For the past two decades, the US energy sector was stable and predictable. Electricity demand barely grew, which meant utilities could afford to slowly replace coal with natural gas and renewable energy at a leisurely pace. But today everything has changed. The sector is now facing something completely different. There's a serious mismatch between the explosive power needs of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and the slow, complicated process for building new power plants. Data center power demand is growing 25% per year (compound annual growth rate or CAGR), while America's aging electrical grid, weighed down by long waiting lists and transmission problems, struggles to keep up.