Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centres.
It’s not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centres on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.
But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centres drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines.
That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centres on electricity bills or pushing data centre owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.
Rising power bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “There’s a massive outcry.”
Not the typical electric customer: Some data centres could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That’s pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use.
Meanwhile in other news: UK government suggests deleting files to save water. ...the proliferation of data centres is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool.
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