North America's Power Grid is a Museum Piece

The US and Canada are powering a data center boom on infrastructure built for a different economy. The capacity-weighted average age of US natural gas plants is 22 years old. That’s well below hydro at 64 years, coal at 45, and nuclear at 44.

Canada's largest assets skew even older: hydro megaprojects built in the 1960s and 70s still anchor the grid, with nothing built since at comparable scale.

Why are our power plants so old?

The list of the top 20 largest power plants is a museum piece. Grand Coulee dates to 1942. Churchill Falls came online in 1971. The Ontario nuclear trio (Bruce, Pickering, Darlington) and the US fleet (Browns Ferry, Palo Verde) were all built in the nuclear buildout of the 1970s and ‘80s.

This is a product of the deregulation that broke up vertically integrated utilities starting in the 1990s. This shifted the risk from ratepayers, who absorb cost overruns automatically, to merchant developers and shareholders, who avoid underwriting decades-long, multi-billion-dollar projects without near-certain returns.

A clear example is the Vogtle nuclear reactor, where units 3 and 4 were budgeted for $14 billion but ballooned to $30 billion, and the schedule slipped seven years.

Combine that with cheap shale gas and smaller gas turbines that can be built in years instead of decades, and modular wind, solar and batteries that lets developers de-risk in smaller increments.

SunZia, the largest renewable project in US history

The $11 billion project began construction in 2023 and began delivering power to Arizona and California in June 2026, after nearly two decades of development, with 916 turbines capable of powering roughly one million homes annually. Its capacity is more than three times that of next-largest US wind farm, and Pattern Energy says it can outproduce Hoover Dam at full output.