Corporate America has become one of the most consequential forces shaping the U.S. electricity system. Speaking as a guest on The POWER Podcast, Rich Powell, CEO of the Corporate Energy Buyers Association (CEBA), explained how the country’s largest energy buyers are responding to unprecedented demand growth, betting on a widening mix of clean technologies, and pressing policymakers for the permitting reforms they feel are critical to meeting the moment.
CEBA Members’ Footprint Rivals the Texas Grid
Powell described CEBA as a “business association” dedicated to advancing low-cost, reliable, carbon emissions–free electricity systems. According to the organization’s latest figures, corporate buyers have announced 143.8 GW of clean energy deals in the U.S. since 2014—nearly the installed generating capacity of Texas. “That’s a heck of a lot of power,” Powell said.
The organization is explicitly “big tent” when it comes to technology. While some members still frame their goals around renewables, others are fully technology-agnostic. “If it’s carbon emissions free, we like it,” Powell said.
That holistic approach shows up in the deal tracker. CEBA members procured about 20 GW of solar and about 5 GW of nuclear in 2025, according to Powell. “Capacity factor adjusted—gigawatt-hour for gigawatt-hour—that actually means we’re about on par between solar procured in ‘25 and nuclear procured in ’25,” he noted. New additions to the mix last year also included gas generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS), and fusion power purchase agreements (PPAs).
Why the widening aperture? As Powell put it: “There are simply only so many solar projects that can come online, only so many wind projects that can come online. So, if you’re not even looking at hydro and geothermal and advanced nuclear and uprates to existing plants and all of those other options, you’re dealing with a pretty narrow set of opportunities right now—and those are heavily subscribed opportunities, which obviously we’re seeing through the pricing that’s coming through, which is going up and up and up for PPAs for solar and wind in particular.”
Data Centers Are Driving the Surge—But They’re Not Alone
CEBA’s membership spans the full spectrum of heavy electricity users: hyperscale data center operators (such as Google, Amazon, and Meta), advanced manufacturers, major agricultural interests, petrochemical companies, and the country’s largest retailers. Walmart was the largest electricity buyer in the U.S. around 2009–2011 before being surpassed first by Google, and then by Amazon, which Powell noted has a business model that combines aspects of Google and Walmart together.
While data centers—especially those supporting frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model training and inference—are the single biggest driver of new demand, Powell was careful to point out that AI is layered on top of existing trends. “We sort of forget that even before AI, there was all of this data center growth baked in just from everything else—just from basic use of the internet and expanded digital streaming and use of social media, digital twins being rolled out,” he noted. “And then on top of that, you add the tremendous new use from both training and inference for large language models, and now you’re talking about some real load that’s being added to the system.”
He also flagged a category most observers overlook: the chip fabricators supplying those data centers. “In some ways, [they’re] an even greater challenge than the data centers themselves, because of the exquisite power reliability requirements that a chip fab has—where even a multi-second blip can lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in recalibration costs for these unbelievably finely tuned machines,” Powell said.
The Nuclear Renaissance Is Multi-Layered
Powell, a longtime nuclear advocate who previously spent a decade at ClearPath, is bullish on the full portfolio of nuclear plays underway. “I’m very optimistic that we’re going to have a suite of technologies, certainly by 2035—perhaps sooner—that is commercially available and commercially competitive,” he predicted.
Powell sees the nuclear industry and some CEBA members pursuing four paths simultaneously:
- Restarts of retired reactors (Constellation’s Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly Three Mile Island; NextEra’s Duane Arnold, with Microsoft and Google as offtakers).
- License renewals extending existing reactors from 60 to 80 years (Amazon and Meta working with Talen and Constellation).
- Uprates squeezing roughly 10% more output from existing plants—“real megawatts,” as Powell put it.
- Advanced reactor bets including on X-energy (high-temperature gas), Kairos (molten salt), TerraPower (sodium-cooled fast reactor), and Oklo (microreactor).
He’s equally optimistic about light-water small modular reactors (SMRs) such as GE Vernova Hitachi’s BWRX-300, already under construction with Ontario Power Generation and recently tapped for a large Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) deployment. Powell believes the market is going to be large enough for many of those companies to be successful. His view on placing multiple bets, “If one or more of those does not pan out—does not become commercially or economically viable—we’re not betting everything on one reactor type or one technology.”
Dealing with Power Demand and Costs
Can power companies keep up with the growth from data centers? Powell’s answer was direct. “America and our amazing utilities and grid operators and energy generators can grow at these rates, because we’ve done it before,” he said. “The rates of growth we’re talking about,” Powell noted, “historically are actually not anywhere out of the realm of the kind of growth rates we were able to achieve in the 90s and the 80s, and they pale in comparison to the incredible growth rates we had in the post-war period.”
What’s changed is that the industry has spent the last two decades in what Powell called a “Goldilocks moment” of flat demand. “We are out of practice on growth,” he said. “And so, somewhat painfully—just like exercise is hard after a long break—we’re somewhat painfully getting back into shape around this.”
To address the cost-allocation question head-on, five CEBA members and other companies recently signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge at the White House. As Powell described the commitment: “We’re going to pay all the costs to serve us, and we are going to help with the costs for grid-scale transmission and distribution upgrades, which will actually ensure that all ratepayers don’t suffer, but indeed benefit from these new loads coming into the system.”
He pointed to Dominion Energy’s Virginia territory—one of the densest data center regions in the country—as a region that still has “very affordable power rates, by and large, for ratepayers.” That, he argued, is proof that large new loads can help spread fixed grid costs.
Deal volume tells its own story. Powell reported that 2025 was a record year with 27 GW contracted, and he said S&P Global reported that the first quarter of 2026 saw about 17 GW contracted—putting 2026 on pace to eclipse 2025 as “the biggest year ever.”
The Three-Legged Stool: Reliability, Affordability, and Clean Energy
When asked how members prioritize among low cost, reliability, and carbon-free attributes, Powell was emphatic: “We really see them as co-equal and mutually supporting. If it’s not cost-effective, your CFO is probably going to disagree about the ability to do the carbon-emissions-free. If it’s not reliable, cost-effectiveness doesn’t matter a whole lot. And obviously, if you’re not doing carbon-emissions-free and you’re not meeting the commitments that you publicly held your company out to, that can have consequences with employees, with doing right by your various stakeholders, and frankly with social license in the communities where you’re building this new infrastructure.”
Said Powell, “We really see it as three co-equal legs of the stool where we’re trying to aim for the sweet spots where we can hit all three of those legs together.”
ERCOT as the “North Star”—But Deal Structures Are Evolving
Powell didn’t hesitate when asked about ideal market structures. “ERCOT [Electric Reliability Council of Texas], to us, is sort of like the North Star,” he said.
More than a third of CEBA’s contracted electrons have been transacted in ERCOT. The ideal, Powell said, is “an open, competitive wholesale market where we can transact freely, with a reasonable speed to power—like an interconnection system that’s working reasonably well—in a well-centrally-planned transmission system.”
Where ERCOT-style markets aren’t possible, CEBA works with utility green tariffs. A notable recent win was Georgia Power’s Customer Identified Resource (CIR) program—a “Bring Your Own Clean Energy” tariff. “Bring Your Own Clean Energy tariffs, or Beyonce tariffs, as we’ve charmingly named them,” quipped Powell. “Our awesome acronym did not survive the combat of the Georgia PUC [Public Service Commission] and the Georgia Power planning process. That’s okay. We still like the program—the CIR.”
A bigger structural shift is also underway. Historically, CEBA members ran two parallel transactions: a physical PPA to power a site and a virtual PPA to net out emissions. Those are increasingly collapsing into a single hybrid deal that provides both firm physical capacity and clean energy attributes. Per Powell: “That is increasingly why you’re seeing interest in adding nuclear and hydro and gas with CCS and these other things into these systems, because they’re both a capacity deal and a clean energy attribute certificate deal.”
The Future: Flexibility Becomes a Buying Category
Looking five to 10 years out, Powell expects corporate procurement to diversify further. Flexibility, in particular, could emerge as a major demand driver—provided interconnection requirements are structured around performance rather than specific technologies.
“If what you need is flexibility—if what you need is the reality that we want demand to go down or stay flat in a particular moment, and that will avoid the need for us to do something really extraordinary, or pay for a whole new peaker plant to be built just to cover a couple hours a year’s worth of costs—you could then see our members investing in on-site demand-side management,” he presumed. Powell cited Emerald AI as an example of software that can scale down a data center’s workload in real time, alongside on-site storage, hydrogen fuel cells, and broader corporate investment in virtual power plants.
Tariffs and Inflation Are Squeezing PPAs
Rising tariffs under successive administrations, compounded by lingering COVID-era supply chain effects, have driven up component costs across the board. Powell cited LevelTen Energy data showing solar PPAs up roughly 9% and wind up 16% year-over-year between 2024 and 2025.
Powell also noted that combined cycle gas turbine economics have shifted dramatically. “The days when you used to be able to acquire a combined cycle gas turbine for 75 cents a watt, and then run it affordably on $2 per MMBtu of natural gas, are gone,” he said, suggesting that gas power is now at least four times that expensive on a capital expenditure (CAPEX) basis.
The Policy Ask: Permitting Reform, Above All
Asked what he wishes lawmakers better understood, Powell didn’t mince words. “I’m like a broken record on this one,” he said. His answer: the U.S. needs fundamental reform of its energy and environmental permitting system and transmission planning system—codified in federal legislation so reforms survive future administrations.
“Folks that are allocating capital need to know that if they’ve gotten a permit and the plant’s under construction, that permit can’t be yanked, or a permit can’t be unduly withheld if it’s passed every significant test and threshold hurdle along the way,” said Powell.
The stakes, in his framing, are national. “If we’re going to do all the remarkable things that we could do—meeting this new economic moment and building out this incredible high-tech infrastructure and keeping our country safe and beating China economically in the AI race—we fundamentally need to reform those processes here in D.C., and then we need to do matching things in a heck of a lot of states and jurisdictions around the country,” Powell said.
Corporate energy buyers are no longer a niche market force—they’re procuring capacity on the scale of entire states and driving the economics of nearly every clean generation technology, from restarted reactors to fusion PPAs. The next phase, in Powell’s telling, will hinge less on any single technology breakthrough than on whether the U.S. can modernize the permitting and planning systems that govern how fast any of it gets built.
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—Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor (@AaronL_Power, @POWERmagazine).
