When members of Congress return home for the summer, few issues will confront them more quickly than the explosion of data center development.
Across the country, voters are asking the same basic questions: Will the AI boom raise my electricity bill? Will it strain the grid during peak demand? Will my community be asked to absorb the land-use, noise, and infrastructure burden while someone else captures the upside?
Those are fair questions. They are not anti-technology or anti-growth. They are what people ask when they’re promised an AI future without an explanation of who pays for it.
Conservatives should take those concerns seriously. Families should not be forced to subsidize billion-dollar computing facilities. Local communities should not be kept in the dark. And lawmakers should not pretend that every objection to a data center is just NIMBYism. The backlash is real. In our June 2026 national survey, voters opposed an AI data center being built in their community by more than two to one — 62% to 27% — with nearly half strongly opposed.
But the right response is not a moratorium. It is more power. That means building the energy resources that can meet demand on the timeline communities actually face.
Right now, solar and battery energy storage are among the only major energy resources that can be deployed quickly enough and affordably enough to keep pace with rising demand. In fact, they have accounted for more than 80% of all new power added to the grid during the Trump administration.
Voters are ready for that buildout. In the same survey in which they rejected data centers, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they would welcome a solar farm in their own community — support on par with an Amazon distribution center or a new manufacturing plant. Americans are not against building. They are against being handed the costs of the AI boom without the power to pay for it.
The scale of the challenge is not theoretical. A June 2026 analysis from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers could more than double their electricity use by 2030 and represent more than 40% of U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years. The question is no longer whether AI needs significant power. It is whether America will build it in time.
That is why conservatives should champion energy abundance. Natural gas matters. Nuclear matters. Transmission matters. So do solar and battery storage, because they are practical tools that can be deployed relatively quickly, add meaningful capacity, and help meet demand during the very hours when the grid is under pressure.
This is not a partisan issue. In our January survey of the likely 2026 electorate, solar was one of the best-liked industries in America — viewed favorably by 67% of voters. Trump voters view solar companies favorably by nearly two to one, and in rural America, solar is favorably viewed by a wide margin.
In fast-growing states, solar is already helping utilities and grid operators keep pace with rising load, while batteries are increasingly shifting that power into the evening hours, when families come home, air conditioners are running, and solar output begins to fall.
Texas offers a useful example. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says wind and solar met 36% of ERCOT demand in the first nine months of 2025, while batteries increasingly helped supply evening electricity as solar output declined. EIA also forecasts that utility-scale solar in ERCOT will exceed coal generation on an annual basis for the first time in 2026.
Some critics will say that these projects simply create another land-use problem. That objection deserves a factual answer, too. A recent interactive tool released by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) does just that, showing that solar uses just 0.04% of total U.S. land and 0.07% of U.S. farmland, with no state using more than 0.5% of its prime farmland for solar. Not every project belongs everywhere, and communities deserve transparency and respect for legitimate local concerns. But conservatives should be wary of turning every concern into a veto over the infrastructure America needs to power its future.
The alternative to energy abundance isn’t standing still. It’s falling behind. It means delays, special deals, local moratoria, higher prices, and growing resentment. That is bad for families, bad for the grid, and bad for American competitiveness at a moment when China is not slowing down.
Lawmakers going home this summer do not need a better slogan on AI. They need a better answer on power. Large loads should pay their fair share. Communities should get straight answers. And America should build more energy of every kind, including the solar and storage projects already helping fast-growing states, many of which are traditional conservative strongholds, add real power on timelines that match the urgency of the moment.
AI won’t run on talking points. It will run on affordable, abundant electricity. The market is already pointing us toward the fastest, most affordable path to more power. Let’s take it.
The author of this CFACT article is from what is basically a public opinion organization somehow affiliated with CFACT. He is clearly not approaching this subject from a standpoint of feasibility and cost. If you poll a bunch of city dwellers who have no clue about where their food, energy, and manufactured goods come from, of course they will look favorably toward solar energy based on the incessant propaganda thrown at them.
In contrast, to get the perspective of data center/AI industry, I recently queried Grok about power supply for data centers. Grok was in complete agreement with me, that the best choice for powering these facilities is CCGT (followed in the near future by SMRs), preferably on site rather than relying on power from the broader grid.
“In the same survey in which they rejected data centers, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they would welcome a solar farm in their own community — support on par with an Amazon distribution center or a new manufacturing plant.”
Nice push- poll ???
The core of the furor is the scale and speed of new power demand, not the raw number of facilities.
There are already thousands of data centers in the United States (roughly 3,500–4,600 depending on the tracker, with ~3,000+ operational). Most of the older or smaller ones are conventional enterprise, colocation, or cloud facilities that draw relatively modest power — often in the single-digit to low tens of megawatts. The current political and public reaction is driven by a much smaller subset of hyperscale and AI-focused campuses that are dramatically larger.
Why the intensity of concern
The sheer count of facilities is therefore misleading. A few dozen multi-hundred-MW or GW-scale campuses can drive more incremental demand — and more visible local friction — than hundreds of smaller legacy sites.
On-site power generation as a responseGrok says my assessment is largely correct and aligns with what many developers and hyperscalers are already doing.
Because grid interconnection is slow and reliability is non-negotiable, a growing share of large new projects are planning or building behind-the-meter / on-site generation. Public analyses have identified projects representing roughly 25%+ of planned U.S. data-center capacity that intend to include significant on-site power (with the share higher among the largest AI-oriented builds). Near-term solutions are dominated by natural gas — simple-cycle turbines, reciprocating engines, and combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) — because they can be deployed relatively quickly and provide firm, dispatchable power that matches the continuous-operation needs of these facilities.
Longer-term, small modular reactors (SMRs) and other advanced nuclear options are receiving serious attention and commercial commitments from several major players. These offer firm power once they reach commercial maturity and licensing, though they are not yet available at scale for near-term projects.
This approach is technologically and economically prudent under current conditions for several reasons:
In short, the controversy is less about “too many data centers” in the abstract and more about the sudden concentration of very large, power-hungry facilities colliding with constrained transmission, generation, and local infrastructure — at a time when parts of the grid are already managing higher shares of intermittent resources. On-site firm generation (gas now, nuclear later where feasible) is a rational engineering and commercial response that prioritizes speed, reliability, and independence from those constraints.
From the above article:
“Right now, solar and battery energy storage are among the only major energy resources that can be deployed quickly enough and affordably enough to keep pace with rising demand. In fact, they have accounted for more than 80% of all new power added to the grid during the Trump administration.”
Correct me if I’m wrong but I do believe that rechargeable batteries at grid scale (NOT one-time use chemical batteries) do not add “new power” but only temporarily store energy that can be metered out later at some rate.
IOW, while a grid-scale battery complex can be considered as an “energy resource”, it is really not an “energy source“.
As to deploying “solar” (as in solar PV) affordably, that is problematic, especially considering the yearly average of sunlight-hours available at the site of the PV panel installations, their fixed orientation relative to the Sun’s movement across the sky, and the potential for wind (including tornado and hurricane) and hailstorm damage.
Control the information and one can control everything.
That is why extreme caution on the massive AI thrust warrants debate and serious considerations.
Consider the historical technology revolutions.
PCs. Did they actually increase productivity? Or did they increase workload?
Or the internet. Did anyone recognize it was a 2-way control access and that hackers would emerge? Cyber criminals? Identity theft?
Cell phones? You can now be tracked in real time if your phone is on. And the invasive cold call messaging? So much for the do not call list.
What about social media and digital media? Sounds great until you look at how people are unconsciously controlled.
The topic of discussion does not address the fundamental components of these “Data Centers.”
AI is software. As pointed out, it can be hosted in one form or another on any computer.
What is being discussed is AI hosted on computers that can be described as Cray Supercomputers on steroids. Software is innocent. Faster software is likewise innocent. It is how and for what it is used where the conversations are needed. Also, what are the natural and unintended consequences. Too often great ideas have dark sides that are not identified up front.
Data centers are massive digital data storage facilities.
The technology involved, however, is not the concern.
Consider that the amount of digital storage in the USA is mind boggling. Local area networks, once the rage, have massive storage. Internet regional hubs have massive data storage. Universities, labs, military, government, all have massive storage. Then there are the individual devices people use daily. All of this, at present, is federated. Even cloud storage is federated.
Data centers are integrated with mind boggling amounts of storage. The advantage of integrated storage to very fast computers is the elimination of interconnectivity latencies. Another advantage is ability to limit access to the mass memory.
One question is, how much storage will a center have compared to the whole of the federated storage array? Are these data centers attempting to accumulate all of humanity’s collective digital data? Good question. To retain the high throughput a central, integrated system gains, whatever information is in center A will likely be duplicated across hundreds or thousands of these systems.
Data security. There is no perfect computer security shy of disconnecting and powering down. Microsoft and Google are able to do updates even when your computer is sleeping.
Who shall guard the guards themselves. This whole setup looks like a massive attempt to control information and in doing so strip us of our freedoms.
Think about it.
Solar? Wind? Lol. Meta is funding a massive fleet of 10 natural gas power plants delivering 7.5 gigawatts of capacity for its Hyperion AI data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, through an $11 billion infrastructure agreement with Entergy Louisiana.
Project and Infrastructure Details
I wonder how much of that is because of the current political climate in the US.
Other countries steer towards renewables, but Mark “I wasn’t sure what number you wanted” Zuckerberg nay want to cozy up to trump.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91578780/how-china-is-powering-new-data-centers-with-clean-energy
There is talk emerging in the financial blogosphere which casts doubt on the ROI of AI technology in general and on the ROI of AI data centers in particular.
Which means that it is possible, perhaps even likely, that an AI tech bubble burst is on the horizon.
In which case some number of CCGT gas turbines now on the order books for use by AI data centers might suddenly become available for general-purpose use on the power grid.
One can hope.