Senators demand to know how much energy data centers use

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Josh Hawley are pushing for the US Central Energy Information Agency to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use.

In a joint letter sent to the Energy Information Administration Thursday morning, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren push the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual energy use disclosures” on data centers. This information, they write, is “vital for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking to prevent large companies from raising electricity costs for American families.”

As the data center boom spreads across the country, there has been widespread concern from voters about how their massive energy needs could raise consumers’ electric bills; it’s over helped shape some midterm elections in data center-heavy states, including Virginia and Georgia. Last month, Hawley co-sponsored a bill with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal that would require data centers to provide their own power sources to protect consumers. Earlier this month, Donald Trump agreed a group of executives from major tech companies at the White House to sign a non-binding (and toothless) agreement promising to pay for their own power for data centers.

“If we’re concerned about taxpayers paying data center energy costs, then knowing how much energy data centers use is an essential part of that calculation,” said Ari Peskoe, a director at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. “It’s not the only piece of information you need, but it’s certainly a piece of the puzzle.”

There are a lot of scary headlines floating around about how much energy data centers are expected to use over the next few years, but it’s surprisingly hard to get official figures from data centers on either their current or projected electrical load. No federal government body collects numbers on energy use specifically from data centers. Information about water or electricity usage at an individual data center can be considered proprietary business information, and is mostly voluntarily disclosed to the public by the company itself. An increasing number of data centers are also turning to installing their own power separately from the grid – known as behind-the-meter power – making it even more difficult to calculate total energy consumption.

Utilities are privy to data center energy usage information in their region; they use that information to forecast growth. But data centers will often look around at different utilities, which, experts say, causes utilities to double-count projects and predict “phantom growth” — data centers that will never be built in their region. The CEO of Vistra, a retail electricity company, said During its first quarter earnings last year, it said utilities could increase demand for electricity three to five times more than is actually needed.

In December, EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey at a round table that he expects the EIA to be “an essential player in providing objective data and analysis to policymakers” regarding data centers. The agency announced Wednesday that it will conduct a voluntary pilot program to collect energy consumption information from nearly 200 companies that operate data centers in Texas, Washington and Virginia, covering “energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics and cooling systems.”

While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter contains several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not the energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not the EIA will collect information about power behind the meter. This information will be especially crucial, say the senators, to make sure that large technology companies that signed The agreement at the White House earlier this month promising that consumers would not bear the cost of data center electricity use will keep their promises.