Reuters puts a hard number on the capex-committed-vs-capacity-energized gap, nationally

What happened

A Reuters analysis of utility and grid data found electricity connection requests from large power users — overwhelmingly data centers — now exceed 700GW across the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and South, roughly ten times current actual US data-center power consumption, the clearest national quantification yet of the gap this thread has tracked since the 08-03 Texas audit-and-freeze entry. Texas's own data-center grid-connection requests grew from ~48GW (2023) to 474GW+ (matching this thread's earlier figure); separately, ten major utilities including AEP Ohio, Southern Co. and PPL have logged roughly 270GW of data-center demand requests combined. Pennsylvania's own count is the sharpest single data point: of 100+ proposed data centers, only 20 have applied for the permits needed to actually proceed — after Governor Josh Shapiro signed an 08-18 executive order tightening permitting for projects 25MW and up, joining Texas as a second state now gatekeeping the queue rather than taking every announcement at face value. Texas PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson, quoted: "When you don't know what is real, you really don't know how to build the infrastructure for it." (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, Investing.com mirror)

Sources 2

Reuters, via Yahoo Finance finance.yahoo.com mixed 0.517
Investing.com mirror investing.com mixed 0.536

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.