Key Takeaways
The EIA is developing a survey to assess data center energy use in response to public and congressional concerns about its impact on electricity prices.
The EIA will begin with a voluntary pilot program to be completed by the end of September, and then develop a mandatory survey.
Information gathered will include energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics, cooling systems, and IT specifications, including metrics on a data center’s energy efficiency.
The Trump administration is encouraging companies to build their own power generation.
Companies are using multiple approaches to provide sufficient power for their needs, with many of them pursuing natural gas, which the United States has in abundance.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is launching three voluntary pilot surveys to evaluate energy consumption in data centers, with web-based pilot surveys in Texas and Washington state and in-person interviews in Northern Virginia and Washington, DC. Having identified 196 companies operating data centers across these three states/regions, the EIA will ask each company to report on the energy use of at least one data center in the targeted area, covering energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics, and cooling systems. That survey is to be followed by a second survey in three different states. Wired reports that the surveys also cover information technology specifications, including metrics on how efficiently a data center uses energy. The two pilot surveys are to be completed by late September, at which point the EIA will begin developing a mandatory survey that will cover data centers nationwide.
According to Wired, most details about data centers’ energy use are considered proprietary business information and usually not made public. Because of public concern, the Trump administration has encouraged data center developers to build their own power sources, known as “behind-the-meter” power. Many data centers are constructing gas-powered generators to ensure reliable energy 24/7, which intermittent wind and solar cannot do since their power goes out when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
As Grist reports, according to an analysis by Cleanview, at least 46 data centers with a combined capacity of 56 gigawatts are using the “behind-the-meter” approach. Boom Supersonic has a $1.25 billion agreement with artificial intelligence developer Crusoe, which is building data centers for OpenAI, to provide 29 jet-engine gas turbines. Crusoe is using “aeroderivative” turbines based on airplane models for its Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, where power demand is 1.2 gigawatts. Meta’s data center in El Paso, Texas, is to be powered by more than 800 different mobile mini-turbines. Caterpillar, a construction equipment company, is supplying gas engines to a data center in West Virginia. Engines start up and stop much faster than turbines. They can come online in about a minute, compared with an hour for a traditional power plant.
New proposed natural gas capacity has surged worldwide over the past year. Global Energy Monitor reports that more than 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power projects are now in development worldwide — a 31% increase in the last year. The United States accounts for about a quarter of those projects.
Via Grist, according to estimates from Global Energy Monitor, Texas, with its vast oil and gas resources in the Permian Basin, has almost 58 gigawatts of natural gas power in various stages of planning and construction, which is more than the next four states combined, and more than every country except China. Nearly half of the power plants under construction in Texas will provide power to data centers, without connecting to regional energy grids. These projects span the state, from OpenAI’s Stargate campus in central Abilene to Meta’s data center in El Paso, where the company has contracted with a Houston-based microgrid developer to set up 813 modular generators.
A developer called BorderPlex is proposing a $165 billion data center called Project Jupiter in southern New Mexico, powered by two microgrids that operate on simple-cycle gas turbines. The project’s 2,880 megawatts of generation are more than the entire generation capacity of central New Mexico’s main utility.
Virginia, dubbed ‘data center alley,’ currently hosts the largest number of data centers and is within the PJM Interconnection service area. The PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid operator in the United States, has a plan for new large power users to either bring their own new generation to the grid or limit their usage when the power system is stretched.
Analysis
Two senators, Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, had inquired about the EIA’s plans to get more information about data centers over concerns from the public that data centers were causing electricity prices to increase. The public concern over rising electric bills has resulted in proposed legislation by Senator Bernie Sanders to restrict their resource use and put moratoriums on their construction.
However, as we showed in Have Data Centers Driven Up Electricity Prices?, there is no statistically significant relationship between data center concentration and faster increases in electricity rates. Prices in the top ten data center states are virtually identical to the average across other states. The top 10 data center states (including Virginia and Texas) averaged 14.46 cents per kilowatt hour in 2025, virtually identical to the 14.39 cents per kilowatt hour average for all other states. That report follows up on a previous IER study, Blue States, High Rates, demonstrating that high electricity rates result from state-level policy choices.
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