Senators Demand to Know How Much Energy Data Centers Use
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley are urging the U.S. Central Energy Information Administration to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use.
In a joint letter sent Thursday morning to the Energy Information Administration, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren pressure the agency to publicly collect “full annual disclosures on energy consumption” from data centers. This information, they write, is “essential for accurate grid planning and will support the development of policies to prevent large companies from raising electricity costs for American families.”
As the data center boom expands across the country, voters are widely concerned about how their massive energy needs could increase consumers’ electricity bills; This concern has helped shape some midterm elections in data center-heavy states, including Virginia and Georgia. Last month, Hawley co-sponsored a bill with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal that would require data centers to provide their own power sources to protect consumers. Earlier this month, Donald Trump summoned a group of executives from major tech companies to the White House to sign a non-binding (and toothless) agreement pledging to pay for their own electricity for data centers.
“If we are concerned about taxpayers paying the energy costs of data centers, then knowing how much energy data centers use is a necessary part of that calculation,” says Ari Peskoe, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. “It’s not the only information you need, but it’s certainly a piece of the puzzle.”
There are plenty of scary headlines circulating about how much power data centers are expected to use over the next few years, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get official figures from data centers on their current or projected power load. No federal government agency specifically collects data center energy consumption figures. Information about water or electricity consumption in an individual data center may be considered proprietary business information and is most often disclosed to the public voluntarily by the company itself. A growing number of data centers are also turning to installing their own power supply, separate from the grid (called behind-the-meter power), making it even more difficult to calculate total power consumption.
Utilities have access to energy consumption information from data centers in their region; they use this information to predict growth. But data centers often turn to different utilities, which experts say leads them to double-count projects and plan for “phantom” growth — data centers that will never be built in their area. The CEO of Vistra, an electricity retail company, said during last year’s first-quarter earnings conference call that utilities could inflate electricity demand three to five times beyond what is actually needed.
In December, EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey said during a panel discussion that he expects the EIA “to be a critical player in providing objective data and analysis to policymakers” regarding data centers. The agency announced Wednesday that it would conduct a voluntary pilot program to collect energy consumption information from nearly 200 companies operating data centers in Texas, Washington and Virginia, which would cover “energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server measurements and cooling systems.”
While the senators praise EIA’s pilot program, their letter includes several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not EIA will collect behind-the-meter electricity information. That information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to ensure that the big tech companies that signed the deal at the White House earlier this month, pledging that consumers won’t bear the costs of using data center electricity, will keep their promises.
