Louisiana’s Leadership on Breaking America’s Decades-Long Energy Stagnation

By Kyle Moran

America has been sleepwalking through nearly three decades of stagnant energy production. In Louisiana, Governor Jeff Landry has put an end to this by signing HB692 into law.

This couldn’t come at a more critical time. While China has exploded its electricity generation nearly eight times over since 2000, the U.S. has barely budged. We’ve spent decades in regulatory paralysis, which has made it nearly impossible to build serious energy infrastructure just as artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented electricity demand. The result? We’re about to lose our technological edge not by being outsmarted, but because we lack the capacity to power the future.

Of particular importance is the growth of artificial intelligence systems, which is driving unprecedented electricity demand. Data centers alone are projected to more than double their electricity consumption by 2030, accounting for nearly half of the growth in new electricity demand. Consumers play a large role in this, too: A single ChatGPT query consumes roughly 10 times more energy than a traditional Google search, and AI trends are only becoming more mainstream.

Louisiana’s move would encourage and expand both natural gas and nuclear energy production — and this is just the kind of energy realism the U.S. needs. Critics will complain that deprioritizing renewables somehow compromises environmental goals, but this couldn’t be further from the truth: Recognizing that you cannot power an entire state—let alone a country—with renewables is necessary to making progress towards adopting more environmentally friendly approaches. Natural gas, for instance, burns significantly cleaner than coal—and it’s not even close. As for nuclear, it’s truly emissions-free and can far outproduce its renewable alternatives.

Meanwhile, states with renewable-only mandates are discovering the pitfalls of their approach the hard way. California residents — it really is always California, isn’t it? —pay nearly double the national average for electricity and face rolling blackouts, while Germany faced an energy crisis so severe that one of their ministers publicly advocated heating only one room during the winter to cut costs.

We are in a sort of arms race with China on the AI front—and so far, we’re narrowly in the lead, in part thanks to our hardware advantage due to our friends in Taiwan who produce some of the most advanced chips in the world that power everything from iPhones to Nvidia’s AI processors.

It would be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory to squander this competitive lead , not by being outsmarted or out-engineered, but simply lacking the power that these systems will require. China now generates nearly eight times the energy it did in 2000, and the growth shows no signs of slowing down. So much for their non-binding pledges from the Paris accord.

The economic implications ought to command the attention of every governor in the country. Louisiana is already seeing approximately $98 billion in combined announced and in-progress investments for energy-hungry data centers and energy-producing initiatives. Meta has chosen the state as the site for its new $10 billion data center, which will be powered by three new natural gas plants that provide clean, reliable power and support the more than 300,000 men and women working in the energy field.  

This is no coincidence. It’s what happens when a state breaks free from decades of regulatory paralysis that has prevented them from building serious energy infrastructure for a generation.

The U.S. must adapt to the world we live in, and that starts with bills like HB692, which demonstrate how states can reclaim control over their energy destiny from federal bureaucrats and environmental extremists. The outcome is clear: After decades of stagnation in energy production, Louisiana has shown that breaking free from this paralysis is possible. The only question now is which states will follow Louisiana’s lead.

Kyle Moran is an analyst specializing in international affairs and national security. His research has been published in the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and his commentary has been featured widely in outlets including RealClearPolitics and the Washington Examiner.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.