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Depending on the poll, the two biggest issues the public has with data centers are:
They take all the water;
They increase electricity prices.
The former complaint is scientifically illiterate, dead and done, and gets its limited intellectual backing from analyses that were shown to have included mathematical errors that inflated water use estimates and others that have spuriously attributed water use elsewhere to data centers. The latter complaint has been found to be not just false but backwards for the period before today’s hyperscale buildout, so proponents of the idea have shifted their defense to stating ‘That might’ve been true, but now the buildouts are radically increasing electricity prices!’
I’ve decided to take this possibility seriously. To that end, I’ve made a continuously-updated website that assembles that latest available data on data center energizations and electricity prices. You can explore the website—wattsmybill.org—by clicking here.
What did I find? Firstly, there is an effect of new data centers on electricity prices. However, the effect is small, and it appears to plateau. Secondly, the effect of new data centers on electricity prices is driven most sharply by large, recent buildouts. Finally, projections based on the existing data suggest there’s plenty of room to build out data center capacity without major effects on electricity bills.1
Here’s how average price effects from a “hyperscale”—250MW—data center being built locally look for a typical household as of August 21st, 2026; in short, they’re small:
If you want to play around with the data, check the expected effects of data centers on your bill, or just explore all the analyses I ran, go check out the site by clicking here! If you have requests for additions to the website, then go and leave a comment below.2
This was a timed post. The way these work is that if it takes me more than an hour to complete the post, an applet that I made deletes everything I’ve written so far and I abandon the post. You can find my previous timed post here.
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Because people have concerns about electricity prices, builders have shifted towards paying more than their share—a historically unusual practice that’s unfair to these businesses, but which should help as a way to bribe communities into permitting building. As a result, we might soon see these already piddly estimates go completely null or negative, at least for hyperscale buildouts. The only barrier to doing that will be the communities doing the permitting themselves. If they allow data center builders to come in and make deals, they will, and the communities will benefit. If they forbid them, then they’ll ensure they only benefit from data centers from afar.
As a final side note, yes, I am fully aware that if the interconnection queue/permitting issues with America’s electrical grid were fixed, there might be no effect of data centers on electricity prices and prices would be considerably lower. NIMBYs also tend to oppose new energy generation capacity more generally, just as they oppose building new data centers.