Conservative listeners were right to sit up when Glenn Beck warned this week that the AI boom isn’t just about tech jobs and chatbots — it’s about kilowatts. Beck bluntly told his audience that by 2026, data-center growth tied to AI could start eating into the power Americans depend on, and that worry is already showing up in sober, government and industry reports.
The independent grid overseer has quietly sounded the alarm: winter demand is spiking and data centers are a major driver of that growth, raising the real prospect of blackouts during extreme weather. Regulators and operators say resources are adequate in normal times, but any prolonged cold snap or heat wave combined with round-the-clock server load could force rolling outages if we don’t act.
This isn’t hand-wringing from radio hosts alone — the Energy Information Administration now forecasts record-high electricity use for 2025 and 2026, with data-center demand a clear contributor to that jump. When federal forecasters start telling the American people that demand will top previous records, that’s a call to sober up and secure our energy future, not double down on policies that hamstring reliable generation.
Texas, the freest state for energy and innovation, is already waking up to the problem as massive interconnection requests pour into ERCOT from AI projects asking for gigawatts of capacity. When private server farms queue up to siphon power near substations, ordinary families can be left holding the bag — and that’s precisely why state-level leadership matters now more than ever.
PJM and other regional operators have likewise warned of a capacity crunch as old plants retire and intermittent renewables fail to fill the gap during spikes in demand, a predictable outcome of policies that prioritized ideology over reliability. Conservatives should be proud to say loudly: prosperity and freedom require reliable power, a diversified generation mix, and accountability for companies that build energy-guzzling infrastructure.
The remedy is straightforward and patriotic: demand that policymakers stop pretending fairy-tale energy will power a trillion-parameter engine, require large server farms to invest in on-site generation or meaningful grid contributions, and accelerate permitting for real baseload plants. If Americans want AI and modern conveniences, then build the power plants to support them — don’t let ideological experiments with unreliable energy leave hardworking families in the dark.
