Gas is taking over new power plant filings

In 2019, gas was 0% of newly-filed generation capacity in our dataset. By 2025, it was 41.1%. That’s not a gradual drift — most of the jump happened in the last two years, and this year is running higher still.

Nothing about permitting rules changed to cause this. What changed is what utilities are asking permission to build. Two things are pushing in the same direction at once: a real jump in forecasted electricity demand (data centers being the headline driver, but not the only one), and the fact that a gas plant can be sited and built on a timeline of a few years — while wind and solar increasingly sit behind years-long interconnection queues in the regions with the worst backlogs, and transmission to move that power is its own multi-year fight.

Put simply: when a utility needs capacity online soon and can’t count on the grid upgrades new renewables often require, gas is the option that doesn’t make them wait for someone else’s queue to clear. That’s a read on incentives, not something visible in permitting data alone — the filings themselves just show the result.

Every gas project behind this chart, with sources, on Projects.