By Fred Lambert
Publication Date: 2026-03-10 17:41:00
Tesla, Google, and Carrier are among the founding members of a new industry coalition called Utilize, which launched today with a bold claim: the US power grid is so underused that better utilization could save American consumers over $100 billion over the next decade.
The coalition, which also includes Renew Home, Sparkfund, SPAN, and Verrus, is targeting a problem hiding in plain sight — the US electric grid operates at just 53% of its total capacity on average, according to a Duke University analysis of 22 regional power systems.
A grid built for peaks, idle most of the year
The core argument behind Utilize is straightforward: electricity costs are driven by the ratio of grid infrastructure cost to the electricity sold over it. If the grid sits idle most of the year, built to handle a few peak-demand hours that rarely come, consumers pay more per kilowatt-hour than they need to.
And the data backs that up. A Stanford University study found that…