U.S. President Donald Trump is taking action to protect American consumers from soaring electricity bills with plans to direct the biggest U.S. grid operator, PJM, hold an emergency power auction in which Big Tech would bid for power supply for their new data centers and effectively pay for new power plants.
President Trump and governors of several U.S. states, including the data-center hotpots Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, are expected to announce the plan later on Friday, Bloomberg reports.
Under the plan, PJM Interconnection will be directed to hold an emergency auction for the hyperscalers who will bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation capacity.
The auction is expected to support the construction of $15 billion worth of new power plants, an anonymous White House official told Bloomberg.
Soaring power demand from data centers is raising electric utility bills for U.S. households, and has already made the issue political.
Earlier this week, President Trump took to Truth Social to criticize the spike in electricity bills for Americans and said that the Administration was working with “major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People.”
Data centers are key to the U.S. AI boom, “and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must “pay their own way,” President Trump said, previewing announcements on the matter in the coming weeks.
PJM Interconnection coordinates the movement of electricity through all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Many of these states, as well as Texas served by ERCOT, have become hotspots of data center build-outs in recent years.
The struggle over power supply has become very real as planned demand from proposed data centers vastly exceeds current grid capacity. The massive build-out of data centers has also inadvertently made local communities foot the bill for Big Tech’s facilities.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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