Across the country, communities are bearing the brunt of AI data centers’ insatiable energy appetites. While Big Tech profits, everyday people are seeing higher energy bills and more pollution. That’s led the industry boosters and elected officials — including the Trump Administration —  to suggest arrangements that fall under the umbrella of “Bring Your Own Power” (BYOP).

But as our new research shows, “Bring Your Own Power” isn’t the panacea that Big Tech wants us to think it is.

None of these arrangements solves data centers’ energy issues — neither pollution nor rising costs. At best, they’re minor Band-Aids that give Big Tech license to continue expanding. At worst, they’re pie-in-the-sky fantasies that will never come to fruition. 

Data Centers’ Insatiable Energy Appetite

Data centers already devour a significant portion of the country’s electricity. If Big Tech continues unabated, that number will only grow. By 2035, data centers may use an entire fifth of the country’s electricity.

The data center boom is already entrenching polluting fossil fuels and expanding the market for dirty gas. Between May 2024 and April 2025, about 60% of electricity consumed by data centers came from fossil fuels. This is creating more noxious air pollutants and more climate-wrecking emissions. 

It’s also leading to rising energy costs for communities across the country, and wholesale electricity prices could rise an additional 50% by 2028 if all proposed data centers are built. At the same time, the number of residential electricity shutoffs has risen as electricity becomes increasingly unaffordable. 

Data Centers’ Power Plants Drive Up Costs for Us

To purportedly solve the problem of rising electricity costs, boosters have proposed that data centers “Bring Their Own Power” by building new, off-grid power plants. But they forget to mention one crucial detail: power plants can’t come online fast enough.

Even without the skyrocketing demand from AI data centers, the U.S. is struggling to build new electricity generation because of bottlenecks in the supply chain. The supply of many parts, from transformers to powerlines, can’t keep up with the demand.

The competition for these parts is driving up costs across the board. Adding data centers to this equation will make this problem worse.

Moreover, many of these proposed off-grid power plants are or will be powered by natural gas. This will drive up the price of gas-fired power for people connected to the grid. How?

Higher gas consumption from data centers will make the price of gas even more volatile. This, in turn, raises electricity prices across the market, as the price of electricity is often set by the most expensive gas generator in use.

The data center industry has also suggested pulling existing power plants off the grid, just to serve data centers. This leaves behind unused power lines that once supported those plants, and utilities may need to buy and build more transmission infrastructure to fill in the gaps — costs that they’d pass onto ratepayers.

These impacts are already having consequences for the grid. PJM, the U.S. electricity market with the largest volume of data centers, failed to meet its reliability requirements for 2028/2029 in a 2026 auction, as the rate of demand growth exceeds supply.

Special Electricity Rates for Data Centers Aren’t Enough

Another BYOP scheme involves creating special electricity rates that data centers would pay to “cover their burden.” But federal law doesn’t authorize states to charge data centers higher rates. For example, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has overturned efforts to levy higher rates for crypto mining (the use of data centers to support cryptocurrency transactions).

Moreover, the proposed special rates often aren’t high enough to cover the cost of building new power plants, nor the transmission costs that arise from building power plants to meet demand. These rates also aren’t high enough to offset the overall price increases that data centers drive because of the scarcity they create.

Data Centers Are Driving More Toxic Pollution

While Big Tech touts its limited use of renewable energy and industry-funded think tanks suggest myriad ways that data centers could lower their emissions and cost impact on households, this all masks the reality: the pace and size of the AI data center boom is driving more fossil fuels and more toxic pollution.

As the AI boom propels a race for quick and dirty power, many corporations are loosening or entirely dropping their “green” pledges. Data center demand will bolster coal use; it’s already leading to a surge in natural gas power generation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration tripled its estimate for gas-fired power plant capacity expected to be built by 2030, in part thanks to the data center boom.

“Bring Your Own Power” doesn’t solve the problem of fossil-fueled pollution in local communities. In fact, many of the so-called “solutions” data centers are using to meet their own power needs are already having devastating consequences. 

For example, in Shelby County, Tennessee, Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus data center runs 35 off-grid “temporary” gas turbines. These can reportedly emit between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of noxious nitrogen oxides annually — pollution that has an estimated annual public health cost of $160 million. 

In the face of our electricity supply crunch, the Trump administration even called for data centers to use back-up diesel generators to support the grid, despite their extremely high air pollution rates. This is one of many moves the administration has made to ease the construction of data centers and the dirty energy sources that power them.

Data Centers With Renewables Aren’t the Answer

So all these power plants and “temporary” turbines are raising power prices and polluting our communities. Why don’t we just power data centers with renewables?

Many data center companies are pledging to (eventually) do just that. But even if these pledges weren’t just empty greenwashing promises, powering data centers with clean energy is utterly unrealistic. It also threatens the progress of our already dangerously slow energy transition.

Continuously powering a 1 GW data center would require nearly 20,000 acres of solar panels or 185,000 acres of onshore wind power. We cannot afford to waste the time, space, or money to build renewables for Big Tech’s profit machines. 

Already, data center growth is outstripping available renewable energy supply and redirecting renewables from other industries. It’s drawing urgently needed renewables from existing technologies and resources. We need to focus our renewable energy resources toward those who need it most. Not toward lining Big Tech’s pockets.

Instead of “BYOP,” We Need A Data Center Moratorium

All these versions of “Bring Your Own Power” are wholly insufficient to fix the cost and pollution problems of the AI data center boom. That’s because of a fundamental problem with Big Tech’s rollout. The industry is demanding too much power, way too fast.

Our economy, our supply chains, and our energy supply are not prepared. And we can’t depend on the industry to put people and planet first. 

Now, Congress is considering the so-called “Ratepayer Protection Act,” which would advance BYOP schemes by asking utilities to consider new rules to make data centers responsible for some of the costs of energy generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades. But the bill should really be called the “Ratepayer Deception Act.” 

Rather than lower energy bills for ratepayers, these new rules would help ensure that utilities aren’t left holding the bag for data center speculation and energy demands. In other words, the Ratepayer Deception Act serves to ease the concerns of utility CEOs and shareholders and gives license to Big Tech to build even more data centers.

Instead of falling for the ploys of the tech industry and its supporters, our leaders have to take data centers’ energy issues seriously. We need a nationwide AI data center moratorium to slow down Big Tech’s voracious growth and give our leaders time to create a comprehensive regulatory framework.