It is a challenging time for the U.S. electric utility sector, an energy expert told the Tulsa Regional Chamber‘s Executive Committee at a virtual meeting Monday.

“Across the country we’re seeing a literal explosion of demand,” said Stuart Solomon, a board member of Southwest Power Pool, the regional transmission organization that supplies power transmission and wholesale electricity to a 14-state region that includes Oklahoma.

“It’s driven mainly by really large customers. Think data centers powering AI, crypto mining and manufacturing facilities.”

Discussing how the future of electricity will impact economic development, Solomon moderated a dialogue that included Leigh Anne Strahler, president and COO of Public Service Company of Oklahoma, and Dan Sullivan, CEO of the Grand River Dam Authority.

Solomon projects that overall electricity demand in the region could jump by 25 percent to 50 percent in the next five to 10 years.

“That’s putting a real strain on current power supplies,” Solomon said. “We just have to have new generation resources on the system to meet this increased demand.”

The Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) is Oklahoma’s largest public power electric utility, fully funded by revenues from electric and water sales instead of taxes.

GRDA, which serves MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor on a retail basis and cities such as Tahlequah and Stilwell on wholesale terms, has a generation capacity of about 2,000 megawatts, Sullivan said.

“A lot of these AI data centers that are coming in are looking at and asking for 300 to 500 megawatts (MW) of power,” he said. “The numbers are staggering when you consider all the different data centers that are being planned right now.”

Public Service Company of Oklahoma (PSO) serves about 580,000 residential and commercial customers statewide. Its peak demand is roughly 4,500 MW, a number that could double in five to 10 years, Strahler said.

Customer expectations are rising, as well.

“We live in the world of Amazon,” Strahler said, alluding to today’s culture of immediacy. “So, public sentiment has shifted with utilities, too. Customers have little to no tolerance around outages, even though caused by power.

“…They really expect these types of personalized services and convenience and community engagement they receive from other service providers.”

Expanding electricity generation and transmission, along with maintaining competitive pricing and a skilled workforce, is key to attracting economic development, the energy group said.

But new business also needs foresight from the federal government, Sullivan said.

“One of the biggest challenges that we see in the country right now is that we don’t have an energy policy,” he said. “We have a tax policy that drives energy investments, but we don’t have an energy policy. We’re making 20- to 30-year decisions based on a four-year election cycle. That’s extremely difficult.”