6 articles
The 5% rate regime concentrates energy-transition capital around strong credits. Hyperscalers combine investment-grade ratings, captive demand, and long-tenor financing to fund behind-the-meter generation near investment-grade pricing, while merchant projects face wider spreads and higher levelized costs.
AI power buildout is constrained less by generation and more by the infrastructure required to deliver power. Large power transformers (LPTs), with 3-5 year lead times, have become the critical bottleneck. Economic value accrues to those controlling scarce manufacturing and delivery capacity.
When supply cannot expand fast enough and demand jumps abruptly, access is allocated through contracts, queue position, and licensing rather than price alone. The scarce asset becomes capacity access, not the commodity itself.
Behind-the-meter generation does not bypass the heavy-frame turbine bottleneck. It routes hyperscaler capital into the same constrained supply chain. GE Vernova's 116 GW backlog is roughly 20% data-center-driven, while castings and forgings impose the hardest capacity ceiling.
The 474 GW interconnection queue is not a power shortage. It is a timeline mismatch: data centers build in 1-3 years, transmission lines take 5-15 years. The bottleneck is permitting, not physics.
The commercial aviation aftermarket is not a free market. We outline the causal chain from flight-hour authorization to mandatory shop visits to digital telemetry locks, exposing how engine OEMs extract monopoly rent through FAA compliance architecture — and why the PMA alternative market remains structurally capped.