• THE GRID
Data Centers Used to Make Your Power Cheaper. Not Anymore.
I almost skipped past it. A working paper from EPRI — buried in a stack of weekend reading. But one line stopped me cold.
From 2015 to 2024, data centers didn't raise your electric bill. They lowered it.
Yes, you read that right.
Every time data center capacity doubled, retail power prices fell 3.5%. In the average state, rates would have been about 6% higher without the data centers built since 2019.
The math is clean. Power grids run on cost recovery. More users mean fixed costs split more ways.
Data centers added huge, steady load. And everyone else paid less.
That was then.
| Price Drop Per Capacity Doubling −3.5% | PJM Cost Increase (Next 3 Yrs) $6.3B | |
| VA Residential Rate Jump (1 Yr) +3% | VA Power Used by Data Centers ~26% | |
Forget SpaceX. Elon's next BIG bet is a radical "light-speed" device that's turning AI into "Accelerated AI" – and making it 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient.
The mainstream hasn't caught on yet. But "Accelerated AI" stocks are breaking out as we speak: 133%, 217%, or even 320% or more… and it's just getting started.
PJM — the nation's largest grid operator — put out a report this week. It projects $6.3 billion in new costs for power consumers over the next three years. The main cause: data center load.
Look at Virginia. Data centers now eat about 26% of the state's power. In 2010, it was less than 5%. Residential rates there rose about 3% in just the past year, per EIA data.
Goldman Sachs sees it spreading. The bank projects U.S. electricity prices will rise 6% between 2026 and 2027. Another 3% to 3.5% by 2028.
This isn't just Virginia anymore. It's a national story.
EPRI's own researcher flagged the risk. If the grid builds for demand that never shows up, costs spike. Fixed costs still need to be paid. But now there are fewer users to share them.
"If the grid builds capacity, expecting a lot of demand from data centers, and that doesn't show up, that could be a clear story of how data centers could increase prices."
McKinsey pegs the global data center buildout at $7 trillion by 2030. That's a massive bet on AI demand growing fast enough to fill the racks.
If it does, the old math holds. Prices stay in check. If it doesn't, ratepayers eat the bill.
The tricky part: nobody knows which way it breaks. Not yet.
For a decade, data centers quietly kept your lights cheap. That era just ended — and the bill is arriving now.
Everywhere I look I see headlines about Iran…
SpaceX…
Elon becoming the first trillionaire in history…
And the ongoing chatter about whether or not we're in an AI bubble…
But I have yet to see anyone whisper a word about why President Trump just "redacted" 750 White House files behind closed doors…
Or why right after, he wrote a check amounting to $300 million of his own money into a company sitting directly in the path of what comes next.
Mind you — these files were designed to "protect America" from "serious harm"… and Trump "REDACTED" them from existence.
The trillion-dollar question is…
Why?
I did some digging and it turns out Trump is hiding a BIG secret.
But probably not what you'd expect.
• VOLTAGE
Data Centers Can't Wait for the Grid. So They're Burning Gas.
ERCOT's queue tells you the whole story. Texas is now tracking 156 gigawatts of large-load requests. About 73% are from data centers.
A grid connection takes five years. Maybe more.
An on-site gas plant? Eighteen months.
That speed gap is fueling the biggest shift in how data centers get power. They're going behind the meter — building their own natural gas plants right next to the servers. No grid wait. No queue.
The scale is staggering. BloombergNEF found 100 GW of on-site gas capacity now planned across the U.S. That's equal to about 7.4% of all existing U.S. power plant capacity.
RBC pegs the total natural gas project pipeline for data centers at 64 GW by 2030.
Cleanview data shows 75% of on-site power gear planned for data centers is gas-fired.
EIR estimates behind-the-meter projects will hit roughly 40% of all new data center capacity by 2030. That adds about 1.3 billion cubic feet per day of new gas demand.
Texas leads by a wide margin. The Texas Energy Fund has drawn 38 GW in dispatchable generation applications there alone. Cheap Permian Basin gas and deep pipeline networks make it easy. Half of all ERCOT and PJM new data center capacity may go behind the meter.
The grid can't keep up. So data centers are building their own. And it runs on gas.
Natural gas isn't a bridge fuel anymore. For data centers, it's the foundation.
• WIRED IN
Signals From the Wire
NextEra Energy (NEE) posted Q2 results on Wednesday. Adjusted EPS grew 9.4% year over year. The real signal was the data center backlog — now totaling 6 GW of projects for data center customers. Management highlighted growing gas transmission demand to serve data center power hubs.
BloombergNEF revised its U.S. data center forecast to 194 GW by 2035 — an 83% jump from December. That kind of revision in seven months tells you how fast this market is moving.
Blackstone agreed to acquire Dresser Utility Solutions on July 6 — gas and water metering gear for utilities. A 145-year-old company. Not flashy. But it's the exact kind of pick-and-shovel play that wins in a grid buildout.
Eaton (ETN) reports Q2 on July 31. Q1 showed total Electrical backlog up 6% year over year. If the pace holds into Q2, Eaton may be the purest play on grid hardware demand right now.
The forecast keeps rising. The grid builders keep winning. And now your power bill is part of the story too.
