Utilities can use AI to solve grid backlogs: AWS energy lead — SkimNews
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- AWS energy lead Joseph Santamaria says the U.S. grid has more than 2,000 GW of potential power projects stuck in interconnection review — enough capacity to power every American home more than twice over — even as demand is projected to grow more than 50% by 2050.
- Average interconnection study wait times have more than doubled from about two years in the early 2000s to five years today, and AI tools can now complete the same technical studies in hours by running thousands of what-if grid simulations at once, per AWS.
- Duke Energy used AI-powered grid planning to reduce study time while doubling the number of projects evaluated in a year, AWS said, and Pacific Gas & Electric consolidated data from more than 80 sources across 20 systems into a single planning tool that prioritized more than 17,000 grid upgrades.
- PG&E's AI planning pilot cut costs by 20% within a $100 million program and eliminated millions of customer outage minutes, according to the AWS-backed figures.
- FERC convened utilities, tech companies, and government agencies this summer to discuss using AI to speed grid planning — Santamaria framed the meeting as a regulatory signal that AI is being treated as a serious backlog solution.
- Amazon and Northern Indiana Public Service Co. signed an agreement expected to deliver approximately $1 billion in savings to existing customers over 15 years, with Amazon covering the full cost of building new data centers — the model AWS argues should be replicated nationwide.
Why it matters: The bottleneck blocking new U.S. power isn't capital or generation — it's the 2,000 GW approval queue taking five years per project. Utilities like Duke and PG&E are already running AI tools that doubled throughput and cut PG&E's planning costs 20% in a $100M pilot, and FERC's summer convening suggests regulators are open to letting that approach scale across the industry.
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