Over the next five years, electricity demand in the U.S. is forecast to increase nearly five times faster than we thought it would just two years ago. A new report from the power consulting firm Grid Strategies says that level of demand growth hasn’t been seen since the 1980s.

Several factors account for this growth, including electric vehicle adoption, heat pump installations and more domestic chip manufacturing, as well as a big energy drain we didn’t plan for:

“The potential application of AI has grown so much that that demand was not really expected at all two years ago,” said Grid Strategies President Rob Gramlich.

The report’s predicted demand growth is half that of the 1960s, and just over a third as large as the expansion of the 1950s, “which indicates we should be able to handle it again,” Gramlich said.

That was when homes were installing air conditioning and electric stoves for the first time.

Higher demand could mean greater reliance on fossil fuels, but it doesn’t have to.

“Utilities aren’t proposing to build these new gas plants because they’re the only solution that they can build. It’s just because it’s what they’re used to,” said senior policy analyst Michelle Solomon with the think tank Energy Innovation.

Solomon said it is still possible to meet demand and U.S. clean energy goals.

“There’s not necessarily a reason why adding something like a gas plant is going to be faster than adding clean energy, for instance,” she said. That’s because natural gas plants need to clear the same siting, supply chain and connection hurdles as clean energy plants.

Santiago Grijalva, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said he isn’t worried about generating new electricity as much as getting that power where it needs to go.

“It is very difficult to build new transmission lines. It can take more than a decade to get all the permits and all the rights of way and all the planning, etc., to build a new line,” he said.

And there’s a lot of work left to be done. The Department of Energy says the U.S. will need to more than double its transmission capacity by 2050.

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