A warning for the AI era: Why America's energy infrastructure isn't ready for what's coming

As tech giants race to power AI data centers and extreme weather becomes more frequent, America's electrical grid is straining under conditions it was not built to handle. Alice Hill, senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, has a message for business leaders and policymakers: prepare now.

“We need to stop treating rapid grid expansion and resilience needs as competing priorities, Hill said. “Resilience is growth policy.”

Hill, a leading architect of the first federal flood risk standard and national wildfire standard for federal buildings, is one of two fellows in a new Visiting Policy Fellows Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Launched in February, the program is designed to bring experts with deep federal and state agency experience to mentor Stanford students, collaborate with faculty, and connect the university’s research community to real-world policy challenges. The other fellow in the inaugural cohort is Michael Jordan, CEO of Banneker Capital and former special advisor at Power Africa, a U.S. presidential initiative supporting power sector investment across sub-Saharan Africa. 

Below, Hill discusses the vulnerabilities of U.S. energy infrastructure, the tradeoffs between grid expansion and climate resilience, and what she hopes students at the science-policy frontier learn from her career.

What are the weakest links in U.S. energy infrastructure right now?

Hill: Engineers designed it for an economy where power demand grew over decades, not months, and for a climate that stayed relatively stable. A single large data center can rival the power consumption of a small city — and it needs that power around the clock, every day. Extreme heat can reduce generating capacity and cause transmission lines to sag and lose efficiency, forcing grid operators into rolling blackouts. Wildfire risk prompts utilities to preemptively cut power to whole communities. Ice storms pull poles to the ground. And flooding can knock out substations, plunging cities into darkness — as happened in Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Each of these events is its own crisis. When they compound, the consequences multiply fast.

How should policymakers think about balancing rapid grid expansion for electrification, AI, and economic growth with the work of hardening infrastructure against extreme events?

Hill: If the U.S. fixates only on winning the AI race, it could lose the grid reliability race. A grid that can't withstand extreme rainstorms and record heat waves won't reliably power homes or data centers. A prolonged blackout in a digital economy carries costs that are astronomically higher than flood-proofing a substation. Every dollar invested before disaster strikes can save many multiples of that in recovery.

Is the private sector adequately accounting for escalating climate risks to energy infrastructure?

Hill: In too many areas, the private sector continues to discount the danger that extreme weather can set off cascading failures in electricity and other critical systems modern life depends on. The Trump administration has curtailed the federal government's development and distribution of climate risk data, which makes it harder for everyone — from small business owners assessing supply chain threats to infrastructure operators planning long-term investments — to understand what they're actually facing. At the same time, infrastructure owners and operators tend to assume the climate of today will look roughly like the climate ten years from now. It won't. The organizations that plan for more intense and frequent weather events will be far better positioned than those that don't.

After years working on some of the toughest climate risks, what still gives you optimism and what worries you most?

Hill: What worries me most is a seductive but dangerous idea gaining traction in some quarters: that because cutting emissions is hard and expensive, we should just focus on adaptation instead. Adapting to fully unmitigated climate change means relocating entire cities, remaking agriculture from the ground up, fortifying every piece of infrastructure built for a climate that no longer exists, and constructing permanent defenses against extremes that will keep intensifying. Reducing fossil fuel use and investing in clean energy, by comparison, is far more manageable — and it addresses the problem at its source.

What gives me genuine optimism is the shift in how Americans actually understand climate risk. When I started working on these issues in 2009, most people thought about climate change as a threat for the distant future — if they thought about it at all. Recent surveys from Yale and George Mason tell a strikingly different story: 73% of Americans believe climate change is happening. The overwhelming majority of people aren’t buying the narrative that climate change is a hoax or scam.

Meeting the faculty and students working on these issues at Stanford has been genuinely energizing and inspiring. The Woods Institute is doing exactly what this moment requires — crossing disciplinary boundaries, connecting science to real-world policy, and training researchers and students to have on-the-ground impact.

Hill is the author of The Fight for Climate After COVID-19 and co-author of Building a Resilient Tomorrow. She serves as the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.