Why Subscribe?
The electric grid is approaching a paradox: surging demand from AI and data centers just as the economic foundation that pays for electricity—stable employment, solvent customers—disappears beneath our feet.
I'm a Principal Consultant with a decade designing Demand-Side Management and Distributed Energy Resources programs across the United States. I've built the DER forecasts, analyzed the rate structures, and navigated the regulatory frameworks that govern utility strategy. But the assumptions underlying everything we're planning may be fundamentally wrong.
This publication examines what happens when rising electricity demand meets collapsing economic foundations. AI is rewriting load curves, customer classes, and utility finance faster than our planning models can adapt. We're rate-basing billions in long-lived infrastructure for customers who may be economically obsolete before the concrete sets.
Subscribe because the models everyone's using are missing the biggest variable: who's going to pay for all this?
Most energy analysis treats rising demand as automatically good for utilities. More kilowatt-hours equals more revenue, right? Wrong. Not when that demand comes from job-destroying technologies that eliminate the customer base needed to pay for infrastructure. Not when data centers consume electricity like industrial facilities but create jobs like automated warehouses.
Subscribe because you need analysis that connects the technical dots to the economic reality.
I write for utility planners running load forecasts that assume economic stability. For regulators approving rate cases that socialize AI infrastructure costs to households losing income to AI displacement. For analysts trying to model utility creditworthiness when the customer payment foundation is eroding in real time.
Subscribe because the planning assumptions are breaking down faster than anyone wants to admit.
We're approving transmission projects with 30-year cost recovery timelines for economies that may not exist in five years. We're designing rate structures around customer classes being eliminated by the same technologies driving load growth. We're stress-testing utility balance sheets for everything except the scenario where customers can't pay their bills.
Subscribe because someone needs to say what everyone's thinking but no one's modeling: the infrastructure is necessary, but the system that pays for it may not survive.
If you're trying to understand why we're building infrastructure for an economy that won't exist to pay for it, or why $2 trillion in grid investments might arrive just in time for a demand model that’s already vanishing, this analysis cuts through the wishful thinking.
The grid will survive. The question is what replaces the system that built it.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in Load to Ruin are solely my own and do not represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of my employer or any affiliated organization.
This publication is written independently and outside the scope of my professional role.
