On Friday, November 21, 2025, SAFE’s Center for Grid Security submitted comments in response to the Department of Energy’s Request for Information on Accelerating Speed to Power/Winning the Artificial Intelligence Race: Federal Action to Rapidly Expand Grid Capacity and Enable Electricity Demand Growth.
The Department of War (DoW) is entering a period of fast-accelerating electric load growth driven by converging mission requirements:
- Expansion and diversification of the defense industrial base and manufacturing facilities to support defense critical platforms;
- Large-scale data center development to support AI-enabled defense operations, modeling, simulation, mission planning, and Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2); and
- Increased electrification, digitalization, and resilience needs across installations, including advanced sensing, autonomy, and secure high-performance compute
Recent Executive Orders, public DoW directives, and National Defense Strategy documents have demonstrated that these missions collectively require substantially greater access to secure, reliable, and high-capacity electricity. These needs represent a structural shift in national security energy demand at a moment when the U.S. power grid faces significant constraints.
To ensure the grid is effectively postured to meet these emerging defense requirements, DOE and DoW coordination must become more structured, more proactive, and more closely aligned with DoW’s evolving mission needs. Strengthening this coordination, not to elevate defense above other priorities but to ensure that national security loads are incorporated at the appropriate stages of planning and federal decision making, will enable the grid to support both national security objectives and broader economic and reliability goals.
Read SAFE’s Center for Grid Security’s full comments here.
