Citing an energy crisis, a growing population, emerging energy-intensive industries such as artificial intelligence, and the retirement of reliable but aging power sources such as coal plants, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox unveiled plans to double the state’s power production over the next 10 years.

Named “Operation Gigawatt,” the strategy aims to “tackle the gap between energy supply and demand while protecting the state’s natural resources,” according to a news release.

The Republican governor announced the strategy at the One Utah Summit, a twice-a-year rural conference hosted this fall in Cedar City.

“Be watching this legislative session,” Cox said during the conference. “You’re going to be seeing some really exciting changes in our state as we prepare to unleash the power that Utah holds.”

The plan is to increase transmission capacity and the state’s energy production, according to the project’s website. Along with enhancing policies “to enable clean, reliable energy like nuclear and geothermal,” the state would also invest in innovation and research that aligns with its energy policies.

The state has resisted phasing out coal-fired power plants, arguing that without them, it is not ready to transition to cleaner resources. Meanwhile, Utah has joined a legal challenge against an Environmental Protection Agency rule implementing stricter standards for greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired energy plants.

Cox signed all of the bills the Legislature passed in 2024 that would protect energy production from fossil fuels and prevent the closure of plants powered by coal. And during the summit, he listed the federal government’s push to phase out coal plants before reliable resources can take their place as one of the reasons why there’s an energy crisis in the country and in the state.

The project, the governor said during a presentation at the summit, would help the state to be prepared to host AI data centers. Utah, as a whole, runs on four gigawatts of power. However, there are multiple large projects that could increase that demand.

“We are in a global arms race right now against China and Russia and others when it comes to building AI, whether it’s good or bad, it’s happening,” he said. “And we have to keep up.”

It takes 10 times more power to do a search on an AI system than a conventional Google search, Cox said. And in Utah, there’s a request for 1.4 gigawatts of electricity to power a data center. To put that in context, Cox pointed out that the entire electricity demand of Wyoming is just 900 megawatts.

“We also need to be able to export it to other states and other countries, because we can do it better, and we can do it cleaner, and we shouldn’t have the rest of the world, our allies, relying on our adversaries like Russia and China for their energy production,” Cox said. “They should be relying on the cleanest, most powerful energy in the world, which is produced right here in the state of Utah.”

Joel Ferry, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, and Dusty Monks, interim director of the Utah Office of Energy Development, joined the governor in the announcement, highlighting how the state plans on using its natural resources for the endeavor.

Utah’s geothermal potential “is a fantastic opportunity,” Ferry said, as well as the possibility of advancing nuclear technologies. He also said it’s within the plan to continue research and energy innovation investments in places such as the San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County, which the state recently acquired.

“Ultimately, what we’re looking at is making sure that our policies align so that we can advance the resources that we have,” Ferry said when asked what could be done at the state Capitol to support the plans. “So it is updating policies associated with, again, geothermals, policies associated with nuclear.”

The state should also work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Monks added, to ensure that there aren’t obstacles to build a nuclear reactor in the state at commercial scale.

“We’re going to set up a consortium which gathers national, regional and local experts and utilizes that power to be able to drive and deploy the project in the state,” Monks said. “And that’s what we’re going to be working on over the next year.”

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.