You know that artificial intelligence data centers are scrambling for spare energy supplies on the grid, and that communities are hesitant or even hostile when it comes to the idea of sharing their own power. But Toby Z. Rice, president and CEO of EQT Corporation, a natural gas producer, explains in Real Clear Energy that “America is not short of energy. We are short of permission.”
Rice explains that three things can lower America’s energy bills. The first is building new generation. Some of that is happening, but more could be done. The second is building transmission. And the third is delivering more fuel to the plants that are already built but don’t have capacity because of pipeline permitting issues.
Rice explains that the impediment to all three solutions is permitting. He writes:
Every one of those is a permitting problem, and Congress is closer to fixing it than it has been in a generation. The House passed several meaningful bills in December — before data centers were even blamed for high electricity prices — and if bipartisanship prevails, the Senate is poised to act on permit reform in the immediate future. The window closes with this Congress. Finish the job and pass permitting reform.
Do that, and data centers stop being tomorrow’s problem and start being tomorrow’s solution. Demand is going to grow either way. Data centers are only about a third of projected U.S. load growth through 2030, so two-thirds of it arrives whether another one gets built or not. A nationwide ban would not fix this imbalance. But unlike manufacturing coming home or a driveway full of electric vehicles, data centers can actually push prices down.
When a data center builds its own generation on site, reliability standards mean it overbuilds — roughly 1.2 gigawatts to serve a gigawatt of demand. The tech company pays for its own electricity and builds excess on top of it. Today that excess sits idle behind a fence, because the rules for pushing surplus onto the regional grid are unsettled. Fix those rules, and what was a data center turns into a tech-financed power plant for the region.
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