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Data center construction ended two decades of flat U.S. electricity consumption. Utilities can't build the plants to serve them fast enough
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
For almost two decades, total U.S. electricity demand barely grew. The country kept adding people and businesses that needed power, but Americans were using electricity more efficiently, and the savings canceled out all that growth. Data centers broke the pattern. A single large facility can draw as much electricity as a small city, and the industry has been building them so fast that utilities are now planning for far more power than they expected.
Data centers consumed about 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, enough to power roughly 17 million homes, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Five years earlier, data centers ate up less than half that amount. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that data centers could account for 9% to 17% of all U.S. electricity by 2030, more than doubling their current share even in the most conservative scenario.
