Noreva in the media: coverage featuring Peter Gardett, Managing Partner, in Utility Dive (September 24, 2025).
In brief: Utility Dive quoted Noreva Managing Partner Peter Gardett on EIA’s July 2025 data: an early demand surge or “just a hot summer”? He said nobody knows how much demand will rise, and attributed roughly 60% of projected growth to data centers and 40% to electrification.
Noreva, an energy market data and analytics provider (formerly Karbone Research), was among the industry voices featured in Utility Dive’s September 2025 analysis of whether the United States is entering a sustained power demand surge. The piece read the Energy Information Administration’s latest generation and sales figures for early signs of the structural load growth that utilities, developers, and investors have been forecasting. It also turned to Noreva Managing Partner Peter Gardett for a read on how much of that growth is real versus seasonal noise.
What the Utility Dive coverage examined
The article asked a question central to power market forecasting in 2026: is US electricity demand structurally accelerating, or is a single hot summer behind the numbers? It anchored that question in the EIA’s July 2025 data, which showed year-over-year increases across generation, sales, and prices (EIA, via Utility Dive, 24/09/2025):
- Total net electricity generation up 3.8% versus July 2024.
- Retail electricity sales up 2.6% year over year.
- Residential retail prices up 5.2%, commercial up 4.8%, industrial up 6.2%, and transportation up 8.5%.
- Henry Hub natural gas prices up 57.6%, to $3.31 per million BTU.
The reporting framed these figures as consistent with the data-center-and-electrification demand story, though not yet proof of it. That ambiguity is exactly what makes the moment difficult for anyone pricing forward power, capacity, or fuel.
Gardett’s contribution was to state the uncertainty plainly. As quoted in Utility Dive, he framed the core interpretive problem this way: “Is this an early indication of the bigger demand surge, or is this just a hot summer?”
And on the forecasting risk that ambiguity creates: “Nobody knows how much demand is going to go up, even broadly, which is a bad sign.”
On the composition of the growth, Gardett attributed roughly 60% of projected demand increases to data centers and 40% to broader electrification, while flagging significant regional variation beneath the national averages (Utility Dive, 24/09/2025). That split matters: data-center load and electrification load arrive on different timelines and in different locations, with distinct effects on where capacity and transmission constraints bite first.
Why the demand-growth question matters for asset owners
For the developers, asset owners, and project finance teams Noreva serves, the question of how much demand grows, and where, feeds directly into forward-curve pricing. If national demand is accelerating but the growth is regionally concentrated, then the value of generation and capacity diverges sharply by market, and averages hide the risk. Noreva’s work turns exactly this kind of ambiguity into transaction-aligned curves: capacity price forecasts that reflect where load actually lands, and power and fuel scenarios that separate a structural surge from a hot summer.
That is the layer beneath the media mention. The debate over whether the demand surge is real plays out in public. What a given asset in a given zone is worth if the surge holds is the question Noreva’s models are built to answer.
Frequently asked questions
Is US electricity demand actually growing?
EIA data for July 2025 showed net generation up 3.8% and retail sales up 2.6% year over year (EIA, via Utility Dive, 24/09/2025). Whether that represents a durable structural surge or a weather-driven spike was the open question the Utility Dive coverage set out to answer, and it remains the main uncertainty for power market forecasts.
How much of demand growth comes from data centers?
In the Utility Dive coverage, Noreva’s Peter Gardett attributed roughly 60% of projected demand increases to data centers and 40% to electrification, with significant regional variation (Utility Dive, 24/09/2025).
How does Noreva analyze power demand growth?
Noreva builds transaction-aligned forward curves and scenario forecasts for US power, capacity, and fuels markets, translating demand-growth signals into zone-level pricing and asset-valuation implications for developers, investors, and trading desks.
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Noreva combines trader-verified pricing, proprietary fundamentals, and AI-driven forecasting into transaction-aligned curves across power, capacity, environmental attributes, and fuels. Book a demo to see how the Noreva Hub prices these markets.
