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Data centers need electricity, utilities need years to build – who should pay?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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I just don’t understand why this is a difficult question. Make the data centers fund their own power needs. End of story.
Yes. They can pay to build their own sources of power of their own choosing. Or put more resources into doing data centers more efficiently, their choice.
Make the data centers build their own power plants. Then they get all the risk and all the reward.
Make them put the power plant right next to the data center, that way they're not stressing out the rest of the grid. And that way the exact same community that gets the benefits of hosting the data center also gets the environmental costs of the power plant.
In theory it's great. In practice it's "oops we had a big spill and went out of business, guess the EPA will have to use taxpayer money".
When unemployment is low in the construction sector, we can't have them pay. When they pay, they'll outbid us for workers who were previously building homes and public infrastructure. We'd either have to outbid cloud for these workers, or we'd pay by having higher housing prices and crumbling infrastructure, which incurs other social costs. Real resources are finite. The only way for us to not pay is for them to not build the power plants and datacenters. In a truly democratic system we'd be able to say no. In this system, capital outvotes us.
E: I'm not arguing that the corpos shouldn't pay. They should. I'm arguing the economic effect doesn't stop with that payment and we're still fucked.
The resources are finite whether the taxpayers pay for the construction or the corporation that needs the electric upgrade pays.
Yes and my point is that even if the corpo pays, which it absolutely should, that's not the end of the economic effect when that resource is used to the limit at the moment. We will end up paying too.
Wouldn't the market just expand to absorb the extra demand?
The demand for construction workers? If so, it could, if there's enough unemployment. Otherwise workers from some other industry would have to shift to construction. Creating a shortage in that industry. Switching industries is a more difficult process than getting an unemployed worker to work in construction though. But if there's already a labour shortage in the construction industry, then that answers the question. There isn't enough unemployment or shifting from other industries to fill the demand. And there seems to be one.
If there's underemployment in construction or higher unemployment, then yeah, the construction labour market would likely expand without much effect in housing and infrastructure.
Then they will build coal plants.
Mandate renewable energy and van open loop water cooling. Can't afford it? You don't need a datacenter then
This is where requirements as part of the data center zoning and purchase agreements comes in.
I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we've had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time.
It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.
Agreed.