The findings come from four separate assessments: The Brattle Group’s Southeast transmission analysis, the Southern Renewable Energy Association’s (SREA) review of Winter Storm Elliott, the defence-focused Unleashing the Grid report, and the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) 2025 Infrastructure Report Card.
While the reports differ in focus, they converge on the view that the Southeast of the US is fast becoming a national weak spot in grid resilience, much to the detriment of data centre firms looking for new markets to enter.
The ASCE report gave the US energy infrastructure a D+ grade in its latest Report Card, citing performance and reliability concerns.
The report warns that the rise in data centres will demand 35 gigawatts (GW) of electricity by 2030 alone, up from 17 GW in 2022.
To meet the digital infrastructure buildout across the region, the report’s top recommendations include doubling national transmission capacity.
States like Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee are attracting large-scale data centre projects from the likes of EdgeConneX, Vertiv, and xAI, all of which come with high, continuous power loads and require stable, multi-source transmission links.
Some sites are turning to deploy their own generation means, though in the case of Elon Musk’s AI startup, allegedly violating environmental regulations by exceeding permitted levels of on-site gas turbines.
Even where operators stay within the lines, the need for backup generation is a symptom of broader grid fragility, not a sustainable solution.
In Georgia alone, several counties have introduced temporary moratoriums or restrictions on data centre developments, citing concerns about grid stress, water use, and tax impacts.
While such measures are often politically driven, they underscore a deeper infrastructure imbalance: the Southeast is courting energy-hungry industries without the grid capacity to support them long term.
The Brattle Group’s analysis highlights the economic consequences of this imbalance. Without strategic interregional transmission upgrades, the region is effectively walling itself off from cheaper, more flexible power resources available elsewhere in the US.
These missed connections limit the ability of utilities to respond to peak loads, reduce exposure to fuel volatility, and integrate higher levels of renewables—all of which are increasingly important to enterprise customers with carbon targets and 24/7 uptime demands.
An earlier report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests that utilities in states like Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia plan to build more than 20 GW of natural gas power plants by 2040 to meet the unprecedented data centre demand.
Upon taking office, President Trump declared a ‘National Energy Emergency’ and has since signed an executive order mandating a return to coal power for the nation's burgeoning data centres — a decision that could benefit several Southeastern states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which are significant coal producers.
“These reports don't just highlight one problem—they tell a shared story about a system in decline," said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association. “The Southeast is growing fast. Our power needs are growing faster. But our grid is not keeping up.”
“If we want to power our economy, secure our national defence, and give businesses and families reliable energy, we must act now to invest in the backbone of our grid.”
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