Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley are calling on the U.S. Central Energy Information Administration to provide better information on data centers’ actual energy exploit.
In a joint letter sent Thursday morning to the Energy Information Administration and obtained by WIRED, Hawley and Warren press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual disclosures about energy use” at data centers. This information, they write, is “essential for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking that prevents large companies from driving up electricity costs for American families.”
As the data center boom spread across the country, voters began to worry about how their massive energy demands could augment consumers’ electricity bills; this concern helped shape some midterm elections in states with vast numbers of data centers, including Virginia and Georgia. Last month, Hawley co-sponsored a bill introduced with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal that would require data centers to provide their own energy sources to protect consumers. Earlier this month, Donald Trump convened a group of executives from substantial tech companies at the White House to sign a non-binding (and toothless) agreement committing to paying for their own power for data centers.
“If we are concerned about ratepayers paying for data center energy costs, 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 a lot of scary headlines online about how data centers are projected to consume energy over the next few years, but it’s surprisingly tough to get official data from data centers on their current or projected electrical load. No federal government body collects energy exploit data specifically for data centers. Information about water or electricity usage in a particular data center can be considered proprietary business information and is most often made public voluntarily by the company itself. An increasing number of data centers are also choosing to install their own power source separate from the grid – called off-meter power – making it even more tough to calculate total energy consumption.
Utilities have access to energy consumption information from data centers in their region; they exploit this information to forecast growth. But data centers are often targeted by different utilities, which experts say causes utilities to double-count projects and project “phantom” growth — data centers that will never be built in their region. CEO of Vistra, an electricity retail company, he said last year in its first-quarter results, it said utilities could augment electricity demand by three to five times their actual demand.
In December, EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey said at round table that it expects the EIA “to be an important factor in providing objective data and analysis to decision-makers” regarding data centers. Agency announced on Wednesday that it would conduct a voluntary pilot program to collect energy exploit information from nearly 200 data center companies in Texas, Washington and Virginia that would cover “energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics and cooling systems.”
While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter raises several questions about how the agency plans to continue collecting more data, such as whether energy surveys will be mandatory and whether the EIA will collect information on off-meter energy. This information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to ensure that substantial tech companies, which signed an agreement at the White House earlier this month pledging that consumers would not bear the costs of using electricity in data centers, keep their promises.