Using more of the grid we’ve already built

The US power grid runs at about 50% capacity on average — built for its worst day, underutilized every other day. As demand surges from data centers and electrification, utilities are racing to build more infrastructure. But Ian Magruder, who heads the new industry-backed Utilize Coalition, argues there's a cheaper, faster path: better use what we've already built — it will enable faster growth and bring down ratepayer bills, potentially by billions. (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hello and greetings, everyone. This is Volts for April 1, 2026: “Using more of the grid we’ve already built.” I’m your host, David Roberts. The US power grid is built and operated around a simple principle: as long as they’re willing to pay for it, anybody who wants power gets as much as they want, when they want. Unlike highways or broadband lines, where traffic congestion occasionally slows you down, you get your electrons the second you plug in. Because it must accommodate anyone at any time, the grid must be built big enough to reliably meet the heaviest demands that might conceivably be placed on it. It must be built for its worst day — an August afternoon with 100-plus degree temperatures, everyone running their AC and charging their EV at the same time. While the benefits of this kind of system are pretty obvious — it’s quite useful, and conducive to economic growth, to have effectively unlimited power at your fingertips whenever you want — it has a significant downside. If you build the grid big enough to smoothly meet the demands of its worst day, most of that grid, most of those power plants and transformers and substations and wires, will be grossly underutilized most of the time. Most days aren’t worst days. Across the whole country, on average, we’re using about half the grid’s capacity. That’s low relative to the last 50 years. And now utilities are looking at a surge in new demand from data centers and saying, we need to build more: more power plants and transformers and substations and wires. All of this will be expensive, all of it will be slow to build, and all of it will eventually show up on power bills — which is a big part of why the average American’s electricity costs have risen about 25 percent in the last six years, even as the cost of actually generating power has fallen thanks to renewables. It’s the infrastructure. What if, instead of always building more — or at least, before building more — we tried to use what we’ve already built a little more efficiently? My guest today, Ian Magruder, heads the Utilize Coalition, a new industry-backed consortium (including Google, Tesla, and many others) making just that case. We’re going to talk about what boosting grid utilization actually means in practice and what it implies for electricity bills, the clean energy transition, and US politics. With no further ado, Ian Magruder, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Ian Magruder Thanks for having me, David. Excited to be here. David Roberts Ian, I’m so excited about this. As I was sitting thinking about how to introduce all this, I was thinking of saying something to the audience along the lines of, “I know this sounds super, super technical and nerdy, but it’s really crucially important.” Then I realize I say some version of that before every single one of my pods. Ian Magruder Almost every pod. David Roberts Flirting with self-parody. I’ll just say this is complicated, but I really think this is a super important, super timely debate to be having, a discussion to be having right now. This hits all the hot issues in the power world, in the energy world right now, so people should just focus up. Ian Magruder Yeah, I think we have a chance to make grid utilization sexy, or at least interesting in this moment. For those who are skeptical in the beginning here, I hope we have gotten them juiced and excited by the end of this. David Roberts Hang on. The word utilization really is just so unfortunate, but there it is. All right, what do we mean when we are talking about grid utilization? I think when I say that the grid utilization is at 50%, some people might imagine a big power line, “50% of the time it has power running through it and 50% of the time it doesn’t.” But that’s not quite right. Help us understand what we mean when we’re talking about utilization. Ian Magruder Sure. I think many of your listeners may be familiar, but we broadly think about the grid in three sections. You have generation — how we make our power; transmission — how we distribute it across long distances, high voltage; and then distribution — how we bring it to our homes, businesses, the last mile, so to speak. The way we think about grid utilization is holistic. There are different ways of measuring this, but we think of it as the total throughput on the grid. This report that we have just released from Brattle that I think we’re hopefully going to get to outlines one way of measuring that which is pretty straightforward. David Roberts Which is just to lay it out plainly: the total throughput that the grid is capable of divided by the electrons actually running through it. How much power is actually running through it relative to how much power it is capable of putting through. Ian Magruder Exactly. They define system utilization as a percent as the total energy delivered or produced over available system capacity over the same time period. What’s important here, the number as a whole is important, the percentage. But it’s also important to think about this at a granular level because in any given geography you are going to have parts of the grid that are more utilized and less utilized. That’s where you have interesting opportunities for efficiencies. David Roberts This is not evenly smeared. Utilization varies dramatically across geographies. It is 50% on average across the country. Ian Magruder Exactly. The simple way to think about this that we talk about is just to make it more real for people. As an analogy, and this ties into the affordability piece, is to think of an airplane. If we build an expensive airplane or a fleet of airplanes and we’re flying them with half the passengers on any given day, those tickets are going to be expensive. If you can fill more of those seats, the prices will come down. David Roberts Let’s spell out why they are expensive. In addition to paying for your seat, when you buy a seat on an airplane, you are also paying some small percentage of the fixed costs required to keep that plane running. If you sell more tickets, more people are splitting up those fixed costs of keeping the plane running. The more passengers you cram in, the lower the per passenger price. Ian Magruder Exactly. Before someone — I’m sure we’ll have a distribution engineer listening to this or someone who may have an issue with the analogy — it is a slightly oversimplified analogy, of course. David Roberts Ian, I ran through so many analogies when I was thinking about this for my intro. I ended up abandoning and not using any analogy because they are all not quite right. Another one I think is vivid for people is, “What if you built highways on the principle that no one should ever have to slow down at all?” Then you are like, “What is the maximum number of people who are ever going to be on this highway? Rush hour, bad weather, busy time of year, whatever.” Let us build a highway wide enough to accommodate all those people so that they do not have to slow down. Then I think people would intuitively see the vast majority of the time, there wouldn’t be nearly that many cars. All the cars that were on that road would be paying for all that extra asphalt to maintain all that extra asphalt. That is also another analogy. There are like 10. There’s a plumbing analogy we could use. Ian Magruder There are many different ones. Just to finish the plane one, though, you could fill a plane. You could fill every seat safely and fly it. The grid is different.…