The U.S. is running headlong into a power crunch driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence — and the nation’s energy grid is not ready for it, an executive behind a major new nuclear partnership warned recently.
Jacob DeWitte is CEO of OKLO, a California-based advanced nuclear company focused on helping large energy users add grid power through private investment rather than traditional utilities. He joined Meta executive Joel Kaplan and Energy Secretary Chris Wright for an announcement in Washington.
The Meta partnership will go a long way to add much-needed power to a key regional component of the national grid, DeWitte said, citing OKLO’s plans to develop a 1.2 GW installation in Pike County, Ohio, near the Hocking Hills.
“I think one of the really exciting things about today is announcing the fact we’re going to be building a lot more power generation capabilities,” he said, quipping that southeastern Ohio used to be an “industrial cathedral” and now can see new commercial rebirth for the digital and AI age.
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“Smaller [nuclear] plants can be built more quickly and come online faster – then you shorten the learning curve. You reduce the cost both in time and money of iteration cycles to drive technological progress and bring these technologies that have huge promise forward in terms of cost reduction… energy dominance and energy reliability and energy abundance,” he said.
Wright and President Donald Trump have helped companies like OKLO and Meta unleash this new energy potential, to not only increase power capacity and amend structural issues but also greatly reduce the regulatory burdens private companies tend to face from Washington, DeWitte added.
With the advent of AI and its power needs, DeWitte said the U.S. energy system as it stands has “absolutely” not been able to keep up.
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DeWitte warned that the U.S. needs to build out the power grid and invest in new installations like the Pike site:
“We are going to run out of power capacity in this country in the next several years, especially in critical industrial markets like sort of the Midwest and Northeast. The PJM interconnection [which supports the Mid-Atlantic region] is going to be undersupplied with power generation in just a matter of a few years.”
“The steps taken today are going to help alleviate that, but there’s going be a lot more that’s needed.”
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DeWitte also addressed what he described as a common misconception surrounding the rise of data centers, which have sparked NIMBY backlash in parts of the country.
“I think sometimes people conflate [that] building these data centers [will] drive prices up – that’s a scarcity mindset. We’re in a world of an abundance mindset, right?” he said.
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He said Meta is committing to a total of 6.6GW of new power, calling it a “huge amount of capacity” to fuel the needs of decades to come, and that nuclear is a very reliable energy source.
DeWitte said one of the biggest structural choke points in bringing new energy online, and why the nation is running out of power, leading to price inflation, is the regulatory environment that has stymied growth for many years.
That dynamic, he said, has been “fundamentally anti-energy.”
But, DeWitte said, that dynamic is changing: “The unfortunate thing is we have to undo decades of… damage [from] not doing things to then overcome that inertia.”
“Look at the states that have the worst energy… They’re largely states that have had the heaviest-handed anti-energy policies, and they’re the ones that are now facing some of the biggest challenges on that point, and they are also responding, which is encouraging.”
OKLO, he said, was founded on the idea that nuclear fission can deliver massive amounts of reliable, affordable energy, noting nuclear power has some of the lowest fuel costs per megawatt-hour of any source.
“Our view of that, though, is changing a couple of things, including the business model, [and the] deployment model, including how we think about size and technology. We see opportunities to go invest in and build significant generating capacity in areas that need it and have significant development opportunities around it,” he said, noting that brings the conversation full circle regarding its investment in the Ohio site.
When asked whether U.S. energy woes are a regulatory or market failure, DeWitte said the issue is in red tape versus demand.
“We, as a country, decided that we didn’t need to build new power capacity and instead masked the challenges it imposes on industrial and economic growth by shipping jobs and production overseas,” he said.
“Then you’re just having those countries build power plants to power it. We need to bring that capability-set of manufacturing back to the country, but we need the energy to do it, and we don’t have it today.”
