Could data center demand raise electric bills or cause outages?

The AI boom has sent energy demand climbing across the country, and critics say the aging U.S. grid is being put to a stress test. The worry is twofold. In the short term, the energy crunch could push electric bills higher. Over the long term, it could lead to outages or other technical problems.

At TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, several industry insiders offered a more hopeful view. They argued that the surge in new connections could be the push utilities need to modernize. Apoorv Bhargava, founder and CEO of WeaveGrid, Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, and Kristin Eberhard, vice president of policy at Rewiring America, all said the grid faces new challenges, but also new opportunities.

What is changing about the U.S. electric grid?

Bhargava described a system that has changed fundamentally. “It’s a very different electric grid, right?” he said. “We’re dealing with a ton of new variables, including renewable energy.” He pointed to electric vehicles, data centers and heat pumps as new sources of load, and said utilities are now grappling with how to manage and orchestrate all of it.

His company is betting on software. Bhargava said WeaveGrid’s platform helps organizations deploy energy efficiently while optimizing connections to lower utility bills for customers.

What technologies could help utilities upgrade the grid?

Heidel’s company works on the physical side of the problem. Veir sells superconductive power lines that it says can carry power five times farther than traditional cables while requiring 20 times less space. The startup recently raised $110 million in a Series C funding round.

Heidel said the scale of investment in AI infrastructure is fueling innovation. “There’s a ton of new technologies that are coming off the shelves and starting to get to scale that, pulled together, can actually really make sure that data centers are the best community neighbors and citizens they can possibly be,” he said. He added that the industry needs to adopt those tools “as fast as possible to ease this next stage of growth.”

Eberhard, whose organization advocates for household electrification, said the surge in data center demand has added urgency to modernization. It has also made industries more willing to try new approaches. “I feel like this era of AI and load growth is a very improv era,” she said. “There’s a lot of yes-and-ing going on. So yes, we need more transmission lines. Yes, we need more centralized power plants, and we also need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of all this other stuff that we had previously been leaving on the table.”

The panelists did not present detailed plans or timelines for how those upgrades would be carried out. Their remarks laid out a case that the same demand straining the grid could also give utilities and companies a reason to fix problems that had been put off.

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