New York paused new hyperscale data centers on Tuesday - a one-year moratorium, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, on construction of centers drawing 50 megawatts or more, citing what they are doing to utility bills [1]. On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on Fox News to object, and made a claim worth holding up to the light: 'Data centers are the greatest tool we have right now to stop the rise of electricity prices and ultimately to bring them back down' [1].
The nation's largest grid operator had published the relevant arithmetic one day before he spoke. On July 14, PJM - which serves 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC - announced the results of its latest capacity auction: $16.4 billion in charges that will land on the region's electric bills [2]. Its independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributed $6.3 billion of that to data-center demand [2]. Across the last four auctions, the monitor counts $29.4 billion in costs added by data centers [2].
PJM does not treat the cause as a mystery. Explaining why demand keeps outrunning supply, the grid operator says: 'The primary driver of that growth is data centers' [1]. The NRDC estimates the growth is already adding $20 to $30 a month to household bills, with long-term impacts that could approach $70 a month [1].
The market monitor's proposed fix is the part that answers Wright directly. Monitoring Analytics president Joseph Bowring wants data-center load removed from the shared capacity market and priced in its own dedicated auction, so that data centers 'do not impose capacity costs on other customers' [2]. That is not the architecture you design for a technology that restrains prices; it is the one you design for a load so large it is repricing everyone else's electricity [2].
Wright's 'ultimately' is a prediction, and predictions get graded later. His 'right now' has already been graded - by the grid he is pointing at, one day before he said it [1][2].
