This is a supply problem, not a demand problem.
Until recently, data centers were invisible infrastructure. Today they sit at the center of a national fight over electricity costs, reliability, and local development. At its core, the data center debate is a debate between scarcity and capacity. We side with capacity.
Every energy system is governed by three levers: price, demand, and supply. Right now, Americans are being told that their best options are to raise prices or freeze demand: higher rates, moratoria, construction bans, and rationing by another name. That approach guarantees higher costs, weaker reliability, and slower growth.
There is only one lever that can simultaneously support affordability, reliability, and human flourishing: expanding supply.
Data centers require power. Meeting that demand by building more capacity doesn’t just serve data centers. It strengthens the grid, lowers long-run prices, improves reliability, and benefits everyone connected to it.
The Problem
The Solution
Fight with facts.
If your town is debating a data center, these one-pagers give you the arguments people actually remember.
A Quick Primer
A visual explainer of what data centers are, how much power they use, and why demand growth isn’t the problem — supply is.
Myths vs. Facts
A clear, on-the-ground guide that debunks common claims about bills, power, and water — and refocuses the debate on building capacity.
Industry Comparison
A simple side-by-side comparison showing how data centers stack up against major industries on power, water, land, and local benefits.
The narrative they've spun.
Public debate around data centers is dominated by a small set of repeated claims. Many sound intuitive, but they do not hold up to closer examination.
Data centers should be banned until “we figure this out.”
Power systems are not fixed by pause. They are fixed by building. Growth forces investment, infrastructure, and modernization. Stagnation delays solutions and compounds risk.
Freezing data center projects will protect consumers.
Freezing new projects does not lower costs. It prevents new supply from being built, locks in scarcity, slows scientific progress, and shifts costs onto existing customers over time.
We’re running out of power.
The United States is not running out of energy resources. In fact, over 2000 gigawatts of power is in permitting and connecting backlogs. The constraint is institutional, not physical.
Data centers are driving up electric bills.
Studies show that new large loads do not increase prices when supply is allowed to expand and can reduce long-run costs by accelerating investment in new generation. Today’s price pressures stem from constrained supply, not demand growth itself.
What the data actually shows.
These facts point to the same conclusion: the problem is constrained supply, not new demand.
Nearly 2,600 GW of generation and storage capacity is queued for grid interconnection. That amount is more than double the current U.S. grid’s capacity.
New generation and transmission projects often face delays of 5 to 10 years due to permitting and interconnection queues.
Since 2010, the U.S. has retired significant coal and nuclear capacity while failing to replace it with equivalent firm power.
Grid operators like NERC began issuing reliability and capacity warnings years before large-scale data center expansion.
Large data centers typically fund their own interconnections, on-site substations, and required grid upgrades rather than shifting those costs to households.
Historically, electricity demand growth led to lower long-term prices when new generation was built alongside it.
Average U.S. retail electricity prices rose roughly 30–40 percent between 2019 and 2023, before most AI-era data center demand came online.
U.S. electricity generation grew by less than 5 percent between 2005 and 2022, even as population and electrification increased.
Educate your neighbors.
Some points are worth stating simply. These capture the core facts of the data center debate in plain terms.
Why data centers matter.
Medical imaging, diagnostics, drug discovery, genomics, and AI-assisted care rely on large-scale compute. Earlier cancer detection, faster trial analysis, and more precise treatment decisions all depend on the quiet work of data centers running in the background. This isn’t about novelty. It’s about lives saved and suffering reduced.
Data centers anchor construction, skilled trades, equipment manufacturing, engineering, and long-term operations. They bring durable investment and tax bases to places that have often watched industry leave. These are not short-term booms. They are long-lived assets tied to physical work and local paychecks.
Compute is strategic infrastructure. Nations that cannot build and power it fall behind in science, industry, defense, and innovation. When capacity is outsourced, so is capability. Powering data centers at home is part of maintaining technological and economic independence.
From engineering and design to education, agriculture, and small business, compute extends human capability. Data centers allow people to work faster, solve harder problems, and compete at scale without leaving their communities. They multiply effort rather than replace it.
News & Publications
Blaming data centers for rising electricity prices is like blaming FedEx for the cost of gasoline — demand didn’t fail; supply was boxed in.
The real threat to your power bill, long-term, is not coming from the additional energy that data centers are using. It comes from a power grid that is increasingly unreliable and fails to match our needs even without the addition of any new data centers.
Yes, data center growth is expanding and pushing electricity needs higher. But the all-of-the-above energy strategy from the White House will meet that demand. The U.S. must dominate the AI race, or China will. Abundant and cheap fossil fuels will keep us in the pole position to do just that.