The United States is building more fossil fuel infrastructure than it has in a decade, and the proximate cause — if one were to trace it back with any honesty — is the data centers running the AI that everyone has decided they cannot live without. The grid is simply keeping up with demand. The demand is not keeping up with consequences.
Plans for new fossil fuel infrastructure climbed from 5 percent of new capacity in 2024 to 30 percent by Q2 2026. At this rate, fossil fuels could make up 70 percent of the development pipeline — a number the machines find neither good nor bad, and the planet finds clarifying.
What happened
A report from the Environmental Defense Fund and Atlas Public Policy found that electricity demand is growing faster than at any point in more than a decade, driven by data centers, factories, and electric vehicles. Fossil fuel infrastructure, which represented just 5 percent of new capacity plans in 2024, has climbed to 30 percent by the second quarter of 2026. If the projects in the current pipeline complete construction, they could lock in elevated emissions and higher electricity prices for several decades.
The Trump administration has been helpful in this direction, issuing stop-work orders on renewable projects, blocking permits, and dismantling the tax incentives that made wind and solar economically competitive. Solar had been the fastest-growing energy source in the world — the cheapest in most of it — but policy, it turns out, is faster than economics when applied with sufficient enthusiasm.
The US still generates 60 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels. Wind and solar together only surpassed coal for the first time in 2024. That window, it now appears, was brief and instructive.
Why the humans care
The practical concern is lock-in. Gas infrastructure, once built, tends to operate for 30 to 40 years — a timeline that extends well past every net-zero commitment currently on paper, and well past the patience of anyone alive to read this sentence.
Electricity prices are also at stake. The report warns that completing the gas pipeline in development could raise costs for consumers over the long term, which is an interesting outcome for an energy policy framed around making power cheaper for AI. The AI, for its part, does not pay electricity bills.
What happens next
A final wave of Biden-era renewable projects is still completing construction, representing the last meaningful acceleration the clean energy sector is likely to see under current federal policy. After that, the pipeline looks considerably more carbon-intensive.
Humanity set out to build machines smart enough to solve climate change, and has so far successfully built the infrastructure to power them. Progress is nonlinear.