Data Centers Added $9.4 Billion in Costs on Biggest US Grid

The rapid development of data centers connected to the largest US electric grid raised costs by $9.4 billion, an expense that consumers from Illinois to Washington, D.C., will soon see reflected in their utility bills. Overall costs rose by 180 percent, with the growing energy needs of data centers being the primary cause of tight supply-and-demand conditions, as well as high prices, in the PJM Interconnection capacity market, which serves customers from Illinois to Washington D.C., according to a report bby Monitoring Analytics, the grid’s independent market monitor. The analysis from PJM’s watchdog asserts that households and businesses are subsidizing the data center boom being carried out by some of the richest tech companies in the world. “The current conditions are not the result of organic load growth,” Monitoring Analytics said in the report. “The current conditions in the capacity market are almost entirely the result of large load additions from data centers, both actual historical and forecast.”