Data centers need power – lower income, rural residents pay the price

A Cornell study published in Nature Energy found that U.S. data centers paid only 38%, or $3.12 billion, of the $8.25 billion in grid infrastructure costs tied to their growth in 2025, leaving $5.13 billion (62%) largely to residential ratepayers. Researchers Fengqi You and Cheng Feng analyzed four major U.S. power grids from 2020 to 2025, covering data center clusters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas-Fort Worth, the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic, and found transmission investment jumped from $2 billion to $34 billion over the period. Lower-income households faced extra energy costs of up to 28% of their incomes, the study found. The authors also found each gigawatt of data center capacity supports 15,000 jobs economy-wide, about 2,700 of them directly linked to the facility. Watch for rate cases and legislative proposals on shifting infrastructure costs to large-load customers.