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Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute and attorney, studies and advises academics, industry, and state and federal regulators on barriers to the clean energy transition, including the impacts of data centers on both power grids and on consumers, with a focus on the mid-Atlantic region. Silverman facilitates the Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission, made up of representatives from 10 states who are working collaboratively on their transmission grid expansion efforts, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is seeking to streamline regulatory hurdles to encourage local data center development, fuel economic growth, and improve the state’s technology infrastructure. However, environmentalists, policymakers, and private citizens have raised concerns about a myriad of issues associated with data centers, including sustainability concerns and the potential for increased costs for consumers. Here, Johns Hopkins research scholar Abe Silverman discusses what’s at stake.

How can policymakers balance the economic benefits of data centers with their growing energy and infrastructure impacts?

The scale of data center energy usage is enormous. PJM Interconnection, the large regional grid operator covering Maryland and 12 other mid-Atlantic states, as well as the District of Columbia, is projecting more than five gigawatts of new electricity demand every year between now and 2030.

For context, Baltimore’s peak energy usage is just shy of seven gigawatts, so we are projecting adding a "Baltimore’s worth" of new electric customers [being added] to the grid every year between now and 2030. Put another way, we would need to build five new large nuclear power plants every year, just to avoid falling behind—which far exceeds our current ability to bring new large generation projects to market.

Many state policymakers, however, see data center expansion as a critical economic priority. Data centers are a major driver of state tax revenue and provide a sugar rush of new construction jobs. Yet as the booming data center industry disrupts the existing supply-demand balance, energy market prices are sharply increasing. These trade-offs are particularly apparent here in Maryland, where electricity prices have skyrocketed over just the last few months.

How can data center development be aligned with grid reliability and renewable energy availability?

Grid reliability, along with energy affordability, is also threatened by the data center boom. Unless major changes are enacted, utilities in the mid-Atlantic region are predicting a substantially higher chance of rolling blackouts by the end of the decade as new data center loads exceed the available electricity supply. Along with lower reliability, prices are rising, potentially making households pay more for less.

Our two main options are either slowing new data center connections—which may be politically unpalatable in many jurisdictions—or bringing new sources of electricity supply to market. Ideally, these new sources would be low-carbon resources, such as battery storage, wind, solar, or even new nuclear power. But new generation resources are expensive, and many take years to bring online.

What should policymakers prioritize to ensure data center growth aligns with sustainability goals?

Much of the recent policy focus is on bringing new natural gas-fired generation to market, which obviously presents a serious challenge to state and corporate clean energy policies. While battery storage has the potential to meet some of the same reliability needs, scaling up batteries at the level necessary to power the gigawatts of new data center load is expensive. Plus, batteries do need to recharge, which means that a truly clean system will need to pair the batteries with wind, solar, or other innovative clean technologies like next generation nuclear or geothermal. In the meantime, many utilities and independent power producers are defaulting to what they know—natural gas.

One debate is who should be responsible for providing the extra energy that data centers consume in a power grid: the data centers themselves, or utility providers? What needs to be considered by legislators making those decisions?

Data centers are adding approximately $8 billion per year to capacity prices—costs being passed to everyday consumers in the form of higher electric bills—in PJM Interconnection’s territory.

The higher prices are contributing to backlash, or "tech-lash," against big tech, which doesn’t want to fully absorb the increased costs. In fact, whether data centers should be forced to pay for the increased costs they are creating is the subject of intensive litigation that is currently underway at PJM and other regional grid operators across the country.

Are there any misconceptions that you have seen about data centers and how much energy they consume?

The biggest misconception is that data centers know exactly how much electricity they are going to consume in five, 10, or even 20 years. Maybe data centers continue growing at the fast pace they are on now. Maybe they face an economic downturn that means less electricity usage. Or maybe data centers become ultra-efficient as better algorithms or more efficient cooling kick in. The fact is that we don’t know.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, massive investments were made in laying fiber optic cable. The thinking went that the internet was going to change the world and that our need for fiber would continue to grow exponentially.

Predictions about the internet were correct—but the industry seriously overestimated the speed at which this new fiber would be needed. Only in recent years have we finally worked through the glut. The question for policymakers today is whether data center electricity usage is part of a sustained boom, and if not, who gets tagged with the stranded infrastructure investments.

Citation: Q&A: Expert discusses data center growth compatibility with energy sustainability (2026, January 21) retrieved 21 January 2026 from https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-qa-expert-discusses-center-growth.html

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