US Federal According to the letter obtained by WIRED, the government’s central energy information agency plans to implement a mandatory, nationwide survey of data centers, focusing on their energy consumption. This survey would be the first attempt of its kind to collect basic information about data centers.
The letter was sent to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley on April 9 by the head of the Energy Information Administration, Tristan Abbey, and responds to an earlier inquiry from senators about EIA’s plans to obtain more information about data centers. WIRED reported on Hawley and Warren’s letter last month.
“Americans deserve to know how much energy data centers consume and what impact it has on their utility bills,” Warren told WIRED in a statement. “EIA’s mandatory survey is an important first step toward holding data centers accountable, but people are hurting right now. I’m pushing EIA to collect and share this data as quickly as possible.”
EIA told WIRED it had no details to provide beyond those included in the letter to senators.
The explosion of data centers across the United States has sparked a wave of public concern and proposed legislation to limit the employ of their resources and impose a moratorium on their construction. However, surprisingly little official data on the industry has been collected.
Most details about data center energy employ – a particular concern for many voters in the face of rising utility bills – are considered proprietary business information and are not usually made public. In response to the Trump administration’s incentives to protect ratepayers, many data center developers are now starting to build their own power sources, known as behind-the-meter power. These facilities – many of which are gas-powered – are raising up-to-date concerns about air pollution and climate change. (On Tuesday, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI alleging that it ran gas turbines behind the meter at a data center in Mississippi without a permit and polluted the surrounding community. xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The EIA conducts mandatory investigations of suppliers of various types of energy generation, including oil and gas production, electricity generation and renewable energy sources, as well as their industrial customers. In overdue March, the day before the senators sent their letter, EIA announced that it would conduct a pilot survey in three areas of the country experiencing intense data center development: Texas, Washington state and the northern Virginia/DC metropolitan area.
In the April 9 letter, Abbey says the agency will announce a second tranche of pilot studies “spanning at least three additional states.” Both studies will be completed by the end of September. Abbey writes that these two pilot studies represent “a necessary step in the methodological development of a nationwide mandatory study.”
According to the letter, the information EIA collects from data centers under these pilot programs includes not only information on annual electricity consumption, but also information on off-meter energy generation. The surveys, Abbey writes, will also include questions about the classification of different types of data centers; cooling systems; characteristics of the object, e.g. surface; and IT specifications, including data center energy efficiency metrics.
The letter still leaves many unanswered questions about the pilot structure.
According to the letter, the pilot program will not ask each respondent about the full set of metrics, but rather will tailor the questions “to the specific location of each data center facility.” The current remote control also asks 196 enterprises identified in three regions to choose only one location for which they will report indicators. EIA did not respond to questions about how it determined which locations should receive which questions, or whether it had set any requirements for surveying respondents about how they selected which data center locations to provide information about.
The EIA also did not respond to WIRED’s questions about when the second series of pilot studies are scheduled to begin, which states will be included, or the possible timing of a mandatory national-level study.