‘This Is The Test’: Energy Experts Say America Must Ramp Up Power To Win The Global AI Race

WASHINGTON — The contest to win the artificial intelligence race may come down to which country can keep the lights on, experts warn.

Energy and industry leaders made the case that American AI ambitions will outpace the nation’s ability to power them without a major buildout at Thursday’s Daily Caller Live event co-hosted by the Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation and presented by ClearPath. Christopher Johnson, president of the American Energy Leadership Institute (AELI), and Mark Bednar, a principal at Monument Advocacy and former vice president of communications at the American Exploration & Production Council, emphasized that the United States must add reliable power and build the plants and data centers here, or else AI infrastructure moves to China.

“[I]f we’re not building data centers here and powering them here, where it’s tons cleaner [and where] we’re doing solar and storage and nuclear, … all those data centers, all that compute, is gonna go to China, where they are building coal plants every week,” Johnson said during a panel discussion moderated by DCNF investigative reporter Sean Moran. “This is totally backwards.”

China began construction on 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity in 2024, the most since 2015 and 93 percent of global coal construction starts, according to a Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor report.

“China is the biggest polluter on Earth. They are four times dirtier in their economy than we are,” The alternative, Johnson argued, is to build and power those facilities in the United States.

“If you care about climate change, if you care about the environment, you should want to build as much energy and manufacturing here in the United States, where we have the best standards in the world and some of the cleanest economies on earth,” he said.

Johnson said the country does not have the power to match what it wants to build.

“[A] lot of the stuff [manufacturers] want to build is basically functionally illegal, or we can’t build the power necessary to actually re-industrialize,” Johnson said during the panel. “[I]f we can’t build a data center with those limited trade-offs, limited environmental impact, we are never going to be able to build steel plants back in America, which are far more energy- and water-intensive.”

“We’re never going to build aluminum plants. We’re not going to bring the semiconductor industry here to the United States. All of those things will be much much harder,” the AELI president added. “This is the test.”

U.S. data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and could use as much as 12 percent by 2028, according to a December 2024 Department of Energy report.

Bednar said the fight is larger than any one facility.

“[F]rom critical minerals to energy to the end product for whatever an AI device or item is … the supply chain is such a big part of the story and their voice isn’t big enough … The need to unilaterally step up more” he said. “It’s not about a data center per se. It’s about the jobs that are around it.”

He said small-town officials can see the tax base, but only if companies show up before the opposition does.

“If you’re a small-town mayor, there’s a group of you that can directly benefit from the new revenue that comes in through your town through this industry,” Bednar said on the panel. “Companies and lawmakers need to sit down and proactively discuss this together because otherwise the nay-saying Left is just going to continue to pummel away, pummel away, pummel away.”

The AI opening is still America’s to lose, according to Bednar.

“The AI opportunities that the United States of America has is such an incredible blessing,” he added. “If we cultivate it right … and people who have skepticism and people who have concerns are at the table, …. this is going to be an ongoing conversation. It’s going to take both parties.”