Data centers get ready — the Senate wants to see your power bills

Two U.S. senators on Thursday fired the latest salvo in an increasingly active front against data centers and their energy use. Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) asking it to collect details on energy use from data centers — and how that use is affecting the grid.

The senators urged the EIA “to establish a mandatory annual reporting requirement for data centers and other large loads,” they wrote in the letter, which TechCrunch has viewed. “As electricity demand growth continues to accelerate after years of relative stagnation, the lack of reliable, standardized data on large load energy consumption poses significant risks to effective grid planning and oversight.” Wired was first to report on the letter.

The letter isn’t the first move by politicians to try and place new regulatory requirements on data centers. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday they would introduce legislation that would halt new data center construction until Congress could come to an agreement on how to regulate AI.

Energy use by data centers has exploded in recent years. Google’s data centers, for example, doubled their consumption between 2020 and 2024. The trend isn’t likely to change in the near future. By 2035, planned new data centers will nearly triple the sector’s energy demand.

The EIA is a government agency tasked with collecting and analyzing data related to the energy system — sort of like a Census bureau for the grid. It was established in 1977 under the Department of Energy in the wake of the oil shocks of the early 1970s.

For decades, the EIA has gathered a wealth of information about energy use in the U.S., including costs, generating sources, and energy-efficiency programs. It also tracks how different sectors use energy, though it only focuses on four very broad categories: residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation.

Hawley and Warren are also asking the EIA to collect more granular information on data centers, including how energy consumption differs between AI computing tasks and general cloud services.

The senators have very specific requests regarding what that data should look like, including hourly, annual, and peak energy loads and the rates companies pay. They also want to know about any grid upgrades required by the addition of new large loads, how those upgrades are paid for, and whether data center customers participate in demand response programs, in which utilities pay heavy users to reduce their use for a period of time.

The letter calls out the EIA administrator Tristan Abbey, who in December said the agency will be an “essential player” in collecting data regarding energy demand from data centers. Hawley and Warren requested the agency reply to their letter by April 9.

It’s possible the process is already underway, though the EIA hasn’t publicly shared if it is. Changes to the EIA surveys must go through the Office of Management and Budget process, which requires a public comment period.

“We get requests for analysis very often. We get requests for an actual new product less frequently,” Abbey said at the public event in December. “It takes probably about two years to launch a new survey from scratch. But there are authorities that exist where you can avoid the two-year process by conducting surveys of smaller scope, but potentially a sharper signal.”