AI’s request could raise American electricity bills – even if it sparkles

The ambitions of artificial intelligence of technological companies will require a massive expansion of electricity eager data centers. This growing demand may raise electricity bills for everyone – even if certain data centers are never built.

US public service companies rush to build more power plants, transmission lines and gas pipelines to meet the rapidly growing electricity requirements for data centers. Residential electricity costs in the United States have already increased by almost 30% since 2021 – faster than inflation – according to a PowerLine report, an American non -profit organization focused on public services regulations. Only the past two years have seen an increase in the electricity bill at a national level of $ 10 billion each year.

Now, a new report commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, an environmental organization for virginia based in virginia, prevents electricity consumption forecasts overestimating the demand for speculative data center plans, which could generate higher public services. In particular, developers often submit redundant electric service requests in several regions for each data center project – before engaging in a single place.

“If the load of the projected data center is not fully materialized – that all the evidence and, frankly, common sense at this point point – the taxpayers will ultimately support this economic burden on unnecessary and underused gas and electricity infrastructures,” explains Megan Gibson to the Southern Environmental Law Center.

The former leaders of companies like Google and Meta themselves recognized that the practice of making redundant electricity requests from the data center is common, notes the report. “The leaders of the technology have already said the calm part aloud,” explains Gibson. New scientist Contacted Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft on their data centers development plans, but have received no additional comments.

Inflated estimates become clearer when taking into account all the American data center projects announced from 2025 to 2030. Together, they would need 90% of the world’s supplies on flea – despite the United States, which currently represents less than 50% of the global demand for flea. “It would be very unlikely that all the tokens in the world would go to this subset of the United States,” said Marie N Fagan in London Economics International, a global consulting company whose headquarters in the United States and Canada, whose team has prepared the report.

To facilitate the burden of ordinary taxpayers, “States must require public services to sign contracts with potential customers of data centers that put this risk on data centers,” said Ari Peskoe at Harvard Law School, which is advisor for electric lines.

Some governments of states are starting to act. On July 9, Ohio State regulators ordered large customers in the largest OHIO public service data center had to pay at least 85% of their subscribed electricity charge – even if their real electricity consumption was below this point. Georgia officials have also adopted a rule that aims to prevent the development of data centers from taking charge of other taxpayers.

“The data center industry undertakes to pay for its full service cost for the energy it uses, including transmission costs,” said Aaron Tinjum at the Data Center Coalition, an industrial association based in virginia. “It is essential to ensure fair and equitable electricity rates for all customers.”