A new industry coalition calling itself Utilize has begun a campaign to make electricity less expensive and quicker to connect by unlocking underused grid capacity.
Utilize announced its launch March 10 and said it soon will release a Brattle Group research report showing that better use of existing grid infrastructure could save more than $100 billion over 10 years.
The coalition’s charter members are a cross-section of energy providers and users including Carrier, Google, Renew Home, SPAN, Sparkfund, Tesla and Verrus.
Utilize is designed as a nonpartisan campaign focused on influencing state-level regulators, elected officials, utilities and stakeholders.
In its announcement, Utilize emphasized one of the salient themes of the 2026 campaign season: consumer costs. It said the $100 billion in savings would accrue to consumers on their electric bills and allow consumers to connect to the grid more quickly. But it also said better utilization would help states meet the growing power demands created by data centers, manufacturing and electrification without delay or excess cost.
The power grid is built for peak demand, and the excess capacity in non-peak periods has been cited repeatedly as a potential resource to meet new non-peak demand, particularly if more users were more flexible in their peak demand.
Utilize cited an influential 2025 Duke University study showing the existing grid could handle 126 GW of new demand with no additional generation if data centers cut their power use as little as 1% in peak periods. (See US Grid Has Flexible ‘Headroom’ for Data Center Demand Growth.)
In the 13 months since the study was released, many other people have reached the same conclusion, and Duke issued a follow-up report that drilled down on the benefits. (See Duke University Study Quantifies Benefits of Data Center Flexibility.)
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently charted U.S. grid capacity utilization dropping from just over 100% in July 1999 to just over 68% in August 2025. It averaged 71.27% in January 2026, the most recent month charted.
Now Utilize wants to translate research into action.
“For decades, we’ve built the grid to meet peak demand, even though large portions of it sit unused for most hours of the year,” Executive Director Ian Magruder said.
“It’s like building an airplane that only flies with full passengers a few times a year. That excess capacity is hiding in plain sight, and new technologies give us the opportunity to unlock it. Better grid utilization is one of the fastest, most practical levers states can pull to reduce power bills while supporting economic growth.”
Utilize said it will support technology-neutral policies that align planning, incentives and regulatory framework to meet the objectives of affordability, reliability and speed.
The goal is to make better grid utilization a core principle of U.S. grid planning.
Utilize cited the 2025 Duke study’s finding that the 22 regional power systems examined operated at just 53% of capacity on average.
Utilize also pointed to a 2025 Stanford University study showing that even during peaks, most Western U.S. transmission lines were carrying only 18 to 52% of their available capacity, with most clustered around 30% of capacity. But the excess capacity is not consistently accessible due to operational and planning constraints; Utilize said better utilization would allow for more demand to be served and would spread the fixed grid costs across more electricity sales.
The new Utilize coalition adds some prominent names to the push to better utilize the existing grid. Some other recent efforts:
A new partnership announced the same day as Utilize announced itself will design flexible data centers. (See Emerald AI, InfraPartners Team up to Deploy Flexible Data Centers.)
Google has funded analyses on flexible data center models and signed some flexibility agreements of its own. (See Analysis Offers Blueprint for Faster Data Center Interconnection and Google Strikes Demand Response Deals with I&M, TVA.)
A blueprint is being created for placing smaller data centers near stranded power to speed their deployment. Research has shown flexibility would be part of a suite of tools that could limit the financial impacts of data center buildout. Other research has highlighted the value of demand management and energy efficiency.
If “flexibility” seems like a buzzword lately, that’s because it is. RTO Insider columnist K Kaufmann recently explained the phenomenon. (See Why 2026 will be the Year of Flexibility.)
