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As many Americans struggle with rising energy prices, 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents face a different dilemma: AI data centers — including those owned by Alphabet, Amazon and Meta — eating up their electricity supply.
NV Energy, which provides Lake Tahoe with three quarters of its electricity through California-based Liberty Utilities, will be redirecting its energy to the electricity needs of Nevada’s data centers (1). Residents of the popular tourist destination are worried they may lose power.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, a resident and California Energy Commission supervisor, told Fortune. “We’re 49,000 customers. We have no leverage.”
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Nevada is a burgeoning data center corridor, currently home to at least 70 such facilities (2) spread across its vast desert landscape. One 2026 study cited figures noting that by 2030, data centers could account for 35% of Nevada’s overall electricity consumption (3).
For its part, NV Energy denies leaving Lake Tahoe in the dark, pledging to continue serving the area “until Liberty has its own transmission access in place (4).”
It added that its partnership with Liberty Utilities was always intended to be temporary, per a 2009 agreement — predating data centers.
In the meantime, Liberty must field bids for a new energy provider. Hughes said short-term solutions exist but remain “unstable” while, in the long run, the community will come up against major state utility providers, as well as data centers, in competition for rates (1).
The looming electricity price jumps that could jolt the nation
Lake Tahoe’s woes could foreshadow major electricity price increases — particularly in vast data center corridors — in the next few years. S&P Global forecast that by 2030, data centers will require 60% more grid power than what they use now (5).
A new study (6) suggests that by 2030, data centers and cryptocurrency mining may drive electricity prices up to 29% higher — or as high as 57% in regions with more data centers, like Virginia, New York, Maryland, North Carolina and west Texas, among others (6).
Study co-author Jeremiah Johnson, an associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, said the research points to the urgency of the situation with 2030 a mere four years away.
“Our findings highlight the need for regulators and utilities to make informed decisions about near-term power generation, and for government officials at all levels to make informed decisions related to the construction of data centers (7),” he said.
So far, electricity prices are up nationwide by almost 40% since 2021 (8), with ElectricChoice, an online rate comparison platform, pointing to a 5.4% year-over-year increase in the average monthly electricity bill in May 2026 — with some states seeing jumps ranging between 7%-9% in the same period (9).
In a Gallup poll, 71% of Americans cited rising utility prices among the reasons they oppose data center construction in their communities (10).
Here’s what communities can do.
Ways communities can stem the data center surge
The easiest way to prevent, or at least blunt, a data center-induced energy price surge is to block the facilities from being built in your community.
According to the New York Times, grassroots resistance helped block or stall $156 billion worth of data center builds — 48 facilities — last year (11). Meanwhile, Data Center Watch added that “By year’s end, hundreds of local opposition groups were active across 42 U.S. states,” with petition campaigns “reflecting a broader expansion in both the scale and coordination of opposition (12).”
This year, multiple states have already introduced more than 300 pieces of legislation to halt data center construction, impose stricter rate laws or otherwise ensure that added electricity costs aren’t passed on to consumers (13).
Meanwhile, some groups are advocating for Consumer-Regulated Electricity (CRE) systems, which would give residents the option to buy their electricity from privately run utilities rather than the same grid where data centers run up the cost (14).
A 2025 Harvard study recommends that in fact it should be data centers using private electricity suppliers rather than local utilities, and that there be more transparency on projected additional costs to consumers (15).
As well, a January report from the Union of Concerned Scientists warned of the longer term cost of data centers to communities, and why states should set strict rules to ensure they don’t pass the bill on to residents (16).
“The cumulative costs of meeting data center electricity demand could be more than $900 billion by 2050,” the report warned.
“Minimum revenue obligations, as well as prepayments or letters of credit for those costs, should be conditions for utilities to serve data center customers.”
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Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
Fortune (1); Datacenter Map (2); Desert Research Institute (3); NV Energy (4); S&P Global (5); IOP Publishing (6); EurekAlert! (7); Powerlines (8); Electric Choice (9); Gallup (10); The New York Times (11); Datacenter Watch (12); MultiState (13); Cato Institute (14); Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program (15); Union of Concerned Scientists (16)
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
