Tech companies’ appetites for electricity are surging, and consumers will pay for it.
Excerpt from this Chicago Tribune story:
You may have no clue what a data center does.
But a boom in these high-tech operations in the Chicago area and around the country—as the United States races to be a world leader in artificial intelligence—will hit home in the form of higher electricity bills next year.
For customers of ComEd, the main electricity utility in the Chicago area, the average increase is expected to be $10.50 a month for each residential customer by the middle of next year. That’s on top of the typical bill in the area, which is about $100 a month.
The price of electricity is going up due to energy-hungry data centers that are expected to dramatically increase demand for power. ComEd and other utilities pay upfront to make sure an electric grid that extends from Chicago to the East Coast has plenty of power over time and won’t see blackouts because of these new electricity hogs.
A typical consumer probably doesn’t have a sense of how these high-tech operations affect electricity demand. It’s unlikely many have heard of PJM Interconnection, a government-regulated nonprofit that operates the grid and oversaw the process that led to the upcoming bill hike.
But those same customers notice when their bills start to rise. And so do politicians.
Some, including Gov. JB Pritzker, blame PJM for the upcoming spike in electric bills to which the grid operator said it’s simply making sure the lights stay on even as power usage soars. A large data center uses enough electricity to power entire neighborhoods or small cities.
A data center is a building or complex that houses equipment used for applications such as cloud computing and AI, among others. Leading data center companies include subsidiaries of Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.
McKinsey and Co., the consulting firm, said data centers are responsible for 3 to 4 percent of the country’s electricity demand today, and this will grow to 11 to 12 percent by 2030.
Chicago is the third largest data center market in the country, just behind Dallas-Fort Worth, and way behind the leader, Northern Virginia, according to the real estate firm CBRE.
