Comment by toomuchtodo

Brookings: Confronting and addressing rising energy bills linked to data centers - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/confronting-and-addressin... - March 13th, 2026

Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands... - February 26th, 2026 ("As data centers expand nationwide, utilities are receiving hundreds of gigawatts in interconnection requests, with implications for the power grid and consumers. Dozens of utilities received data center requests for at least 700 gigawatts (GW) of power connection development in 2025, which is more than the 477 GW in electricity that the United States consumed in all of 2023. Even though many of these projects will never be built, the requests are still leading to a ramp-up in energy infrastructure investments, including generation facilities, transmission lines, and transformers.")

No more PJM data centers unless they can be reliably served: market monitor - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-data-center-interconnec... - November 26th, 2025 ("The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rule that large data centers can only come online if the grid operator can still meet reliability metrics.")

FERC Complaint: https://elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/filelist?accession_number... ("20251125-5275_2025-11-25 IMM Complaint re Data Center Loads-AS FILED-1.pdf")

Brannon, Ike and Wolf, Samuel, The Impact of Data Centers on Energy Demand and Market Prices (November 11, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5017484 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5017484

> The number of data centers in the U.S. has increased sharply in the last decade and nearly all forecasts suggest that their growth will accelerate in the next decade, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Since data centers are extremely energy intensive, they have led to significant increases in energy consumption. After two decades of relatively static demand, demand for energy in the U.S. is accelerating rapidly, and demand growth is driven in large part by data centers.

> Data centers have had a particularly strong impact on Northern Virginia: More than half of all the nation's energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in the state-mostly in Northern Virginia, where the needs of the federal government and national security agencies are important drivers of demand.

> Capacity market prices in the last auction nearly doubled across the PJM region and by more than 14 times in Virginia, signaling an urgent need to secure new transmission and generation to ensure reliability for consumers. Billions of dollars of new investment in generation and transmission capacity will be needed to restore a healthy reserve margin and to recover the portion of reserve capacity that has been consumed by data centers.

> We estimate that failing to make such investments in a timely manner would force regulators to acquiesce to rate increases of as much as 70 percent in the next decade in order to ensure that the grid functions properly and provides energy to all users. The consequences of such a failure could be the appearance of regular brownouts and blackouts in Northern Virginia and across the country.

(If you want to talk to someone at Brookings, FERC, UtilityDive, or another domain specific firm to confirm, let me know and I will connect you to them)