Ask who owns the American grid and most people name the company on their electric bill. The filings say otherwise. GridOwners, our new register built from Form EIA-860, resolves every operable generator in the country — 27,768 units, 1.38 TW of capacity — to its owner. The shape that emerges is not the one in the civics textbook.
The utilities no longer own most of it
Independent power producers — merchant generators, fund-backed platforms, project companies with names like the LLCs on our other ownership map — hold 37.4 percent of national capacity: 514 GW. The investor-owned utilities that actually bill most American households hold 32.4 percent. That crossover is the quiet endpoint of three decades of restructuring: generation separated from delivery, plant by plant, until the companies the public regulates hardest own less of the machine than the companies most people have never heard of. Cooperatives and municipal systems — the grid's member-owned and city-owned corners — hold another 9.1 percent between them.
The largest owners are not who you expect
The single largest owner is conventional enough: Florida Power & Light Co at 40.0 GW. But look at the federal row: the United States government holds 71.3 GW — 5.2 percent of the national fleet — through Tennessee Valley Authority, U S Bureau of Reclamation, USACE Northwestern Division and their siblings. Washington debates public power as a hypothetical while operating one of the largest generation portfolios in the country. And a quarter-terawatt more — 261 GW — is jointly owned through the capacity shares of Schedule 4: municipal utilities owning slices of nuclear stations, cooperatives owning percentages of coal units, arrangements invisible on any bill.
What this register is, and is not
Honesty notes, carried on the dataset itself: nameplate capacity is not generation — a megawatt of rarely-run peaker equals a megawatt of always-on nuclear in these tables. Owner names are as filed — Duke Energy appears as its separate state utilities, and no consolidation to ultimate parents is asserted; that connective work, the kind our Shell Map does for farmland, is the natural phase two. And the vintage is the 2025 Early Release, filer-reported and subject to revision.
The accountability point is forward-looking. The datacenter buildout, the gas-turbine queue, the nuclear restarts — every megawatt of it will be filed into this same register, with an owner attached. GridOwners is the baseline: who owns the machine before the biggest capacity expansion in a generation. The next vintages will show, entity by entity, who owns what got built.
Method
All figures computed live from GridOwners (Form EIA-860, 2025 Early Release, public domain): generators assigned to their operating utility unless Schedule 4 reports ownership shares. Entity level only; owner addresses never ingested; the 7 person-named owners in the federal file (9 MW) are aggregated anonymously. No wrongdoing is asserted of any owner.
The data: GridOwners — keyless JSON, CC0, top-100 owners with state and technology detail.
Related writing: EIA Generator Ownership — the federal record itself, and how to query it through our regulatory API.
Related writing: Follow Every Flag — the same question asked of American land: who is really behind the filing name.