The Load Queue: Data Centers and America's Electricity Demand

The data center build has moved from forecast to meter, though the meter reads it only indirectly. Commercial-sector sales, the category in which the federal statistics count most data centers, account for almost all net growth in US retail electricity sales this year, and the fastest gains are in the states where data center campuses are being energised; we infer from that pattern that data centers are the main cause. The headline figure that circulates, the size of the large-load queues, is a measure of claims on the grid rather than of load: operators are screening speculative requests and trimming near-term forecasts, while their long-run forecasts and the federal outlook keep rising. Regulators are writing, and in some states have already written, rules that make new large loads pay for the capacity and wires they need. The near-term consequence is steady, measurable growth in commercial sales and higher wholesale and capacity prices, not the vertical demand curve the queues imply.