Thought Leadership: Follow the Megawatts

Journyx CEO Curt Finch on why Texas drove 54.3% of America’s electricity-demand growth, and what other states must learn to win the AI buildout.

Journyx research finds Texas accounted for 54.3% of America’s net electricity-demand growth. 

Energy is civilization’s operating system—everything else is an application.  America needs more electricity. States that deliver this power will win the next wave of industrial investment.   

Where the megawatts go, the jobs will follow.

Providing affordable, reliable electricity is progressive policy because high-income households can absorb scarcity whereas working families can’t. America must build power plants to protect its future; wealthier nations use more electricity, without exception. 

Texans are working hard to power AI, leading to an America in 2036 where power infrastructure gets built. 

So where is power getting built today?  Answer: Texas 

The map separates 

Texas is doing something right. 

Journyx analysis of EIA state electricity sales show Texas accounted for 54.3% of the net increase from 2015 to 2025 in combined commercial and industrial electricity sales across all 50 states and D.C. – 102.3 million MWh; its utility hiring then surged. These are solid high-paying jobs.  From 2015 to 2025, without Texas, the rest of the United States recorded a 9.1 million MWh decline in industrial electricity demand.  This sounds great until you compare it to the number two economy in the world.  Enter China. 

China’s total electricity consumption rose 87% to 10.37 billion MWh during the same period.  

China builds infrastructure while America builds stakeholder processes.  

Evidence: Texas Utility Employment 

TX — Electric Power Generation, Transmission & Distribution (NAICS 2211) 

Source: FRED/SMS monthly, SA · series SMU48000004322110001 · 438 months · 1990-01-01 → 2026-06-01 · ● local max · ● local min 

Texas employment in electric power generation, transmission and distribution rose sharply after 2022, evidence that meeting new electricity demand is creating substantial physical-infrastructure jobs. 

Digital is physical 

Why the explosion in electric power generation? AI. And AI runs on electricity, transmission lines, cooling systems and people who know how to build them. The AI economy may be financed by Harvard MBAs, but it gets built by people wearing hard hats, and those jobs spread prosperity beyond the top of the income ladder. 

The next limiting resource may be labor rather than capital. Electrical work accounts for 45–70% of data-center construction costs, pulling experienced electricians toward megaprojects just as utilities need them to build and maintain generation, transmission and distribution. Pipelines and other infrastructure owners are competing for many of the same technicians, inspectors, engineers and project managers. Permitting reform can authorize construction, but it cannot manufacture experienced crews. The winners will recruit well and know precisely where every scarce labor hour is going. 

The scale is already visible: as of March 26, 2026, ERCOT was tracking roughly 410,000 megawatts of proposed large-load interconnection requests, about 87% associated with data centers.  

Source: Journyx, “Which States Are Seeing the Fastest Growth in Commercial and Industrial Electricity Demand?,” citing ERCOT large-load interconnection data. 

America in 2036 

The energy sector is suffering from how long it takes to build things. Litigation delays projects by nearly four years on average. Two-thirds of likely voters across both parties think Congress should modernize permitting rules to speed up energy projects.  Fortunately, an answer already presents itself in the Bipartisan Freedom Act now wending its way through Congress.  It is designed to fix problems that prevent infrastructure investment from happening across our country. 

Other states should follow Texas’s willingness to build generation, transmission and the physical infrastructure behind AI, while refusing to treat clean air and scarce water as acceptable collateral damage. For example, Texas’s speed came with a deadly reliability failure in February 2021. The lesson is speed with firm standards, not speed instead of them.
Government should referee for both speed and responsibility: firm protections, predictable deadlines and no endless vetoes. Investment and workers will follow. 

Government should be a fair referee protecting the environment, and with predictable deadlines enabling investment and job growth. But that referee must also protect its scarce water and its atmosphere – two areas where Texas still needs to improve.  

Good government asks, “How do we build this responsibly?” Bad government spends ten years debating whether building is morally permissible.  The Freedom Act makes progress on fixing this. 

Power is the foundation, and Texas is showing the way. AI is the future, but digital is physical: we can’t demand American leadership in AI and American paralysis in infrastructure at the same time.  

America’s way through this difficult era runs, in part, through its power lines.