President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday included calls for an energy boom, with the nation’s leader calling for doubling — or even tripling — the nation’s electric capacity.
“We’re leading right now with AI,” Trump said during his first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning. “We’re leading with everything right now. But … we need resources.
“We have to double our electric capacity. We have to do many things,” Trump continued. “We have to really triple, if you think of it, the electric capacity from what we have right now, if you can believe it.”
That would be an astounding increase to the nation’s electric grid, and Wyoming, as the nation’s No. 3 energy exporter would have a huge role to play. Wyoming already exports 60% of its power to other states, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Doubling or tripling the nation’s power grid would be game-changing for Wyoming, state Rep. Daniel Singh, R-Cheyenne, told Cowboy State Daily, particularly when it comes to attracting AI businesses, which require about 10 times more power than regular data centers, according to analysts like Goldman Sachs.
“Historically, one of the biggest challenges Wyoming has faced with power generation has been burdensome federal regulations that limit how we produce electricity,” he said. “The previous administration imposed restrictions that hindered our ability to fully utilize our abundant natural resources like coal, oil, and natural gas.”
The new administration is much friendlier, Singh said, and that could create “major opportunities for Wyoming.”
It also poses significant challenges.
“Expanding electrical generation is only one-half the question,” he said. “Getting that power where it needs to go requires infrastructure investment, including new transmission lines, which can be costly and time-consuming to install.”
What About Regular Rate Payers?
State Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, also sees opportunity for Wyoming in President Trump’s remarks, as well as the challenges such a major expansion could pose. It will require moretransmission lines and supporting infrastructure.
“The most important issue to me, and nobody’s talking about this is, if we have this great huge increase in demand, will it hurt other rate payers?” he said. “Does it cost more, for example, to build new sources of generation than it used to, meaning if we share the cost of generation equally, rate payers will see their rates go up because of the new construction.”
Protecting rate payers should be a priority in all of that, Case suggested.
“You know we had a bill this year in the legislature about large loads,” he said. “It didn’t make it very far, but it basically said that huge loads that come in have to be considered. You have to show they won’t hurt the existing customer base. So that’d be like, a big data center, which can use more (power) than the entire city of Cheyenne, for example.”
Utah, Case added, is seeing requests for as much as a gigawatt of power, which Case said would is as much as the entire state of Wyoming generates.
“We’re looking at prospectively, loads growing and needing to be accommodated, and making sure that we accommodate them without hurting other people,” he said. “And renewables don’t measure up to that. We’ve got to build reliable, dispatchable baseload or have batteries, but batteries aren’t economic.”
America is up to the challenge, Case added, but it won’t be an easy path.
“It’s very serious implications,” he said. “We can do it as a country, and electricity is our future, but it’s not going to be easy to get there. And we just have to protect existing rate payers.”
Inflation Reduction Act Included Grid Expansion Funding
One place some of that funding could come, suggested energy economist Robert Godby, an associate professor in University of Wyoming’s College of Business, is the Inflation Reduction Act.
“That’s what the Inflation Reduction Act was,” he said. “A big chunk of it was for just that.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which had a lot of climate change spending in it, has been under attack, Godby added.
“What are they busily doing in Washington right now?” he said. “(They’re) rolling back grant program after grant program, freezing expenditures from the Inflation Reduction Act on energy system improvements, all sorts of stuff like that.
“Regardless of whether you think some of that spending was efficient or not or could be done better in order to make the grid bigger and cause it to grow more quickly,” Godby continued, “you do need to incentivize it the way the Inflation Reduction Act did.”
Godby, however, questioned the idea that the grid actually needs to double or triple.
“If you look at PacificCorp’s current estimate for growth in the West in their region, it’s about 3% to 4%, which is much larger than they expected previously,” he said. “But it’s not doubling the capacity on their system.”
While AI will use more power, Godby said it won’t need double or triple the existing power load in the nation. Goldman Sachs has estimated AI Data Centers will use 8% of U.S. power by 2030, compared to 3% in 2022.
That is a huge expansion, Godby said — close to triple for that sector — but it’s nowhere near a doubling or tripling of the nation’s energy capacity.
Godby said the only study he’s seen suggesting a need to double or triple the electrical capacity is one that came out of Columbia University. It was looking at what would need to happen if the nation electrified everything in its transition to renewables.
“That was used to justify the Inflation Reduction Act in the Biden Administration and why we needed all that investment in infrastructure,” Godby said. “It would have to occur over the next, I think it was by 2050, and, of course, the Trump administration has been rolling back all of that funding to increase the grid that much.”
Wyoming Stands Ready To Boost American Power
Regardless of whether it’s double, or triple or some other number, Wyoming is ready to increaseits electricity output, Wyoming Energy Authority Executive Director Rob Creager told Cowboy State Daily.
“Wyoming being an energy powerhouse, we have the resources to help his mission,” Creager said. “We have coal, gas, nuclear coming on board — anything they want.”
Creager agreed that there are some tricky logistics. Permitting for one, for new transmission lines.
But he believes that earlier executive orders from Trump declaring an energy emergency weremade with that in mind.
“It’s going to be tricky on the investment side,” he said. “Some utilities are kind of cash strapped.”
Power generation, he added, is rarely a build-it-and-they’ll-come proposition.
“It’s more these guys want to come, can you build it?” he said. “Folks need to understand that an (energy) asset is not just there for say, the life of a data center, or whatever the new need would be, it’s there for decades. That all has to be calculated as we look at doing this quickly.”
Wyoming’s Congressional Delegates Are On Board
Wyoming’s Congressional delegation applauded the president’s remarks, and said Wyoming is ready to meet the challenge.
“With our abundant coal, oil, and natural gas resources, we can drive America’s reliable energy future, create jobs, and bolster our economy,” U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman said. “Wyoming’s reliable and plentiful energy is vital to our nation’s success and ending the energy poverty created by the Biden Administration. I know Wyoming is ready to deliver affordable power to Americans and cement our role as a cornerstone of U.S. energy dominance.”
Hageman added that Congress has some work, ridding the nation of burdensome regulations that are holding energy back.
“Democrats are trying to block common sense measures to address painfully high prices and continue their war on American energy,” U.S. Senator John Barrasso said. “We have the capacity and the workers to produce energy responsibly, especially in Wyoming. We will continue to work with President Trump to pave the way for affordable and reliable energy production.”
U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, meanwhile, said Wyoming’s energy diversity positions it well to help with Trump’s goal.
“Energy is the backbone of Wyoming’s economy and we are ready, willing, and able to lead on President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” she said. “Whether it’s oil, gas, uranium, or coal — Wyoming will lead the way on powering the future.”
Potential Double-Win For State
Permitting reform will be important long-term, Wyoming School of Energy Resources Director Holly Krutka suggested.
“Wyoming is already building (more power),” she said. “But to do this we are going to need permitting reform. We’re going to need more electric transmission to carry the electricity to markets.”
Wyoming can be a strong player in helping expand the nation’s electrical grid, though, she added, and it could even be a double win for the state.
“This is tied back into the demand from data centers and AI,” she said. “And I think Wyoming is a really great location to have those kinds of facilities.”
That could mean Wyoming wouldn’t need to export all of its new power generation. Some of it could stay in the Cowboy State, to serve these new industries, a huge win-win.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
