• THE GRID
Washington Just Killed Three Highways for Electrons
Last Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of Energy Katie Jereza stood in Lamar, Colorado, and did something odd. She cancelled a transmission corridor that would have brought cheaper power to the very crowd watching her.
Three corridors, gone. The Lake Erie–Canada link. The Southwestern Grid Connector through Colorado and New Mexico. The Tribal Energy Access route across the Dakotas and Nebraska. All three were Biden-era picks from a list of ten. None will move forward.
"Extensive review, including public feedback and stakeholder input, made clear that the current designation process for these three proposed transmission corridors should not continue."
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The corridors mattered because they came with a shortcut. Federal "NIETC" status lets regulators speed up permits and tap federal financing. Without it, every mile of new high-voltage line goes back to the slow, state-by-state slog.
Now zoom out. Data center construction starts hit $81.5 billion through June this year. That already tops all of 2025. It's triple the 2024 total. The load is coming. The wires are not.
DC Construction YTD
$81.5B
| 2025 Full Year
$72.5B
|
2024 Full Year
~$27B
| Corridors Cancelled
3 of 3
|
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DOE isn't done with transmission. It still lent $3.3 billion to AEP Texas in July and $26.5 billion to Southern Company subs in February. But those are loans to utilities. The corridor tool was different — it was a way to force new paths across state lines.
That tool is now gone. Every state can veto a line. Every year of delay is a year a data center sits in a queue.
The math is plain. We're building the things that eat power at three times last year's pace. And we just made it harder to deliver that power across state borders. If you're long grid builders, this is a tailwind — more bottlenecks mean more urgent local spending. But for the broader grid, it's a step backward at the worst possible time.
• VOLTAGE
52 Gigawatts: America's Battery Fleet Has More Than Doubled
Two years ago, the U.S. had about 20.2 GW of battery storage on its grid. As of June, that number is 52 GW.
The EIA posted the data last week. U.S. battery storage grew at a 70% average annual clip over the past three years. In the first half of 2026 alone, operators added 8.3 GW on top of the 43.6 GW that closed out 2025.
And the pipeline is fat. Operators plan to bring another 54 GW online through 2028. That's more than what's running today.
The biggest single site is Bellefield in California — 500 MW of solar paired with 500 MW of storage. It plans to double to a full gigawatt by November.
Why does this matter for the power-demand story? Because batteries don't just smooth out solar. They let data centers co-locate with renewables and shave peak loads. MarketsandMarkets pegs the data center battery market at $4.82 billion this year, growing to $10.23 billion by 2032.
Storage won't solve the transmission gap by itself. But 52 GW of fast-dispatch power sitting at the edge of the grid? That's not a sideshow anymore. It's load-bearing infrastructure.
• WIRED IN
Signals From the Wire
Bloom Energy (BE) jumped 12.3% on August 12 after Nvidia-backed Nebius Group picked Bloom's fuel cells to power a 300 MW AI data center in Vineland, New Jersey. The deal, revealed on Nebius's Q2 earnings call August 12, adds behind-the-meter gas power that skips the grid queue entirely. Bloom stock is now up 171% year to date.
Speaking of skipping the queue — H&MV Engineering, an Irish high-voltage substation builder, closed a €750 million continuation vehicle on August 11 that values the company at €1.4 billion ($1.62 billion). H&MV has grown from $70 million in revenue in 2020 to over $1.14 billion in fiscal 2026, mostly wiring data centers and renewables to the grid. The new capital targets deeper U.S. expansion.
Constellation Energy (CEG) beat Q2 estimates with adjusted EPS of $2.55 versus the $2.33 consensus. Management raised full-year guidance to $11.50–$12.50 per share and disclosed 920 MW of new long-term power contracts. Nuclear keeps winning data center deals.
And the construction numbers keep climbing. ConstructConnect's August report shows $81.5 billion in data center starts through June — already past 2025's full-year total of $72.5 billion and more than three times 2024's pace. June alone was $22.3 billion, second only to January's $25.5 billion.
Fuel cells, substations, nuclear contracts, concrete — money is pouring into every layer of the power stack at once.
