see a stronger push for next-gen reactor designs where permitting and supply chains can be made repeatable.

You can see which direction we’re going if you look close enough… 

The hidden gem in the AI boom isn’t “AI.” 

AI is quickly transforming into an energy trade, and those players delivering the dependable baseload juice 24/7 should be at the top of your radar. 

Take a look at exactly which tickers my readers and I are riding higher today.