In a rare moment of bipartisanship, President Donald Trump and Pennsylvania's Democratic governor are seeking to address concerns about rising energy bills throughout the US, as some blame data centres for the spike.
The White House on Friday announced that it would call for PJM Interconnection, a corporation that transmits electricity throughout a large portion of the country, to make a temporary overhaul to address rising bills.
“The initiative calls on PJM to conduct an emergency procurement auction to address escalating electricity prices and growing reliability risks across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States,” read a news release from the Trump administration.
Hours before the announcement, Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro highlighted his state's continuing feud with PJM and hailed the White House for joining him.
“When PJM refused to take steps to get more energy on the grid and protect consumers from rising costs, I took action,” he posted on X, adding that Pennsylvania had previously successfully sued the company.
“Because we took action, we’ve saved consumers more than $18 billion so far – and with further reform to the grid, there will be billions more.”
In another social media post, he said that “the White House is following our lead”, going on to say that Pennsylvania was among the first to call for PJM to “build more generation and reduce energy costs”.
Besides the calls for reforms and temporary changes to PJM, the White House also addressed worries that the rapid push to build data centres for AI was partially to blame for higher electricity bills.
The Trump administration said that it was seeking to ensure that “data centres pay their fair share” of electricity taken from the existing grid by making them “pay more for new generation than residential customers”.
The White House calls for reform included harsh criticism of Mr Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden.
“High electricity prices are a choice,” US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said. “The Biden administration’s forceful closures of coal and natural gas plants without reliable replacements left the US in an energy emergency.”
The bill announcement from the White House comes after several months of growing concern from many homeowners and tenants across the US dealing with rising electricity bills.
A recent report from the non-partisan Pew Research Centre points out that in recent years, Americans have been paying increasingly higher prices to keep the lights on.
That same report cites a Carnegie Mellon University study that predicts data centres could be a factor in “leading to an 8 per cent increase in the average US electricity bill by 2030, potentially exceeding 25 per cent in the highest-demand markets of central and northern Virginia”.
