THE GRID
One in Eight Watts
585.
That one number landed on my desk yesterday. It came from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab — the DOE's own research arm. It's the mid-point forecast for how many terawatt-hours U.S. data centers will burn each year by 2030.
To put that in plain terms: 585 TWh is more power than the entire nation of France used last year.
France. 68 million people. A full industrial economy. Trains, heat, light.
All of it. U.S. data centers alone will top that by 2030.
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Right now, data centers use about 4.5% of all U.S. power. Berkeley Lab says that jumps to 9.5% to 15.3% by the end of the decade. The mid-point is 11.8%.
That's roughly one in every eight watts on the American grid going to cool racks of GPUs.
The growth path is steep. Data centers will make up about 40% of all new demand over the next five years.
No other sector is close. Not EVs. Not heat pumps. Not factories.
This report matters because of who wrote it. Not a bank. Not a tech CEO with skin in the game. The government lab that tracks every electron on the grid.
And the range is wide. The low end nearly doubles today's share. The high end more than triples it. That gap tells you how much we still don't know.
Then today, Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy asked the next question: who pays?
Their answer is sharp. Residential power prices rose 6% last year. That's more than twice the rate of inflation.
Investor-owned utilities asked for $18 billion in rate hikes — the most since the mid-1980s. Regulators approved two-thirds of every dollar they asked for.
Columbia's team found that utilities label data center upgrades as "system benefits." Then they spread those costs across all customers. Homes. Schools. Small shops.
The utility still earns its 9–10% return on capital. The homeowner gets the bill.
Since 2019, residential rates have climbed 33%. Commercial and industrial rates? Just 26% and 27%. The gap is growing — and it points one way.
Utilities have every reason to build fast. They earn a fixed return on every dollar of steel and wire they put in the ground. More capex means more profit. The incentive structure pushes toward overbuild, not caution.
The demand curve just got official. One in eight watts by 2030. The next fight isn't about whether the load is coming — it's about whose bill it lands on.
See this official SEC document? On page 146 Elon Musk revealed the name of a startup that Jeff believes will be…
Even though this has nothing to do with robots, self-driving cars, or rockets…
This startup is growing faster than Tesla… faster than SpaceX… and even 23 times faster than Nvidia.
That's why The Atlantic called it…
"The fastest-growing business in the history of capitalism." (Click here to get the name, 100% free of charge.)
RESISTANCE
You Don't Need to Live Near a Data Center to Hate One
A survey from Milltown Partners landed yesterday. One stat hit hard. Only 8% of people who oppose data centers live near one.
Eight percent. The other 92% have never lived near one. They still don't want them built. The backlash has jumped the fence from local zoning fight to national cause.
New York is the biggest domino yet. On June 4, the state legislature passed a one-year freeze on permits for data centers over 20 megawatts. It's called the Responsible Data Center Development Act. The bill awaits delivery to Governor Hochul's desk.
In Festus, Missouri, voters went further. In April, they threw out city council members who had backed a new data center. Elected officials lost their seats over server racks.
Seattle — home of Microsoft and Amazon — is advancing its own one-year pause. At least 50 local governments had active bans as of May. And the pace is picking up, not slowing down.
Tech firms have set aside nearly $750 billion in capex this year. That is real money sitting in real accounts, waiting for sites that may never get green-lit.
Money can't buy permits that don't exist. It can't win over towns that don't want you.
The constraint on AI isn't chips or cash. It's consent. And consent is getting harder to earn by the week.
BLACKOUT WATCH
The Load That Vanishes
Ghost in the grid. On May 4, NERC fired off a Level 3 alert — its most urgent kind. The trigger: data centers dropping more than 1,000 MW of load in seconds. Not once. A pattern. When that much power vanishes at once, grid frequency spikes. Generators trip. The risk of a cascading blackout is real. NERC has given grid operators until August 3 to respond to 33 questions about how they plan to handle it.
ERCOT blinks first. NERC already cut its Texas summer demand forecast by 1.9 GW — a 2.3% trim — because data center load is too hard to predict. Some of these facilities ramp up and down in ways the grid was never built to track. The old model assumed factories that ran 24/7. Data centers don't behave like that.
The 40-year bet. Columbia's new study warns of a "phantom load" trap. Utilities are building assets with 40- to 50-year lifespans to serve a sector that might look nothing like it does today. If AI demand shifts — or chips get far more efficient — those plants and lines become stranded costs. And under current rules, ratepayers eat the loss. Utilities still collect their 9–10% return either way.
