During a House Oversight Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) questioned Tyson Slocum, the Energy Program Director at Public Citizen, about increased electricity costs for families with nearby data centers.
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00:00Yes. I'm just curious, Mr. Slocum, on what he was just talking about in terms of the rising costs for families at home.
00:09Are there any solutions that folks have been talking about in terms of this?
00:15Absolutely. And in my written testimony, I cite to some excellent research by the Harvard Law Electricity Policy Institute,
00:23which documents all of these problematic deals between electric utilities and the data centers
00:29where the utilities and the data centers sort of have a shared objective here in terms of the utilities want to build more rate base
00:38that they can charge to consumers and the data centers want to get access to the utilities infrastructure
00:43that's paid for by rate payers and not the shareholders of the big tech companies.
00:48And so when you're asking working families to pay higher electric rates so that more infrastructure can be built
00:57to serve billionaire-controlled tech companies, that's a problem, and that's an equity issue.
01:03In my written testimony, I acknowledge that AI plays a central role in our economy for a number of different important deployments,
01:14but the reality is that the infrastructure has to be done in concert with rate payers and with local residents.
01:23And right now we're seeing big tech companies with their expensive lawyers strong-arming communities.
01:28And it's not just in liberal democratic areas. It's in red states. It's in conservative areas.
01:33And so what we need to see is a balance. And I'm always concerned when in Washington, D.C., everyone says we need permitting reform, right?
01:41What permitting reform means is trampling over the rights, the constitutional rights of our communities.
01:48We have to have a balance that respects the Constitution and respects communities' ability to live the way that they want to
01:57and not have big tech data centers dominate the discussion.