Top Senate Democrats Open Probe Into Data Centers’ Effect on Power Prices

Current conditions: Days after atmospheric rivers deluged the Pacific Northwest, similar precipitation is headed for Northern California, albeit with less than an inch of rain expected in the foothills of the Bay Area • Australia is facing a heatwave, temperatures hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit this week • Heavy rains threaten flash floods in Ghana, Togo, Benin, and southern Nigeria.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Three Senate Democrats open probe into data centers’ effect on electricity bills

Three Senate Democrats considered top progressives announced Tuesday a probe into whether and how data centers are driving up residential electricity bills. In letters sent Monday to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and three other companies, the lawmakers accused the server farms powering artificial intelligence software of “forcing utilities to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the power grid,” expenses then passed on to Americans “through the rates they charge all users of electricity,” The New York Times wrote. The senators — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — warned that ratepayers will be left holding the bag when the AI bubble bursts, a possibility Friday’s stock plunge (which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered) has made investors all too aware of.

Opposing data centers is emerging as a touchstone political test on the left. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist independent from Vermont, posted a video on his X account in which he argued that “a moratorium” on building new data centers nationwide “will give democracy a chance to catch up, and ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1%.” Polling suggests the political issue has populist appeal. Just 44% of Americans said they would support a data center built nearby in a September survey from Heatmap Pro.

2. House advances bipartisan permitting reform bill

The House of Representatives voted 215-209 Tuesday to advance the bipartisan permitting reform bill known as the SPEED Act, despite mounting opposition from Republicans to provisions meant to protect already-licensed projects from the type of legal assault the Trump administration has unleashed on offshore wind. Republican critics of the bill, including Maryland Congressman Andy Harris and New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, vowed to vote against any legislation that included measures that might defend offshore turbine developers from Trump’s “total war on wind.”

Yet, “while the bill is alive for now, the outcome casts a pall over the prospects for any permitting deal this Congress,” as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last night, because “there is little shot of a grand deal on NEPA reform without exactly the sort of executive power restrictions Republican objectors feared.”

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3. Orders for big transformers exceeded the annual supply this year by 14,000 units

The nationwide transformer shortage is getting worse as extreme weather destroys the existing grid and data centers demand the buildout of power infrastructure at a rate not seen in decades. A new Wall Street Journal feature on the manufacturers racing to churn out the big transformers featured a fresh statistic from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie that illustrates just how bad the problem has become. Orders for large transformers exceeded supply by about 14,000 units so far this year. The Biden administration made the transformer crisis worse by proposing — then revoking — a regulation to increase the energy efficiency of the equipment at the cost of requiring manufacturers to decide between investing in compliant assembly lines by 2027 or additional output to match today’s demand. The Trump administration has made the problem worse still by imposing strict trade tariffs on the very material transformers need most, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote.

4. Microreactor developer Last Energy raises $100 million

A rendering of one of Last Energy's power plants.Last Energy

In the race to build the nation’s first small modular reactor, there are startups that developed designs based on less-powerful models of existing light water reactors and startups that are pursuing next-generation technologies shrunken down to a tiny fraction of a normal atomic power plant’s size. Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy is doing both. The company, founded by the entrepreneur and nuclear podcaster Bret Kugelmass, started out by proposing to build 20-megawatt light water reactors in Europe, before embarking on a U.S. project after the Trump administration vowed to ease the way for new nuclear reactors. On Tuesday, in a sign of investors’ confidence in the new trans-Atlantic direction, Last Energy announced a $100 million fundraising round. “For the first half a decade that I was telling people I was doing nuclear, I had to convince them, ‘Hey, here’s why nuclear is important,’” Kugelmass told TechCrunch. “Now everyone just comes to us saying, ‘Oh yeah, of course nuclear is a key part of the solution.’ I’m like, okay, great, I’m glad everyone’s caught up now.” The company is among the 10 startups in the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program, meant to speed up deployments of new technologies by bringing at least three to the atom-splitting phase of development by next July 4.

The fundraising news came as the Trump administration took yet another stake in a private minerals company. On Tuesday, the military announced a deal to take a 40% share of the nearly $8 billion mineral processing plant the South Korean industrial company Korea Zinc promised to build in Tennessee.

5. BlackRock loses yet another European pension fund over climate

BlackRock’s retreat from sustainable investing has cost the world’s largest asset manager the business of at least two European pension funds. On Tuesday, the PME group, which manages more than $69 billion in retirement savings for Dutch workers in the metal and technologies sectors, said it had “decided to end our relationship with BlackRock,” the Financial Times reported. The move comes after the Dutch healthcare workers pension group PFZW withdrew about more than $16 billion from the financial giant, though its money-market funds are still under BlackRock’s management. It’s not just BlackRock facing backlash for its softening position on emissions. In February, the United Kingdom-based People’s Pension yanked nearly $38 billion from State Street, saying it was prioritizing “sustainability, active stewardship, and long-term value creation.”

THE KICKER

For penguins, bad weather is good news. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, researchers from the University of Gothenburg showed that storms in the Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica regulate the Earth’s climate by moving heat, carbon, and nutrients out in the world’s oceans. The effect amounts to what scientists called “a critical climate service” marked by “absorbing 75% of the excess heat generated by humans globally.”