Two US senators have launched the latest attack in an increasingly active front against data centers and their energy use. Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren have sent a letter to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) asking it to collect details on data center energy use — and how that use affects 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, seen by TechCrunch. “As electricity demand growth continues to accelerate after years of relative stagnation, the lack of reliable, standardized data on heavy load energy consumption poses significant risks to effective grid planning and oversight.” Wired was the first report in the letter.
The letter is not the first move by politicians trying to impose new regulatory requirements on data centers. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday they will introduce legislation that would halt the construction of new data centers until Congress reaches an agreement on how to regulate artificial intelligence.
Data center energy use has exploded in recent years. Google’s data centers, for example, doubled their consumption between 2020 and 2024. The trend is not likely to change in the near future. By 2035, planned new data centers will nearly triple the industry’s energy demand.
The EIA is a government agency charged with collecting and analyzing data related to the energy system — sort of like an inventory 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 collected a wealth of information about US energy use, including costs, generation sources, and energy efficiency programs. It also tracks how different sectors use energy, although it only focuses on four very broad categories: residential, commercial, industrial and transport.
Hawley and Warren are also asking the EIA to collect more detailed information about data centers, including how energy consumption differs between AI computing tasks and general cloud services.
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Senators have very specific requests for what that data should look like, including hourly, annual and peak energy loads and the prices companies pay. They also want to know about any network upgrades required by adding new heavy 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 usage for a period of time.
The letter calls out EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey, who said in December that the agency would be an “essential player” in collecting data on data center energy demand. Hawley and Warren asked the agency to respond to their letter by April 9.
It is possible that the process is already underway, although EPE has not publicly communicated if it is. Changes to 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 often,” Abbey he said at the public event in December. “It probably takes about two years to start a new survey from scratch. But there are principles where you can avoid the two-year process by conducting surveys that are smaller in scope, but potentially a sharper message.”
