What’s Bothering a Free Market Conservative About the Data Center Boom

This week’s conversation is with Travis Fisher, an energy policy analyst with the Cato Institute and one of my favorite people to chop it up with on Energy Twitter. I reached out to Fisher for a conversation about how he’s approaching the data center boom as a free market-minded wonk at a time when other figures on the so-called Right are calling for strict regulations on the sector. What I learned is that folks like Fisher are concerned about the scale of the buildout too, but their ideas and approaches wildly differ from the Tucker Carlsons of the world.

As always, our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

What’s your approach to the data centers debate in the Republican camp right now?

My bias is towards free markets. So as long as we’re talking about voluntary exchanges with property rights, it's fair game.

The sticking points for me are: is cost being socialized? Is there too much special treatment, like tax credits or overt subsidies or eminent domain? All of that stuff is problematic to me.

There is a world where we have massive expansion and it's still very consistent with my view of how things ought to go. But I’m not sure I love the approach I’ve seen on the siting end of things. There’s stories of private land takings, or private companies taking land, and that’s very problematic for me.

I see this as a huge growth area and a huge opportunity, so the idea of pausing even for a year feels like the wrong way to go about it. There’s a lot of parallels where folks want to slow things down but in hindsight it feels like a silly thing to stop progress.

[And] it really shines a light on conservatives versus free-market people. They’re not always the same.

How do you view data centers as an opportunity for building out the energy grid?

There’s two conversations here, really: improving the grid as we know it and expanding access to power off-grid.

Data centers are very large customers if we can free up supply to increase the quantity on the grid and then reduce average costs. That’s a whiteboard approach. But I can spend all day on why the whiteboard approach to economics on the power grid does not show up in reality. If you reduce average costs, what incentives do utilities have to pass lower costs onto consumers? They’ll just maximize shareholder returns. I don’t like the status quo utility model but there is a white board approach where if we believe in a natural monopoly thesis, then an expansion on the demand side moves you further down a downward sloping supply curve.

If you buy this argument, there’s an opportunity to cut costs. But I’m skeptical of that argument.

You’ve advocated for consumer regulated electricity reform in this situation. How does that relate?

This is the second prong, the off-grid solution. We have customers that want to move faster than the grid allows. We have a very regulated grid which is not compatible with the fast growth these customers want. And they have an enormous willingness to pay for that speed-to-power, so in terms of their opportunity cost, this sets up an opportunity to essentially build new power networks. If you’re a private utility and not a public utility, public utility regulations should not apply to you. And if you can build a private utility without oversight from Public Utility Commissioners or FERC, you’re free to innovate. Then this all becomes a new sector we can transfer learnings from back to the grid.

This idea – which I’ve seen you describe to my colleague Matthew Zeitlin – does it require policy change?

Yes, but it depends on what state. Ohio, Utah, and Oklahoma, maybe West Virginia… Those states already have systems kind of like this. It’s why you may be seeing private [energy and data center] networks there. In Ohio, at the New Albany site. In Utah, which is its own thing. But there are already state laws trending in this direction.

My view on this is you need a reform at the state level saying if you’re a private utility, you’re not under the jurisdiction of the PUC. At the federal level, it would mean the regs that do not apply to the bulk system do not apply to you.

So then, is your goal to create “power islands” here off grid using the free market?

The goal is to be as pro-consumer and free market and fast-moving as possible. This policy change would open that avenue and make it clear this is a greenlit activity. A thing that can happen and investors have certainty they won’t be side-swiped later.

I think we’re approaching the point where a lot of observers recognize the status quo is untenable. They say we had [utility] restructuring and now the status quo is untenable after restructuring, so let’s re-vertically integrate utilities or nationalize them. Those are all terrible, terrible, awful options. But the moment is so dire that a lot of bad ideas are on the table. I’m trying as hard as I can to parse the free market ideas from pro-utility ideas.

Vertical integration – where’s the momentum against that situation? I understand you’re trying to combat monopoly here, without being too heavy-handed from a regulatory level.

Even in a vertically integrated space, there’s pro-consumer reforms and consumer choice. Consumer-regulated electricity would do that in a clean and aggressive way but there is plenty you can do to tinker. How do we fight back against incumbent utilities? There’s many answers to that question but the last thing we should do responding to data centers is give them more control.

For example, the one thing we absolutely cannot do is reintrench the franchise. If a state says nobody else can be a utility in this state, why is that even a thing in the year 2026? That is backwards thinking, 100-year-old thinking we need to move on from.

My last question, since you keep bringing this conversation to utilities, is… why are we seeing so much upset in the utility sector?

I can only answer on my own behalf: They are monopolies. Since when was a monopoly industry friendly to free-market thinking? It’s historically been friendly to conservatives, because of the status quo bias, and I’m trying as best as I can to cleave the conservatives off being pro-utility because if you’re free market and conservative you shouldn’t like what they’re doing.

If you’re pro-consumer, you don’t like whatever the incumbent set up is. There’s an element of both the left and the right seeing this.

As rates go up, and as problems persist, we’re not getting anything more even though we’re paying more. It’s not a good environment for the utilities, who want to keep things the way they are.