Who Will Pay for Data Centers’ Energy? Not You, Utilities Say.

Utilities want you to know how little data centers will cost anyone.

With electricity prices rising faster than inflation and public backlash against data centers brewing, developers and the utilities that serve them are trying to convince the public that increasing numbers of gargantuan new projects won’t lead to higher bills. Case in point is the latest project from OpenAI’s Stargate, a $7-plus-billion, more-than-1-gigawatt data center due to be built outside Detroit.

The project was announced Thursday by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who focused heavily on the projected economic benefits of the projects while attempting to head off criticism that it would lead to higher costs. In the first sentence of her press release, she said that the project will “create more than 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 jobs on site and 1,500 more across the county.” Also, it “will be one of the most advanced AI infrastructure facilities in the U.S., especially when it comes to its efficient use of land, water, and power.” Oh, and it “will not require any additional power generation to operate.”

The utility set to power the project, DTE Energy, released its quarterly earnings Thursday, as well, which described a 1.4-gigawatt project it had already executed. In a presentation for analysts and investors, DTE said that the new data center would pay for “required storage through a 15-year energy storage contract,” and that it would “support affordability for existing customers as excess capacity is sold.”

On a call with analysts, DTE Energy chief executive Joi Harris further asserted that the project has “meaningful affordability benefits to our existing customers.” As the data center ramps up, she explained, it can use existing excess capacity on the grid. By the time it reaches full strength, it will enjoy the benefits of “nearly $2 billion of incremental energy storage investments and additional tolling agreements to support this data center load.”

Who will pay for energy storage and tolling agreements? A DTE spokesperson, Jill Wilmot, clarified in an email that “DTE will meet the 1.4 gigawatts of demand from the data center with existing capacity,” and that “new energy storage will be built — and paid for by the customer” — that is, Stargate — “to help augment times of peak demand, ensuring continued reliability for all customers.”

Data centers help spread out the fixed costs of the grid more widely, Wilmot went on. “Data center development in DTE’s electric service territory will not increase customer rates,” she said, adding that “DTE is ensuring the data center will absorb all new costs required to serve them — in this case, battery storage. Our customers will not pay.”

That said, Wilmot did not answer a question about whether there would be any network or transmission upgrades necessary. She told me that she expected DTE would make a filing for the project with Michigan regulators later Friday.

Consumer advocates were skeptical of the utility’s claims. “When you are talking about new demand as massive as what would be created by this data center, we can’t afford to just take DTE at its word that other customers won’t be affected,” Amy Bandyk, the executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, told me in an email. She called for Michigan regulators “to require DTE and the data center customer to agree on a tariff specific to that customer that includes robust protections against cost-shifting and provisions that any incremental costs will be solely covered by this new customer.”

More utilities and data center developers are trying to explicitly head off claims that data centers are driving up electricity rates. In another recent data center announcement for a multi-billion-dollar project in West Memphis, Arkansas, Google and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission said that “Google will be covering the full energy costs for the West Memphis facility and will be ramping up new solar energy and battery storage resources for the facility.”

Drew Marsh, the chief executive of Entergy, the utility serving the project, confirmed on an earnings call earlier this week that Google “will protect energy affordability for existing customers by covering the full cost of powering the data center in West Memphis.” He also said that in Mississippi, where Amazon has announced a $16 billion project, “customer rates would be 16% lower than they otherwise would have been due to these large customers.”

So why are utilities — which, after all, get paid by ratepayers for the investments they make in their systems — telling their investors about all the money they’re not charging ratepayers?

In short, utilities and developers know they’re on political thin ice, and they don’t want to kill the golden goose of data center development by stoking a populist backlash to rising electricity prices that could result in either government-mandated slashing of their investment plans, caps on the rates they can charge, or both.

“Looking ahead, we anticipate the central issue will be how utilities protect residential customers from costs associated with large-load customers, or else face potential consequences from regulators,” Mizuho analyst Anthony Crowdell said in a note to clients earlier this week. “Data centers, and their associated load, have the potential” to “cause political push-back.”

This is already happening across the country. The frontrunner in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, for example, has promised to freeze electricity rates, which have seen a sharp runup in recent years. Indiana Governor Mike Braun, a Republican, said in a recent statement that “we can’t take it anymore,” in reference to rate hikes. Indiana has also rejected a number of proposed data centers, as I covered earlier this year.

This means that utilities will have to think carefully about how and to whom they allocate costs arising from data center development and operation.

“Allocation of cost will be pivotal as the current ’pocketbook issues driving a lot of the U.S. political debate could create some challenging regulatory outcomes should data centers put pressure on customer bills,” Crowdell wrote.

But what’s said in an announcement to the media or to investors may not always reflect the reality of utility cost allocation, Harvard Law School professor Ari Peskoe told me.

“Don’t trust a utility press release or comment from a CEO of a monopoly that says Hey, these rates are good for you,” he told me.

Peskoe told me to pay close attention to the regulatory fillings utilities make for their data center projects, not just what they tell the press or investors. “Are the utilities themselves actually making these claims as strongly as their CEOs are making them in investor calls? And then once we do have a regulatory process about it, are they being transparent in that regulatory process? Are they hiding a lot of details behind the confidentiality claims so that only the participants in that proceeding actually get to see the details?”

Peskoe also pointed to other costs that might be incurred in the course of data center development that get socialized across the rate base but aren’t necessarily directly tied to any one development, like the transmission and network upgrades, that have contributed to large price increases in the PJM Interconnection territory.

“What you’re looking for is a firm contract that ensures the data center is going to be paying for every penny that the utility is incurring to provide service, so that it’s paying for all the new infrastructure that’s serving it,” Peskoe said. Without that, all you have is a press release.