Total Lower-48 electricity demand from EIA's hourly grid monitor, with the day-ahead forecast the reporting authorities filed alongside it and the same demand broken out across all thirteen grid regions — the national view no single grid operator can publish.
How much power is the United States using right now?
US demand peaks at 711,109 MW on Wed, 6 PM, against a low of 469,618 MW — a swing of 241,491 MW across the window. Mid-Atlantic is the heaviest area at 129,786 MW, 18% of the system peak.
Plotted window Aug 27, 4:00 AM EDT → Aug 28, 7:00 PM EDT. Demand updates hourly with a one-to-two-hour lag; the day-ahead forecast is filed once per day per authority.
Every line above, and who produced it.
What settled — the realized values every forecast here is scored against.
The grid operator's own published forecast for these hours. Source: EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration).
The same window, split by region — each area’s own curve.
Net generation by fuel for the latest hour EIA has reported (Aug 26, 11:00 PM EDT). The by-fuel series trails demand by several hours — this is the most recent complete picture, not the live one.
Every hour of the window, shaded by load.
| 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wed, 8/26 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Thu, 8/27 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fri, 8/28 |
Darkest cells are the tightest hours. The window peaks at 711,109 MW on Wed, 6 PM, local to the market.
| Region | Peak (MW) | Peak hour | Low (MW) | Average (MW) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-Atlantic | 129,786 | Thu, 6 PM | 90,464 | 111,567 |
| Midwest | 116,123 | Thu, 6 PM | 79,227 | 98,045 |
| Texas | 90,116 | Thu, 6 PM | 60,638 | 74,544 |
| Northwest | 57,074 | Thu, 8 PM | 38,282 | 47,726 |
| California | 54,360 | Thu, 7 PM | 35,981 | 46,399 |
| Central | 50,544 | Thu, 6 PM | 33,099 | 41,713 |
| Florida | 44,258 | Thu, 2 PM | 26,600 | 35,857 |
| Southeast | 38,257 | Thu, 5 PM | 25,407 | 31,985 |
| Carolinas | 37,809 | Thu, 4 PM | 23,057 | 30,621 |
| Tennessee | 28,846 | Thu, 5 PM | 16,560 | 22,959 |
| Southwest | 25,934 | Thu, 8 PM | 14,620 | 21,007 |
| New York | 21,716 | Thu, 8 PM | 15,917 | 19,273 |
| New England | 17,650 | Thu, 8 PM | 12,559 | 14,812 |
| Forecast | Produced by | Method | Horizon |
|---|---|---|---|
| EIA day-ahead forecast (reporting authorities) | EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) | Form EIA-930, Hourly Electric Grid Monitor — US48 roll-up | Day-ahead: each balancing authority files one forecast for tomorrow, hourly |
The day-ahead forecast is a roll-up of separately-filed forecasts with no confidence interval — and not every authority files one, so the forecast line covers a reporting subset and reads below total demand. Recent demand hours are provisional and routinely revised as authorities re-file.
The Lower-48 power grid is not one machine — it is three interconnections and more than sixty balancing authorities, each seeing only its own territory. EIA's Form 930 collects hourly demand from every one of them and rolls it up, which makes this the only place total US electricity demand exists as a single number. This page plots that number for the last two days, alongside the day-ahead forecast the reporting authorities themselves filed.
National demand has a double structure: a daily wave that troughs before dawn and peaks in the evening, and a huge seasonal swing between mild-weather days near 450 GW and summer heat waves above 700 GW. Because the country spans four time zones, the national peak is flatter and later than any one region's — the East is ramping down as the West is still climbing.
The dashed line is EIA's day-ahead demand forecast roll-up. Not every balancing authority files one, so it covers a reporting subset and reads below total demand — useful for the shape of tomorrow, not as a like-for-like prediction of the settled line. That coverage gap is also why this page publishes no accuracy scorecard: scoring a subset against the whole would manufacture a miss that is really a definition difference.
The regional breakdown below splits the same hours across EIA's thirteen aggregation regions. The Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Texas, and Midwest carry the biggest blocks; California and New York are smaller in megawatts than their economies suggest because of milder climates and efficiency. Every Lower-48 balancing authority rolls up into exactly one region, so the parts genuinely sum to the whole.
EIA collects the data hourly from each balancing authority, so the demand curve trails real time by an hour or two and recent hours are routinely revised as authorities re-file. The by-fuel generation series lags further — several hours — which is why the fuel section names the exact hour it describes.
curl "https://askthegrid.com/api/v1/grid/national"
Connect your agent to mcp.askthegrid.com and this forecast is a tool call away — the same host Claude and ChatGPT connectors already use.
Lower-48 demand typically runs between roughly 450 GW on a mild spring night and more than 700 GW at the peak of a summer heat wave. The chart above shows the actual number for the last 48 hours, updated as EIA collects each hour from the grid's balancing authorities.
No single operator does. The Lower 48 is three interconnections — Eastern, Western, and Texas — divided among more than sixty balancing authorities: seven big market operators like PJM, MISO, and ERCOT, plus dozens of utilities and federal power agencies. EIA's hourly grid monitor is the one place all of them report into a single national picture.
EIA Form 930, the Hourly Electric Grid Monitor. Every balancing authority in the Lower 48 files hourly demand, day-ahead demand forecasts, net generation by fuel, and interchange. This page reads the US48 national roll-up and the thirteen regional roll-ups exactly as filed — nothing is modeled or interpolated.
Authorities report generation by fuel on a slower cycle than demand, so the by-fuel series arrives several hours behind. Rather than mixing hours, the fuel section shows the latest hour for which the full breakdown exists and says exactly which hour that is.