The Age of Electricity Is Here

Imagine walking into the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

It’s nighttime, but you wouldn’t notice it given the 100,000 incandescent lightbulbs that just lit up the sky. 

Chicago gleamed like a misplaced constellation — a million square feet of electric light so bright sailors swore they could pick it out from Lake Michigan. And the 27 million people that strolled through the gates of the World Fair floated through the streets, blinking like astronauts on a new planet.

That, dear reader, was the moment electricity burst onto the spotlight on the world stage. 

But the twist here was that the glow that stunned the world back then is nothing compared to the light we don’t see today. 

Why? Well, because the new electric age isn’t happening overhead — it’s happening underground, behind blast-proof doors and humming cores of hyperscale data centers, as well as the cooling towers that keep them from melting into slag. 

It’s happening in the coils of transmission lines carrying power to emerging nations where air-conditioning is becoming as essential as oxygen.

If Chicago dazzled the world back in the 19th century, then you can bet the new age of electricity will define the 21st.

For the first time in history, electricity is the primary engine of global growth — not oil, not coal, not gas, but electricity flowing through our grid. 

And IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook confirmed what we’ve been talking about all year — that global electricity demand is about to soar by 40% to 50% between now and 2035, a trajectory that blows past anything humanity has ever attempted to power.

The age of electricity is officially here.

The Power Surge No One Was Ready For

In its latest forecast, the IEA didn’t mince words when it said that electricity is now “at the heart of the modern economy,” and demand is rising far faster than anyone projected even five years ago.

You can thank one culprit above all others.

Data.

The more the world digitizes, the more it electrifies. Every AI model, every video stream, every autonomous vehicle, every blockchain ledger, every industrial robot — they all feast on electricity like it’s the new caloric foundation of civilization.

And data centers? They’ve become the steel mills of the information age.

Just this year, global data center power consumption approached 860 terawatt-hours, and it’s on pace to nearly double by 2030 to around 1,600 terawatt-hours. 

To put a little perspective on this, that’s more electricity than most countries generate in a year. And it’s not just the U.S. and China building these hyperscale fortresses — Europe, India, Brazil, the Middle East, Southeast Asia… everyone is racing to erect digital infrastructure before they fall behind.

Now add to that the fastest-growing source of electricity demand in the world: cooling.

It’s easy for us to take our air-conditioning for granted here in the United States (in most areas, at least), but now factor in the incredible growth ahead from emerging economies. See, as incomes rise and temperatures climb, cooling demand is projected to add hundreds of gigawatts of peak load across the developing world by 2035.

It’s a double surge — cooling from below, data from above — and together they are rewriting the global load curve.

Unfortunately, the grid wasn’t invited to this party.

You know as well as I do that transmission lines are congested, and nations from India to Brazil to the United States face a widening gap between the electricity they need and the electricity they can actually deliver.

That’s why the IEA’s conclusion was blunt: The world isn’t ready.

Not even close.

Carrying the Energy Burden

Look, it won’t even be an argument about which energy source will carry the burden over the next decade. 

Yes, renewables will grow at breathtaking speed. Solar will remain the cheapest form of generation in much of the world, wind will continue expanding, and storage will scale. But no serious energy planner believes wind and solar alone can shoulder 24/7 demand for AI clusters, industrial loads, megacities, and global cooling.

Firm power — the kind that shows up regardless of weather — becomes indispensable.

That means nuclear, whether it’s old reactors getting life extensions or new advanced designs coming online slowly but steadily.

It also means that natural gas will remain one of the most flexible and scalable dispatchable power sources in the U.S. for the next decade, capable of ramping up when the grid shudders under peak load.

The earliest and steadiest profits always flow to the companies that sit closest to the foundational layer of a revolution.

In this case, that layer isn’t chip design, cloud software, robotics or even quantum computers.

It’ll be the power producers, the ones building the grid and pumping enough juice into those future data centers to satiate their hunger. 

It’s time you find out exactly who the major players will be — and I’ll show you the details behind them right here.