Power & Infrastructure Weekly — Mar 10, 2026

The U.S. just installed 50 gigawatts of clean power in a single year for the first time — and simultaneously, the contracts that fund the next wave of projects dropped 27 percent. Across the Atlantic, wind and solar outgenerated fossil fuels in the EU for the first time ever, then watched gas set the price every evening anyway amid insufficient storage. The week's message is blunt: building record capacity is the easy part; plugging it in, cooling it, watering it, and paying for it is where the system actually breaks.

The American Clean Power Association's Q4 2025 report, released March 5, confirmed that clean energy installations hit 50,344 megawatts last year — solar, wind, and batteries together capturing roughly 90 percent of all new generating capacity added to the U.S. grid. Natural gas is now the exception in new builds, not the rule.

Battery storage recorded the biggest jump, with deployments exceeding 2024 by nearly 4 gigawatts — a 41 percent year-over-year increase. The EIA projects developers plan to add 24 GW of utility-scale batteries in 2026 alone, which would be 60 percent above the 2025 record. Texas, California, and Arizona account for roughly 80 percent of that planned buildout.

Now the yellow flag. Power purchase agreements — the long-term contracts that give developers bankable revenue to actually break ground — declined 27 percent year-over-year. That raises the prospect of materially lower deployment in the 2028–2030 window, precisely when data center and electrification load is projected to peak. And nearly 60 GW of capacity remains stalled behind interconnection delays and permitting bottlenecks. You can build it; you just can't always plug it in.

One state is trying a different model. Maryland's Public Service Commission received five applications for transmission-connected battery storage under its Next Generation Energy Act — treating batteries as regulated reliability assets that interconnect directly to the high-voltage system, not just merchant arbitrage plays at the distribution edge. If the winning portfolio reveals which chemistries and OEMs regulators consider bankable, that's a template other states will copy.

The record year is real. Whether it's the floor or the ceiling depends on interconnection reform and policy stability — neither of which is resolved.

Wind and solar generated a record 30 percent of EU electricity in 2025, overtaking fossil fuels at 29 percent for the first time in the bloc's history. Solar alone surpassed both coal and hydro, hitting 13 percent of EU power — its fourth consecutive year of 20-plus percent year-over-year growth. Fourteen of 27 member states now generate more electricity from wind and solar than from all fossil sources combined.

The problem that arrived with the milestone: gas generation actually increased in 2025 amid a decline in hydro output, pushing the EU's fossil gas import bill up 16 percent in 2025 and wholesale electricity prices during peak gas-use hours up 11 percent in 2025. Wind and solar won the annual scoreboard, but gas still sets the marginal price every evening. Storage is the missing infrastructure that converts a renewable-majority grid into a low-cost grid.

Europe is building the complementary systems, though. Germany opened capacity reservations on its future hydrogen backbone — pre-selling pipeline seats to give electrolyzer operators transport certainty years before construction. Spain's Moeve reached final investment decision on a 400 MW green hydrogen valley with Masdar backing. And the EU's Hydrogen Valleys Days in Antwerp this May will be where regional projects get stitched into a continental strategy.

The EU story is the American storage argument, told in completed data.

OpenAI and Oracle's decision to pause expansion of the Abilene, Texas "Stargate" data center campus highlights tensions that arise when AI infrastructure planning outpaces the physical systems underneath it.

West Texas's grid — managed by ERCOT — runs tight on reserve margins, and the Abilene area lacks sufficient capacity to serve a hyperscale AI campus at the speed OpenAI's compute roadmap demands. Combined with Oracle's financing structure, which CNBC described as carrying significant debt obligations relative to revenue, both the power and capital sides of the equation became unfavorable simultaneously.

This is the story in miniature that PJM — the grid operator covering 65 million people across the mid-Atlantic and Midwest — is trying to plan around at scale. PJM's modeling flags roughly 35 GW of additional peak demand from data centers by 2031, a compressed five-year shock that makes the Abilene pause feel like a preview, not an outlier.

Expect hyperscalers to respond in two directions: some will double down on off-site firm power (PPAs, merchant nuclear, long-duration storage) while others will try to vertically integrate generation and adopt low-water, high-density cooling to reduce permitting friction. The state-level response is already arriving — Virginia legislators in the 2026 General Assembly are negotiating data center water reporting requirements, and Ohio EPA is reviewing a draft general permit for data center wastewater discharges. Both moves can materially constrain cooling architecture choices for future campuses.

Watch for which of the remaining announced Stargate sites face similar constraints when their interconnection applications hit the queue.

The data center cooling water story finally has numbers attached to it, and the numbers are bracing.

A new technical preprint titled "Small Bottle, Big Pipe" mapped data center footprints to specific water utilities and estimated that U.S. data centers could require an additional 697–1,451 million gallons per day of potable water under current cooling practices — enough to force treatment plant expansions and sometimes push operators toward less efficient dry cooling, which in turn raises power demand on summer peaks. A University of California, Riverside analysis estimated that training a single large AI model can consume roughly 1,000 gallons of water, largely through evaporative cooling during training runs.

Here's the mechanism most coverage misses. Most data centers today still use evaporative cooling — water towers that shed heat by evaporating water into the atmosphere. A typical hyperscale campus at 100 megawatts consumes 2 to 5 million gallons per day. But the move to direct-to-chip liquid cooling — where coolant flows directly over the processor in a closed loop rather than cooling the surrounding air — reduces water intensity dramatically, because closed-loop systems don't evaporate.

This is a tale of two architectures. Legacy air-cooled campuses are water-intensive. New direct-to-chip deployments can approach near-zero water consumption. Which architecture a hyperscaler chooses when they sign a land lease today determines whether a municipality's water utility will be running a major capacity expansion in three years. That siting decision is being made right now, mostly without the water utility in the room.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the synthetic "forever chemicals" that persist in water systems and human tissue — were supposed to have a clear federal compliance path. They still do, technically. It's just that the path now has two speeds, four lanes, and a court case in the middle.

EPA delayed the compliance deadlines for PFOS and PFOA by two years (to 2031) while simultaneously moving to rescind regulations for four other PFAS compounds. The D.C. Circuit denied EPA's request to summarily vacate those Biden-era rules, and EPA filed a motion to hold related claims in abeyance while it starts a new rulemaking. The federal picture is, charitably, in motion.

States aren't waiting. Analysts expect virtually every state to enact PFAS reporting obligations. Virginia lawmakers agreed on mandatory monthly PFAS monitoring in biosolids starting January 2027. North Carolina just opened public hearings on PFAS monitoring and minimization rules that would require utilities and industrial dischargers to meter forever chemicals at the plant gate. Illinois is advancing routine testing for sewage treatment works.

That state-level acceleration helps explain why 374Water signed a five-year agreement with the City of Orlando to operate a supercritical water oxidation hub — a high-temperature, high-pressure process that destroys PFAS and other hard-to-treat organics. This is commercial-scale service revenue, not a pilot, and it signals a possible shift from landfilling to thermal destruction for concentrated PFAS streams.

Water utilities are making billion-dollar treatment decisions against a regulatory target moving in opposite directions simultaneously. The safest posture: design to the strictest state standard, not the federal floor.

Panasonic coolant distribution units (CDUs) for AI data centers — Panasonic's HVAC division entered the European data center liquid cooling market with CDUs rated at 400 kW and 800 kW, plus free-cooling chillers designed for the 120 kW-per-rack densities that AI GPU clusters demand. When a major HVAC OEM launches purpose-built liquid cooling hardware for AI clusters, the technology has crossed from specialty to mainstream. (Cooling Post; DCD)

Alfa Laval FreeWaterLoop — Swedish heat-exchanger company Alfa Laval launched an external cooling loop that draws on natural water bodies — rivers, lakes, seawater — to cool data center facility loops with minimal treatment, dramatically reducing or eliminating mechanical refrigeration energy. The obvious constraint is geography: you need a thermally acceptable water body nearby. For Nordic, Pacific Northwest, and Great Lakes siting, this is a serious option that connects directly to water withdrawal permitting.