The CEO told the consultant what he needed to say yes. Three things: tax stability, policy stability, interest rate stability. Then he delivered the verdict. "On the day he said that to me," Robert Coward told Delaware's Nuclear Energy Feasibility Task Force, "his opinion was he was 0 for 3."
That single exchange — a nameless executive, a bruising confession, a task force in a mid-sized state trying to figure out its energy future — captures something real about where America's power grid stands in the spring of 2026. Across the country, state legislatures and task forces are scrambling to answer the same question: how do you keep the lights on when electricity demand is exploding, old plants are closing, and the politics of energy have never been more volatile?
Delaware and Colorado are both wrestling with that question. But they've landed in almost opposite places. Delaware is staring down a potential 900-megawatt capacity shortfall and debating whether to bet on nuclear power — technology that hasn't seen a completed new American project without catastrophic cost overruns in decades. Colorado, meanwhile, passed a bill through committee to squeeze more capacity out of the wires it already has, with almost every major utility in the state standing down to let it happen.
Two states. Same crisis. Very different ideas about the solution.
Delaware: The Biggest Risk Management Puzzle You've Ever Seen
Delaware's Nuclear Energy Feasibility Task Force has been meeting for months, and on April 6, 2026, it heard something that should have stopped the room cold. Coward, a nuclear project development consultant brought in to explain what it would actually take to build a nuclear plant in Delaware, didn't sugarcoat it.
"It's not a project to build a nuclear power plant," he told the task force. "It's the biggest risk management puzzle you've ever seen that happens to build a nuclear power plant."
The numbers behind that puzzle are staggering. Coward explained that developers must spend roughly 25% of a project's total budget before receiving a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and before reaching financial close. For a gigawatt-scale reactor, that means hundreds of millions of dollars committed to a project that might never get built. He cited interest rates moving from roughly 3% to 5% as a key factor in the cancellation of the NuScale small modular reactor project in Idaho. He noted that parties close to AP1000 reactor decisions had "hit the pause button" due to supply chain anxiety over a federal deal to build ten AP1000s on Department of Defense and Department of Energy property using Japanese financing.
Neither of Delaware's major utilities — Delmarva or PSEG — would build a nuclear plant, Coward said. Neither would large merchant generators like NRG or Constellation. Not in PJM, the regional grid that covers Delaware and much of the mid-Atlantic. Not "for the foreseeable future."
So what is Delaware doing at a nuclear feasibility task force?
A State That Might Be Running Out of Time
The honest answer is: trying not to fall behind. Task force member Martin — whose full name was not recorded in the hearing record — has been the loudest voice for urgency. Martin wants Delaware to form a "Delaware Nuclear Advanced Commission," begin an early site permitting process, and pass enabling legislation before June 30, 2026, when the General Assembly's session ends.
When Martin asked Coward directly whether the task force should pass legislation by that deadline, Coward hedged. "I don't know, Martin, because it's a matter of what that would look like," he said. "Because I think if you do something, you want it to be meaningful, not just people want to press release."
Martin's reply was immediate: "But doing nothing is not an option."
The stakes underneath that exchange are real. Delaware is a tiny state — the second smallest in the country — but it sits inside one of the most electricity-hungry grids on the planet. The task force was originally convened to address a shortfall of approximately 900 megawatts of productive capacity. But Representative Burns flagged a problem at the April 6 meeting: the conversation had quietly drifted toward something much larger. Data center demand in the region could push the need to 3 gigawatts or more. "Sometimes I think we're sort of going back and forth between one and the other," Burns said, asking the task force to get clear on whether it was redefining its mission.
Task force member Martin didn't shy away from the bigger number. He argued the group should be "looking past 750 megawatts, especially after the winter we just had."
Land, Labor, and a Very Awkward Silence About Solar
One of the session's sharpest moments didn't involve nuclear at all. It involved farmland.
Martin has repeatedly argued that Delaware simply doesn't have enough space for renewable energy. At the April 6 meeting, he put a number on it: "We don't have 30 acres for 70 windmills. We don't have 300 acres for 2 megawatts of solar. But we do have enough acreage for gigawatts of nuclear power."
Task force member Tony pushed back directly. "I don't think that's true," Tony said, and asked that someone — specifically naming task force member Tom Noyes — formally address "this notion that there's not enough land for solar." The matter was left unresolved. No one was assigned to answer the question.
That small, unresolved dispute matters because it reveals a fault line running through Delaware's entire energy debate. If the state can't agree on basic facts about land availability, it's going to have a very hard time agreeing on a $10-billion nuclear plant.
The workforce question, at least, produced more clarity — and a genuinely surprising argument. Chris Muntz, business manager of Plumbers and Pipers Local 74, testified during public comment that Delaware's nuclear workforce problem isn't what most people assume. "The reality is we don't have a workforce shortage necessarily," Muntz said. "We have a shortage of job opportunities to train them. Our union apprenticeship programs are already built to solve that. Speaking for Local 74 alone, every year we see over 200 applicants come through our doors. And this year, with a strong recruitment push through the VOTEC public charter and private schools in Delaware, as well as adult education and skill centers, we fully expect that number to be closer to 300. Yet every year I'm only able to take the top 20 in that apprenticeship class."
In other words: the people are willing. The projects aren't there to justify training them. That's a chicken-and-egg problem that no feasibility task force can solve on its own.
John Quick, Executive Director of the Delaware Workforce Development Board, added a hard deadline to the funding picture: ARPA funding for workforce training ends June 30 — the same date Martin has set as his legislative deadline.
Colorado: The Quieter, Faster Fix
Three states to the west, Colorado's Senate Transportation and Energy Committee held a very different kind of energy meeting on April 1, 2026. No existential debates about technology. No unnamed CEOs refusing to commit. Just a bill, a set of amendments, and a 7-1 vote.
HB 26-1081, the Colorado Grid Optimization Act, passed the committee with broad support after Senator Dylan Roberts presented it alongside testimony from Clean Air Task Force, Advanced Energy United, Western Resource Advocates, NRDC, and a coalition of 48 local governments. The bill's premise is deceptively simple: before building new transmission lines, Colorado's utilities must rigorously evaluate whether advanced transmission technologies — smarter conductors, better software, upgraded equipment on existing lines — can do the same job cheaper.
The evidence that they can is hard to ignore. A study cited by supporters found that 80% of Colorado's transmission needs can be met by upgrading existing infrastructure rather than building new lines. A Southern California Edison conductor upgrade cited in testimony saved $85 million. The technology exists. The question is whether utilities are required to seriously consider it — and this bill would make sure they are.
All three of Colorado's major utilities — Xcel, Black Hills, and Tri-State — took a neutral position on the bill. That's not nothing. Utility neutrality on legislation that expands regulatory requirements is often the functional equivalent of quiet support.
One No Vote, and What It Tells You
Senator Mark Baisley cast the committee's lone dissenting vote on HB 26-1081, but his stated reason was more interesting than a simple partisan objection. Baisley questioned whether the PUC is "resistant to using the new optimization technology" and whether the legislature even needs to act — wouldn't utilities want these efficiencies anyway?
Roberts had a ready answer: utilities are already legally required to file 10-year transmission plans, and the bill simply requires them to evaluate advanced technologies within that existing process and explain why they didn't use them when those technologies were cost-effective. It closes a gap in accountability, not a gap in engineering.
Baisley wasn't fully convinced, but he left himself an out. "I'm going to be a no today," he said, "but I may change my mind after I do a little bit of research on all this, respectfully." The bill heads next to the Committee of the Whole for consideration.
The committee also passed HB 26-1208, a narrower bill extending the Compliance Advisory Panel — a state body that helps Colorado meet its Clean Air Act obligations — for another 10 years. That one passed 5-3, with Senators Baisley, Catlin, and Pelton voting no. The panel has had no regular meetings since 2020 and has no currently appointed members, but supporters argued keeping it alive costs nothing and could matter if air quality standards shift under a new federal posture.
Two Theories of the Energy Crisis
Pull back and the contrast between these two states reveals something bigger than any single bill or task force meeting.
Delaware is pursuing what you might call the moonshot theory of energy policy: identify a transformative technology, build the institutional and financial scaffolding to support it, and hope the pieces fall into place before the lights go out. It's ambitious, it's expensive, and — as Coward's presentation made uncomfortably clear — it faces headwinds that no state legislature can fully control. Interest rates. Federal policy. CEO risk tolerance. Supply chains stretched by a 10-reactor federal deal.
Colorado is pursuing something closer to the plumber's theory: fix the pipes you already have before you start talking about building new ones. It's unglamorous. It doesn't generate the kind of political energy that a nuclear announcement does. But it's moving — through committee, toward the floor, with utilities not fighting it.
Neither approach is obviously wrong. Delaware's grid genuinely needs more capacity, and the small modular reactor technology that Coward estimated at roughly $130 per megawatt hour — excluding transmission — may look different in five years than it does today. Colorado's transmission bottlenecks are real, and the savings from advanced conductors are documented.
But the comparison raises an uncomfortable question for Delaware: what happens if the task force spends the next year building consensus around nuclear, passes enabling legislation by June 30, and then finds — as Coward's CEO did — that the preconditions for a final investment decision still aren't there?
"But doing nothing is not an option," Martin said.
He's right. The question is whether something and nuclear are the same word.
The Big Picture
Across these two states, a pattern emerges that is playing out in legislatures from Georgia to Minnesota: the electricity grid that was built for the 20th century is straining under 21st-century demand, and no one has a clean answer for what comes next. Data centers, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and the reshoring of American manufacturing are piling new load onto systems that were already aging. The gap between supply and demand is real, and it is growing.
Colorado's approach — squeeze more out of what exists, now, with technology that works today — offers near-term relief but doesn't solve the long-term supply problem. Delaware's approach — build something new and transformative — offers long-term capacity but faces financing barriers that even the most optimistic task force member can't wish away.
For the roughly 1 million Delaware residents who depend on a grid that is already running close to its limits, the stakes of getting this wrong are not abstract. A 900-megawatt shortfall on a hot summer afternoon or a cold winter night is not a policy failure. It's a blackout. And for the Colorado ratepayers whose electricity bills reflect every mile of new transmission wire that gets built when a cheaper upgrade would have done the job, the stakes of the Grid Optimization Act are equally concrete: HB 26-1081 could mean lower costs and a faster path to a cleaner grid — or it could mean a year of utility compliance paperwork that changes nothing.
If HB 26-1081 passes the full Colorado Senate and is signed into law, utilities serving millions of Coloradans will be required, for the first time, to rigorously justify every decision not to use cheaper, cleaner transmission technology. If Delaware passes nuclear enabling legislation before June 30, it will join a small and increasingly competitive group of states racing to attract the first new nuclear projects in a generation — with no guarantee any developer will show up. And if Delaware does nothing, it may find itself, as Martin warned, light years behind in an energy race where the finish line keeps moving.