Environmental groups demand moratorium on data centers as electricity bills surge 13%

Environmental groups call for halt to new data center construction | TechCrunch

As energy demand for data centers soars, environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on the approval and construction of new facilities. More than 230 organizations including Food and Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace signed a public letter urging members of Congress to support a national moratorium on the approval and construction of new data centers, citing rising electricity and water consumption. "The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans' economic, environmental, climate and water security," the letter reads. Several studies have linked higher energy prices to the arrival of new data centers in a region. Consumers have been arriving at similar conclusions: A recent survey, commissioned by solar installer Sunrun, found that eight in 10 consumers were worried about data centers negatively affecting their utility bills. Electricity prices have already shot up 13% this year, bigger than any annual increase in the past decade. The effects are expected to be felt most in a handful of states, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and New Jersey, which are slated for the largest increase in data center capacity. Energy demand for data centers is expected to nearly triple in the coming decade, up from 40 gigawatts today to 106 gigawatts in 2035. Much of that will take place in rural areas. "All this compounds the significant and concerning impacts AI is having on society, including lost jobs, social instability and economic concentration," the environmental groups said. Proposed data centers have become a flash point in recent days. Last week, protestors marched outside the headquarters of utility DTE in Detroit. The company is requesting approval from the Michigan Public Service Commission to supply OpenAI and Oracle with electricity for a 1.4 gigawatt data center. Protestors said they were concerned about the data center driving up electricity bills, using too much fresh water, and snarling traffic. Also last week, three people were arrested in Wisconsin during a common council meeting about a 902 megawatt data center that's slated to be part of OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate project.

How families could get stuck with higher electric bills if the AI data center boom goes bust

Homes near a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, on Friday, July 25, 2025. Data centers that haven't been built yet are driving up electricity prices and could leave consumers on the hook for expensive power infrastructure if demand projections are wrong. The race to build facilities that provide artificial intelligence has fueled a boom in data centers that train and run large language models, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, upending a utility industry that grew used to 20 years of no increase in electricity demand. But now, some investors and energy market analysts are questioning whether the AI race has turned into a bubble, one that would prove expensive to unravel as new transmission lines and power plants are built to support those data centers. Consumers served by the largest electric grid in the U.S. will pay $16.6 billion to secure future power supplies just to meet demand from data centers from 2025 through 2027, according to a watchdog report published this month. The grid is PJM Interconnection, serving more than 65 million people across 13 states, including the world's largest data center hub in Virginia and fast-growing markets like northern Illinois and Ohio. About 90% of that bill, or $15 billion, is to pay for future data center demand, according to Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor. This amounts to a "massive wealth transfer" from consumers to the data center industry, the watchdog told PJM in a Nov. 10 letter.

Stop new AI data centers, enviornmental orgs tell Congress

One of many residents of rural Michigan makes her feelings known about the proposed $7 billion Stargate data center planned on farm land. Credit: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Local pro-environment groups in all 50 states delivered a blunt message to the U.S. Congress: Put a moratorium on new power-hungry AI data centers, or face the wrath of voters everywhere. "The harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive," read the letter, signed by more than 350 nonprofit groups, from Alabama Climate Reality to West Virginia Citizen Action Group. That includes the swing state of Michigan, where the OpenAI-led Stargate project is already running into local opposition on a $7 billion data center built on farmland. Focusing on kitchen-table issues as much as the use of fossil fuels (which power an estimated 56 percent of U.S. data center electricity), the letter noted that electricity bills have shot up by more than 21 percent since 2021 -- "driven largely by the rapid build-out of data centers." If nothing is done to stop a proposed tripling of data centers in the next five years, these vast server farms will end up requiring as much electricity as 30 million households, and as much water as 18.5 million households, the group estimates. (For context, the entire U.S. has just over 130 million households.) The letter, convened by Food & Water Watch, calls for "a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be enacted to fully protect our communities, our families, our environment and our health from the runaway damage this industry is already inflicting." The estimates are speculative, of course -- in part because tech companies still aren't providing the data needed to understand just how much energy and water data centers use. Or more importantly, how hungry the AI model training process has become. U.S. representatives should be aware how little is known about AI's environmental harms, given that the legislature's own nonpartisan General Accounting Office released a report this summer on this very topic. "Training and using generative AI can result in substantial energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water usage," the GAO report stated.

AI boom fuels "environmental justice" fears in communities of color

Why it matters: Massive data centers require vast quantities of water, energy and land. Many of these centers are clustered in regions where marginalized communities already face higher levels of air pollution, industrial zoning and climate vulnerability. * Civil rights groups say these impacts resemble earlier patterns seen with highways, refineries and manufacturing: pollution concentrated where political resistance is weakest and property values are lowest. * Data centers can also consume millions of gallons of water per day and use as much electricity as a small city, driving up energy and water use costs for poor residents. Zoom in: A supercomputer data center built by Elon Musk's xAI in Southwest Memphis, a historically Black neighborhood, faces a legal challenge from the NAACP. The group says the site's gas generators are violating the Clean Air Act. * Nitrogen dioxide pollution near the site has spiked as much as 79%, according to TIME, raising the risk of asthma and respiratory illness in a community already burdened by high pollution rates. * Earlier this year, Brent Mayo of xAI said the data center was adding newer units that would make it "the lowest-emitting facility in the country." The company also touted on X its progress on a wastewater treatment facility. In Amarillo, Texas, advocates are fighting what developers call the world's largest AI data center, warning it could drain the Ogallala Aquifer, a shrinking water lifeline for the Texas Panhandle and southern Great Plains. * Latino residents and rural water advocates fear losing access to groundwater already stretched thin by agriculture and drought. The city's former mayor, working as a community lead on the data center project, says it will use closed-loop cooling that should minimize water usage. Northern Virginia -- site of the world's largest data center hub -- is seeing mounting resistance in Loudoun and Prince William counties, where Black families say the build-out is overwhelming their communities. Near Tucson, Ariz., a majority-Latino city strained by megadrought, a proposed "Project Blue" data center could consume millions of gallons of water per year. * Activists warn the project could accelerate water scarcity for communities already facing heat stress and economic vulnerability. * A planned massive data center in Florida's St. Lucie County is also drawing intense opposition. What they're saying: "Data centers by design do not have a lot of jobs. It's predatory. They target cities desperate for economic development," LaTricea Adams, CEO of the Memphis-based Young, Gifted & Green, tells Axios. * "This is the Wild West. There's not even case law yet. What happens now will dictate the future of how data centers are regulated." Between the lines: As AI data centers expand across the West, Indigenous nations say the industry is accelerating resource extraction without tribal consent. The bottom line: The NAACP announced it's bringing together advocates, researchers and regional leaders for a two-day strategy summit in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss AI data centers. * The civil rights group says the gathering will coordinate policy and legal action around what it calls "one of the nation's fastest-expanding environmental justice threats."

More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US data centers

Exclusive: Congress urged to act against energy-hungry facilities blamed for increasing bills and worsening climate crisis A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new data centers in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress halt the proliferation of energy-hungry data centers, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and for exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year. "The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans' economic, environmental, climate and water security," the letter states, adding that approval of new data centers should be paused until new regulations are put in place. The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new data centers, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 data center projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities' need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce. These seemingly parochial concerns have now multiplied to become a potent political force, helping propel Democrats to a series of emphatic recent electoral successes in governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey as well as a stunning upset win in a special public service commission poll in Georgia, with candidates campaigning on lowering power bill costs and curbing data centers. This threatens to be a major headache for Donald Trump, who has aggressively pushed the growth of AI but also called himself the "affordability president" and vowed to cut energy costs in half in his first year. However, household electricity prices have increased by 13% so far under Trump and the president recently lashed out in the wake of the election losses, calling affordability a "fake narrative" and a "con job" created by Democrats. "They just say the word," Trump said last week. "It doesn't mean anything to anybody. They just say it - affordability." Yet about 80 million Americans are currently struggling to pay their bills for electricity and gas, with many voters regardless of political party blaming data centers for this, according to Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines, a nonpartisan organization that aims to reduce power bills. "We saw rising utility bills become a core concern in the New Jersey, Georgia and Virginia elections which shows us there is a new politics in America - we are entering a new era that is all about electricity prices," Hua said. "Nobody in America wants to pay more for electricity and we saw in Georgia a meaningful chunk of conservative voters vote against the Republican incumbents, which was staggering." Hua said the causes of the electricity cost rises are nuanced, with aging transmission lines and damage caused by extreme weather also adding to utilities' costs on top of the surging demand for power. But it is the growth of data centers to service AI - with electricity consumption set to nearly triple over the next decade, equivalent to powering 190m new homes - that is the focus of ire for voters as well as an unlikely sweep of politicians ranging from Bernie Sanders on the left to Marjorie Taylor Greene on the far right. More broadly, almost half of Americans say the cost of living in the US, including power, food and other essentials, is the worst they can ever remember it being. This focus on affordability has provided a new line of attack for an environmental movement that has struggled to counter Trump's onslaught upon rules that reduce air and water pollution. The president has called the climate crisis a "hoax" and clean energy a "scam" and has slashed support for and even blocked new wind and solar projects, even though renewables are often the cheapest and fastest options for new power generation. At the current rate of growth, data centers could add up to 44m tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to putting an extra 10m cars onto the road and exacerbating a climate crisis that is already spurring extreme weather disasters and ripping apart the fabric of the American insurance market. But it is the impact upon power bills, rather than the climate crisis, that is causing anguish for most voters, acknowledged Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing at Food & Water Watch, one of the groups behind the letter to lawmakers. "I've been amazed by the groundswell of grassroots, bipartisan opposition to this, in all types of communities across the US," she said. "Everyone is affected by this, the opposition has been across the political spectrum. A lot of people don't see the benefits coming from AI and feel they will be paying for it with their energy bills and water. "It's an important talking point," Wurth said of the affordability concerns. "We've seen outrageous utility price rises across the country and we are going to lean into this. Prices are going up across the board and this is something Americans really do care about."

Data center power demand surges faster, analysis finds

Why it matters: That's a 36% upward revision from its April outlook, "illustrating just how quickly the sector is expanding," the analysis said. * One gigawatt can power about 750,000 to 1 million homes. Yes, but: Even that bigger 2035 projection is still pretty conservative compared to estimates from Goldman Sachs, BCG, McKinsey and several others. The big picture: The study highlights big, interlocking trends. * Development is moving away from urban areas as facility sizes grow. "Today, US data centers are typically located in suburban areas within 30 miles of major cities," it finds. * Just 10% of existing data centers exceed 50 megawatts of capacity, yet most in development are north of 100 MW. A handful of gigawatt-scale sites are coming online in the next few years, with more to come later. State of play: Big tech and the Trump administration are all-in on the AI race. * One data point: Barclays estimates that Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle will have roughly $390 billion in combined capex this year, a 71% year-over-year rise with more on the way. * The Energy Department and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are working on a new policy to speed up data center grid connections. * The tech and data center industries are scrambling to find new power sources -- including re-start of shuttered plants -- to supply electricity for training and using AI models. Friction point: The boom is bringing fears of localized grid strains and wider power system problems as overall energy demand rises. * "These pressures point to an inflection moment for US grids: the desire to accommodate AI-driven load without undermining reliability or driving up power costs," BloombergNEF said in a summary of the report. What we're watching: The simmering data center backlash in some regions as electricity prices rise for a host of reasons.

Data center power demand to triple by 2035

BloombergNEF forecasts that data center electricity demand will increase 2.7 times by 2035, reaching 106 gigawatts from the current 40 gigawatts, driven by AI expansion and a surge in announced projects, primarily in rural U.S. areas within the PJM Interconnection and Texas ERCOT regions. The report details how this growth reflects the sector's rapid evolution, with planned construction adding substantial capacity over the next decade. Facilities are shifting toward rural locations because urban sites are becoming limited as data centers expand in scale. This relocation allows for larger builds away from densely populated zones, accommodating the infrastructure needs of modern computing demands. Current data center power usage shows that only 10 percent of facilities consume more than 50 megawatts. In contrast, the average new data center coming online over the next decade will require more than 100 megawatts. This shift underscores the increasing size of installations, with Qnearly a quarter of these new facilities exceeding 500 megawatts in power draw. A small number will surpass 1 gigawatt, representing the largest hyperscale operations planned for high-performance computing tasks. Alongside size increases, operational efficiency will improve, as utilization rates for data centers rise from 59 percent today to 69 percent by 2035. This uptick stems from greater demand for compute resources, particularly in artificial intelligence applications. AI training and inference processes will account for nearly 40 percent of total data center compute by that year, optimizing existing infrastructure and justifying the power expansions. Global investment in data centers has reached 580 billion dollars this year, exceeding worldwide expenditures on developing new oil supplies. This funding supports the construction and equipping of these facilities, enabling companies to meet rising computational needs. The investment surge aligns with efforts by AI firms to deploy more powerful systems, fueling the overall capacity buildup. The BloombergNEF report marks a significant update from its April publication, with projections revised upward based on recent developments. A key factor is the increase in newly announced projects since that time. As the report states, "With an average seven-year timeline for projects to come online, developments in earlier stages affect the tail end of our forecast the most." This means early-phase announcements influence long-term estimates, extending their impact into the 2030s. Early-stage projects have more than doubled in number between early 2024 and early 2025. These differ from committed or under-construction initiatives, representing potential future capacity that bolsters the forecast. The seven-year average timeline covers planning, permitting, construction, and grid integration, during which projects progress from concept to operation. New capacity planning concentrates in specific U.S. regions. Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and New Jersey form the core of the PJM Interconnection area, which also includes Delaware, West Virginia, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. The PJM Interconnection operates the electrical grid across these states, managing transmission and ensuring reliability. Texas's ERCOT grid, the independent system operator for most of the state, will host a substantial portion of additions as well, drawn by available land and energy resources. The PJM Interconnection faces examination from Monitoring Analytics, its independent monitor. This group submitted a complaint to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, asserting that PJM must limit new data center connections to instances where grid capacity suffices. Monitoring Analytics emphasizes PJM's reliability obligations, writing, "As part of its obligation to maintain reliability, PJM has the authority to require large new data center loads to wait to be added to the system until the loads can be served reliably." The complaint further recommends establishing a load queue to sequence additions systematically. Data centers contribute to elevated electricity prices in the PJM region currently. Monitoring Analytics attributes this to the influx of high-demand loads without corresponding grid upgrades. The organization criticizes PJM's approach, stating, "PJM's failure to clarify and enforce its existing rules and to protect reliable and affordable service in PJM is unjust and unreasonable." This filing highlights tensions between rapid data center growth and grid management practices.

In Data Center Alley, AI sows building boom, doubts

As planes make their final approach to Washington DC's Dulles Airport, just below lies Ashburn, a town otherwise known as Data Center Alley -- where an estimated 70 percent of all global internet traffic at any moment finds its way. Ashburn is in Loudoun County, the richest county per capita in the United States, with towns the world over looking at the Washington suburb as a way to win the future -- even if others see it as a cautionary tale. As planes make their final approach to Washington DC's Dulles Airport, just below lies Ashburn, a town otherwise known as Data Center Alley -- where an estimated 70 percent of all global internet traffic at any moment finds its way. Decades ago, the expanse of empty lots, forest and farmland in this corner of northern Virginia was slowly filled with suburban development. Then came the advent of the internet and an influx of data center builders. They emerged with pledges of tax revenue and investment in return for building structures that, while not pleasing to the eye, were the backbone of a digitally connected world. Why here? A combination of strategic location, robust infrastructure, pro-business policies, and affordable energy helps explain it. The Pentagon and the US government are just down the road, as were the headquarters of AOL, the early web giant that once defined being online. The benefits to Ashburn from these anonymous buildings over the past two decades are undeniable. Woven through the expanse of data centers are new stores, residential neighborhoods, an ice skating rink and public facilities that prove this town is in no way short of money. Ashburn is in Loudoun County, the richest county per capita in the United States, with towns the world over looking at the Washington suburb as a way to win the future -- even if others see it as a cautionary tale. Among its 40,000 citizens, Ashburn alone has 152 data centers currently in operation over its 40 square kilometers (15.4 square miles), with more bursting from the ground, part of an AI investment boom creating a race for ever more massive structures. In 2025, private companies are spending roughly $40 billion a month on data center construction in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau, much of that for megaprojects by the major AI players: Google, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI. This compares to just $1.8 billion a decade ago. Off limits AFP reporters were given a tour of a typical data center facility by Digital Realty, a specialized real estate company that operates 13 data centers in Ashburn. "We provide not only the space that you see here, but the power, the cooling and the connectivity," said Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer at Digital Realty. The servers in any given data center give life to basically anything we do online. Computer rooms here -- which are strictly off limits to outsiders -- are filled with racks of servers for a single client or broken into separate "cages" serving smaller clients. The emergence of AI has catapulted the industry to another dimension, creating new challenges as tech giants, caught in a bitter AI rivalry, scour the globe to build AI-capable data centers quickly. These new generation buildings require unprecedented levels of power, cooling technology and engineering: servers running Nvidia's graphics processing units, necessary for training AI, are incredibly heavy, requiring bigger and sturdier structures that need massive amounts of electricity. "If we think about Virginia alone, just the data centers last year used about as much electricity as all of New York City," said Leslie Abrahams, deputy director of the Energy Security and Climate Change program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Data servers deploying ChatGPT-like technologies run very hot and require new-generation liquid cooling-air conditioning will no longer do the job-and in most cases this means access to local water. Not surprisingly, the new necessities have made new constructions a harder sell. "Growing up, we started to see a few data centers, but honestly, not at this accelerated pace -- they're just popping up everywhere," said Makaela Edmonds, a 24-year-old who grew up in Ashburn. Her family's home is part of a suburban development that abuts a massive construction site. Another issue is that jobs in data centers are mostly found at the construction phase. Teams in hard hats work the sites, often around the clock. But once operational, many sites betray very little human activity. "The benefits of data centers tend to be more regional, national and global than local," Abrahams said. 'Monumental growth' In a major shift, local politicians in northern Virginia are now running campaigns to slow the expansion instead of promising to attract more construction. For companies like Digital Realty, the challenge is to work with communities to prepare them for what bringing in data centers entails. Despite any doubts, the demand is not abating. "The growth and demand in this market is monumental," said Sharp.

AI Data Centers Are Driving US Power Crunch -- And Even Record Grid Spending Isn't Enough, New Research Finds

Enter your email to get Benzinga's ultimate morning update: The PreMarket Activity Newsletter The United States could face mounting reliability risks as electricity demand from data centers climbs far faster than grid capacity, according to two new BloombergNEF (BNEF) reports released on Monday. BNEF now expects U.S. data-center power demand to reach 106 gigawatts (GW) by 2035, a 36% jump from its previous forecast just seven months earlier, while grid investment, despite hitting record levels, remains too slow to ease transmission bottlenecks. Data-Center Load Forecast Surges On AI Expansion BNEF attributes the sharp upward revision to both the sheer volume and escalating size of new projects. Of nearly 150 developments added to the research firm's tracker this year, almost one-quarter exceed 500 megawatts, more than double last year's share. The new wave is fueled by AI workloads that require massive compute density and consistent power availability, BNEF research found. See also: Amazon Runs 900+ Data Centers To Fuel AI Demand: Report Major Regional Grids Warn Of Tightening Supply Two of the country's largest power markets -- PJM and ERCOT -- are showing signs of strain. PJM operates the grid across 13 U.S. states from New Jersey to Illinois, supplying nearly 65 million people. BNEF forecasts that data-center capacity in PJM could reach 31 GW by 2030, nearly matching the 28.7 GW of new power generation the Energy Information Administration expects in the same period. ERCOT, which manages the grid covering about 90% of Texas, faces a similar challenge. Reserve margins there could fall into "risky territory" after 2028 as long-term power supply lags behind accelerating demand from AI and industrial growth, the report said. Meanwhile, Northern Virginia's long-dominant data-center market is nearing saturation, pushing new development into central and southern Virginia, according to BNEF. Georgia is expanding beyond metro Atlanta as land and power availability tighten. Texas stands out as developers convert former crypto-mining sites into AI data centers near major population centers and fiber routes. Record Grid Spending Still Failing To Solve Bottlenecks BNEF's Grid Investment Outlook 2025 found that global grid capital spending will exceed $470 billion this year, with the U.S. contributing $115 billion, the most of any country. Yet even with double-digit growth, supply-chain constraints, permitting delays, and labor shortages continue to slow transmission expansion. BNEF warned that demand-side connection queues, driven heavily by data centers, are rising rapidly and remain a major structural challenge. "With data centers and industrial electrification driving sharp increases in power demand, investors need to factor in how essential timely grid expansion is for not only connecting new demand but also connecting all of the generation we will need to ensure a secure and reliable supply to this demand after over a decade of stagnation," said Peter Wall, Head of Grids Research at BloombergNEF. READ NEXT: Gene Munster Says Apple's AI Chief Was Probably Requested To 'Retire' By Tim Cook, As CEO Is 'Very Intense' About His Final Years Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs