Brief: The Top Sources of Load Growth Across N. America

Mobius Intel Brief:

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released its 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment yesterday, reiterating that emerging sources of large load present novel or underappreciated challenges to US/North American grid reliability and resource consumption for electricity generation. Today’s Intel Brief highlights three themes from the 2024 LTRA: risk assessment results, NERC’s peak demand and net energy growth forecasts, and the primary drivers of demand growth by North American region.

Key Intel

NERC’s 2024 LTRA showed over half of North American grid operators face elevated or high risk of power supply shortfalls over the next half-decade.

• High-Risk Assessment Area: NERC reported that the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) has the highest risk of power supply shortfalls of any assessment area due to reliable thermal generation retirements (-6 GW of coal-fired capacity since 2023 LTRA) and slower-than-anticipated renewable additions (delays in integrating ~56 GW of solar and battery resources).

NERC’s updated 10-YR peak load and energy demand growth forecasts are increasing at the fastest rate in the last two decades, reversing a 20-YR trend of flat or declining growth rates since 2022’s LTRA.

• The 2024 LTRA’s 10YR aggregated winter peak demand for the 2025-2034 period is forecast to rise by 149 GW (the highest in NERC’s history), while the aggregated assessment area summer peak demand forecast is expected to increase by more than 132 GW.

• Similarly, 2024’s 9YR net energy for load growth is forecast to increase at the fastest rate in over a decade and by the largest margin in NERC’s forecasting history.

The data for this year’s LTRA show interesting disparities in primary demand drivers by region.

• As thoroughly detailed in the Mobius Research archive, elevated or high reliability risks consistently appear in regions with increasing amounts of emerging large commercial loads like crypto/AI data centers and large industrial facilities connecting to the bulk power supply.

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