Data centers, new factories and electrified heating are pushing U.S. electricity demand up after about 15 years of flat use. These signals follow both sides of that: how much power each grid uses, and what is lined up to supply it.
Demand by grid region
From EIA's Hourly Electric Grid Monitor (Form EIA-930), for the Lower 48, EIA's 13 grid regions, MISO and CAISO:
- Daily peak (power.demand.daily_peak_mw.*): the busiest hour of each day, in megawatts. Records tell you how close a grid runs to its limits.
- Monthly demand (power.demand.monthly_gwh.*): electricity used in each month, in gigawatt-hours.
- Demand growth (power.demand.yoy_12m_pct.*): the latest 12 months against the 12 before. A full year in each window cancels the seasons, so this is the cleanest read of where load is growing.
Six regions are one grid operator: Mid-Atlantic is PJM, Texas is ERCOT, New York is NYISO, New England is ISO-NE, Tennessee is TVA, and Central is almost all SPP. Texas's daily peak is the existing ERCOT Daily Peak Demand signal. Updated every day.
What is waiting to connect
- Interconnection queues, every region (power.queue.lbnl.active_gw.*): the capacity of power plants and batteries waiting for grid studies at the end of each year since 2014, by grid operator and by type, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up. Most of it will never be built, so read it as what developers want, not what is coming. Updated once a year.
- Texas, every month (power.queue.ercot.under_study_gw.*): ERCOT's own queue by fuel, and the part with a signed interconnection agreement (power.queue.ercot.ia_executed_gw), which is much closer to construction.
- Large loads in Texas (power.queue.ercot.large_load_gw): the data centers and other large loads asking ERCOT to connect. ERCOT publishes this only in presentation documents, so each value is read by hand from the document it came from, and it updates when ERCOT publishes a new total.
What is leaving
From EIA's monthly generator inventory (Form EIA-860M): capacity whose owners plan to retire it in the next 12 months (energy.capacity_retiring_12m_gw.us.*) and capacity that retired each year (energy.capacity_retired_annual_gw.us.*), with coal split out. Read them beside the planned additions that were already in the catalog (energy.capacity_planned_12m_gw.us.*).
Charts
The Charts library has a map of demand growth by region, a map of the queues by grid operator, the U.S. and Texas queues by fuel, Texas large loads against Texas generation, retirements by fuel, and hyperscaler capex beside U.S. demand growth. Search "grid" or "interconnection" in the Library.
What it does not say
Demand here is what the grid serves: rooftop solar lowers it, and weather moves a month by several percent. Queues are requests, not projects under construction. None of these series separates data centers from other demand; the large-load queue and the regional growth are the closest reads.
Sources
U.S. Energy Information Administration (public domain). Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and GridTracker, Queued Up (CC BY 4.0). ERCOT public reports, which ERCOT allows to be used and redistributed in compilations, charts and analyses.
Related: [Charts](/help/modules/charts)