Mobilizing for the Big Load Era - Reading & Podcast Picks - November 4th 2025
AI, data centers, reshoring, and electrification are driving historic demand. The constraint is not ideas or capital, it is how fast we can connect and power what is being built.
Everyone can feel it. Demand is sprinting ahead of the system built to serve it. AI campuses, data centers, EV fleets, and new factories are coming online faster than our interconnection rules and transmission maps can handle.
The question is not whether to build. The question is whether we can power what we build, where we build it, and when it is actually needed.
Veterans know this terrain. When the mission speeds up, you tighten logistics, align teams, and move. This week’s picks show regulators rewriting the playbook for large loads, states pushing self-reliant power, finance opening new lanes, and operators staying mission ready through policy turbulence. The through-line is simple: mobilize.
Boston to house world’s biggest heat pump (Financial Times, VicinityEnergy)
The world’s largest industrial heat pump is headed for Boston, where Vicinity Energy and Everllence are building a 35 MW system that will “provide 50 metric tonnes of steam an hour and serve more than 70 million square feet of building space,” using the Charles River as a heat source and mostly renewable electricity. Service is planned for 2028.
Vicinity says, “Engineering for our 35 MW industrial-scale heat-pump complex is complete … construction has begun,” with its eSteam network already moving power-to-steam through Boston’s existing district system. The idea isn’t theoretical anymore, it’s steel-in-the-ground.
Analysis from Rewiring America, a non-profit focused on electrification, says states such as Texas and Arizona — some of the fastest-growing data centre hubs — could reduce peak annual demand by 6.8 and 1.3 gigawatts, respectively, through widespread heat pump and other energy efficiency upgrades. This is equivalent to 171 and 33 data centres respectively.
Time is running out for residential heat pumps though. Under the Joe Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, households could claim a 30 per cent tax credit for up to $2,000 a year for energy efficiency updates, such as installing air source and water heat pumps, as well as biomass stoves.
Trump gutted this subsidy in his “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill. The deadline to claim the credits is December 31.
Federal support may fade, but the economics and comfort benefits still make sense in much of the country.
Industrial-scale systems have a different calculus. In Boston, the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) requires buildings to hit net-zero emissions by 2050, with fines of $234 per ton of CO₂. That local mandate, not Washington, is what’s driving the Vicinity project.
It’s a good reminder that the energy landscape isn’t red or blue. While the federal government leans harder into fossil development, cities and states are experimenting with technology that keeps costs predictable and emissions trending down. As always, results matter more than rhetoric.
DOE to FERC: Accelerate Interconnections for Big Loads (Reuters)
DOE is pressing FERC to craft a clear path for connecting power-hungry facilities like data centers and hybrid load-plus-generation sites. The goal is to let large customers move through the queue with standardized processes and timelines so the grid can keep up with demand.
The energy department said the rule would reduce study times and costs for improving the grid, while reducing the time needed for additional power to come online. The rule also pushes FERC to mull whether reviews for grid projects, which sometimes take years, can be done in 60 days.
This flips the script from generation-first to load-led planning. It will reward leaders who can coordinate utilities, ISOs, and site owners while keeping crews working safely and on schedule. Veterans who speak operations and policy will be in high demand.
It’s important to recognize that this is not new rule yet.
Energy secretaries can direct FERC, an independent panel of the Energy Department set to have a 3-2 Republican majority, to consider rules, but cannot force it to adopt them.
PJM Governors Signal: Bring Your Own Power (Inside Climate News)
Governors in PJM states are exploring fast-track approvals for data centers that guarantee dependable power as part of their interconnection. Translation: self-reliant sites, microgrids, storage paired with solar or firm capacity, and tighter local resilience.
Data centers require around-the-clock electricity and even brief dips can cost millions of dollars in revenue. The fast-track proposal aims to accommodate lucrative investment from tech and financial firms in some pivotal states.
States oversee the siting, permitting and environmental review for commercial projects that require grid access. The states also assess land-use or rights-of-way and construction approvals related to the construction of electric lines and substations.
The DCC-governors proposal essentially relies on the states to expedite permitting and siting for the data operations. Under the proposal outlined by Quinlan, each state can issue directives to expedite projects that will build energy lines or substations. The data center’s power sources don’t have to be on the data-center site itself. The generators can be elsewhere in the same grid area that is approved by the state."
Under the plan, data centers qualify for the fast lane only if they create power equal to their expected use. For example, a data center site planning to use 50 megawatts must secure or develop 50 megawatts of supply. Those megawatts would be added to PJM’s grid at the time the business is launched.
This is a field-manual move. Shorten the supply line and control your power on site. It opens a surge of work in design, storage integration, controls, and O&M. Prime ground for veteran PMs and operators who can build these systems.
DOE Loan Rule Expands Eligibility for Projects (Federal Register, H&K)
DOE issued an interim final rule updating its loan-guarantee regulations under “Energy Dominance Financing,” broadening eligibility and authorizing significant capacity through FY2028. The Federal Register summary says the rule “expands the definition and criteria of eligible projects.” Read that twice, then read the fine print.
DOE introduces the term “energy dominance financing project” and broadens the definition of “energy infrastructure” to include activities across the energy and critical minerals value chain – from identification and leasing to production, processing, transportation, refining and generation.
In practical terms, this expansion could now cover projects such as:
upgrades or capacity expansions at operating natural gas or coal plants to enhance reliability or extend usable life
critical minerals extraction, refining or midstream processing facilities that strengthen U.S. supply chains
grid-scale storage and generation projects that ensure forecastable power delivery during peak or reliability-critical intervals
This represents a major shift from prior language that limited eligibility largely to power generation, transmission and fossil fuel infrastructure.
Financing lanes are helpful, though their direction is important and they do not replace execution.
This shift formally replaces the prior requirement that projects “avoid, reduce, utilize, or sequester” greenhouse gas emissions – codifying OBBB’s move from emissions-driven criteria toward reliability, capacity and energy security objectives.
The global boom in solar — with or without the US (Financial Times)
Nevada’s Esmeralda 7 cluster just hit a wall when federal land managers pulled the group approval and told developers to reapply one by one. That slows schedules and adds cost. It also signals how quickly policy can flip on utility-scale siting.
Advocates are reading this as part of a broader federal chill on renewables. We keep a neutral posture on motives and focus on effects. The effect is delay.
Meanwhile, China is pressing the accelerator.
“China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau.”
“There is already more than four times [the IEA’s 2010 solar forecast] installed, with about half of it in China.”
Outside China, the picture is mixed but moving. Petrostates are building solar to free up export barrels. Africa and South Asia are scaling both utility-scale and small systems where the grid struggles.
“Solar panel installations of less than 1MW accounted for about 42 per cent of global installations last year.”
“We’ve displaced tens of thousands of diesel generators.”
“The cost of panels [is] down by almost 90 per cent over the past decade… overall capex down 70 per cent.”
Prices are reacting to tight supply and rising demand. That is not a renewables vs fossil story. It is a sequencing and infrastructure story.
The global scorecard is simple. China is compounding advantages in manufacturing, build speed, and electrification. The US risks losing ground if it treats this as a culture war instead of an energy-security race.
Jurisdiction Lines Matter: FERC Rejects Tri-State Large-Load Tariff (Utility Drive)
FERC rejected Tri-State’s proposed large-load tariff, saying it strayed into retail rate territory that belongs to the states. As big loads multiply, clear roles and authorities will matter more at every interconnection.
Tri-State said its proposed High Impact Load, or HIL, tariff and High Impact Load Agreement would protect its utility members from a range of risks related to large loads, including the possible need for more transmission and generation to serve the loads as well as cost-shifting onto existing ratepayers.
We find that Tri-State has not provided a sufficient basis for the Commission to find that its proposal does not regulate the terms and conditions of a [High Impact Load] Customer’s retail service in ways that are beyond the Commission’s authority,” FERC said.
FERC said that because it decided that Tri-State’s proposal was outside its authority, the agency didn’t need to address other issues, such as the scope of its jurisdiction over interconnecting loads to the transmission system.
I think this shows that while FERC is not likely to interfere in any matters expressly within states’ jurisdiction moving forward, FERC will likely carve out a larger role for itself on other issues, including with respect to overseeing interconnections to the FERC-jurisdictional transmission system,” Steven Shparber said.
Understanding who controls what is not glamorous, but it is strategy. If you can brief the jurisdiction map, you can de-risk siting and sequencing. Fewer surprises, faster build.
U.S. Offshore Wind at an Impasse (Energy Policy Now Podcast)
Offshore is a master class in ambition meeting real-world friction. Financing costs, permitting delays, shifting rules. The conversation is clear, grounded, and useful for anyone who has to turn plans into steel in the water.
Offshore challenges rhyme with onshore work. Learn the lessons now so we do not repeat them as we scale transmission and storage to serve the Big Load Era.
“Every setback is a systems lesson. Capture it, adjust, and move.”
Final Thoughts
This is how we’re reading it. Federal agencies are proposing tools. States are drawing guardrails. Markets are preparing to spend heavily. None of that replaces execution.
Our north star stays the same. Reliable power at a fair price, with American workers doing the work. Oil and gas, nuclear, renewables, storage. All of it. We judge policies by results in the field, not by the press release.
If this brief helps your planning, pass it along. If you see something on the ground that others should know, reply with details. The point is not to be impressed. The point is to build.