EIA forecasts nationwide U.S. retail electricity sales to ultimate customers will grow at an annual rate of 2.2% in both 2025 and 2026, compared with average growth of 0.8% between 2020 and 2024.
The forecast reflects rapid electricity demand growth in Texas and several mid-Atlantic states, where the grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the PJM Interconnection, respectively.
EIA expects electricity demand in ERCOT to grow at an average rate of 11% in 2025 and 2026 while the PJM region grows by 4%.
After relatively little change in U.S. electricity demand between 2005 and 2020, retail sales of electricity have begun growing again, driven by rising demand in the commercial and industrial sectors. Developers have proposed numerous data centers and large manufacturing facilities that could consume significant amounts of electricity, and many of these projects are concentrated in the ERCOT and PJM regions. But, the timing of these facilities’ initial operations remains uncertain.
EIA publishes short-term forecasts for electricity sales to ultimate customers for each of the nine census divisions and for the entire United States.
They directly incorporate ERCOT’s and PJM‘s monthly projections for power demand into our sales forecasts for the relevant regions. The portion of the power grid that ERCOT operates is located within the West South Central Census Division, which consists of Texas and three neighboring states: Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. In Texas, electricity is delivered to end-use customers by four large investor-owned utilities and several municipal utilities.
