Three Democratic US senators announced on Tuesday that they are investigating whether big tech companies are passing the soaring utility costs of “energy-guzzling” data centers on to ordinary Americans.

...they were alarmed by reports that these data centers caused residential electricity bills to “skyrocket”. Regions with significant data center activity have already endured price increases by as much as 267% over the past five years, the three lawmakers wrote. According to the Energy Information Administration, a federal agency, the average cost of a US family’s electricity bill had risen 7% year-over-year as of September.
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They also inquired about the tax deductions or other financial incentives these companies received from state and local governments, as well as payments they made to lobbyists and consultants to advocate for the construction of data centers. They requested a response no later than 12 January.
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A Cornell study published last month in Nature Sustainability found that data centers could annually consume as much water as 6 million-10 million Americans and emit as much carbon dioxide as 5m-10m cars.

The scrutiny arrives when 70% of US households have seen their electricity costs rise over the past year, with many blaming it on the energy-demands from AI, according to a recent survey. In some cases, local residents have been protesting incoming AI data centers over the environmental impact, potential pollution, and land seizure attempts.

With the explosive growth of Big Tech’s data centers threatening to overload U.S. electricity grids, policymakers are taking a hard look at a tough-love solution: bumping the energy-hungry data centers off grids during power emergencies.
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Grid operators in Texas, the Great Plains states and the mid-Atlantic region have produced eye-popping projections showing that electricity demand in the coming years will spike, largely due to data centers.
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The proposals are cropping up at a time when electricity bills nationally are rising fast — twice the rate of inflation, according to federal data — and growing evidence suggests that the bills of some regular Americans are rising to subsidize the gargantuan energy needs of Big Tech.
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“Data center load has the potential to overwhelm the grid, and I think it is on its way to doing that,” said Joe Bowring, who heads Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid.

70% of rising electricity cost from data centers
Tennessee in top 10 states with electricity rate increases

Our government representatives are not doing a good of representing/protecting citizens. Be more informed when it comes time to vote.

Louisiana Public Service Commissioners voted four to one to approve Entergy’s three new gas plants to power Meta’s largest-ever data center coming to Northeast Louisiana.
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The 70 football field-sized AI powerhouse in Richland Parish will need around 2,500 megawatts of power. The facility will use roughly three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans annually, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

Wasteful, wasteful, wasteful.

Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year’s increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand.

Yikes! Do you think Tennessee would try to make data centers pay their fair share? Nah.

An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.
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this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources...

I wonder how these data centers affect residential electricity prices. As mentioned in a previous post, why is Tennessee in the top 10 states with electricity rate increases?

With the increase in energy costs, residential insurance, and food, will any middle income citizen this new society?

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are fighting a proposal by an Ohio power company to significantly increase the upfront energy costs they’ll pay for their data centers...

American Electric Power Ohio said in filings that the tariff increase was needed to prevent new infrastructure costs from being passed on to other customers such as households and businesses if the tech industry should fail to follow through on its ambitious, energy-intensive plans.

The power company said projected energy demand in central Ohio forced it to stop approving new data center deals there last year while it figured out how to pay for the new transmission lines and additional infrastructure they would require.

The energy demands of data centers have created similar concerns in other hot spots such as Northern Virginia, Atlanta and Maricopa County, Ariz., leaving experts concerned that the U.S. power grid may not be capable of dealing with the combined needs of the green energy transition and the computing boom that artificial intelligence companies say is coming.

As has been said here before, "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an energy hog. "Should the Bitcoin and AI companies be allowed to use so much of our energy resources? Will our electricity rates go up in order to support these efforts?"