The winning model will be hybrid: gas for firmness, renewables for optics and cost, and storage for stability, writes NOVUS Energy Advisors’ Emily Easley.

In a recent opinion piece for Utility Dive, Emily Easley, CEO of NOVUS Energy Advisors, argues that the rapid rise of AI and hyperscale data centers is creating a new kind of energy race in the U.S. — one focused on delivering immense amounts of reliable electricity for computation rather than traditional power uses.

The piece highlights Fermi America’s high-profile plan for an 11-gigawatt energy campus in Amarillo, Texas, combining nuclear, natural gas and solar generation to supply major data center customers. This project illustrates the growing demand for so-called “AI-grade” power — electricity that is clean enough to satisfy investors, inexpensive enough for operators, and dependable enough to meet the extremely high uptime requirements of modern data centers.

Easley notes that federal energy policy is shifting. Recent decisions by the U.S. Department of Energy to curtail certain wind and solar grant programs have signaled a broader “energy dominance” strategy that now includes electricity generation for digital infrastructure. But she stresses that natural gas alone can’t meet the long-term needs of data centers, which require continuous, 24/7 power. Instead, a hybrid energy mix — blending gas for reliability, renewables for cost and public perception, and energy storage for stability — will likely become the industry standard.

The article explains that this shift isn’t a rollback of the clean energy transition but rather an evolution, where power markets and grid rules must adapt to massive, unpredictable loads from AI workloads. Easley points to ongoing federal efforts to reform grid interconnection processes to accommodate large users more flexibly and to allow private developers to build generation capacity directly tied to big customers like data centers.

Investors are taking note: there’s growing interest from infrastructure and private-equity funds in companies that can solve the complex challenge of integrating different energy sources and reliably serving data center loads. The firms that succeed in this “hybrid power” model may emerge as the dominant players in the next era of America’s energy and technology economy.