Duke Energy CEO says data centers will have ‘no impact’ on electricity bills

EXCLUSIVE — The CEO of one of the largest utility companies in the United States said that the rapid build-out of artificial intelligence data centers will not increase electricity bills, a possibility that has scared voters ahead of the November midterm elections.Duke Energy CEO and President Harry Sideris told the Washington Examiner that he believes data centers will instead provide cost savings, rather than push bills higher.“Even from Day 1, [data centers are] paying the infrastructure costs up front if needed for the transmission interconnections,” Sideris said. “And then the generation is paid for by them as we’re as we’re building it out. So there is no impact to the customers, and then … the savings come years later.” Duke Energy provides electricity to more than 8 million customers across six states, including the Carolinas, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.It will still take several years for the data centers being built in the utility’s service region to come online. Sideris told the Washington Examiner that it typically takes three to five years for each project.Across all six states, the company has at least eight gigawatts’ worth of data center capacity in its queue to connect to the grid. About six gigawatts of that is expected to be built in North and South Carolina. For comparison, one gigawatt is roughly the energy needed to power around 750,000 homes.For the last several months, voters have grown wary of the rapid build-out of data centers and adjacent artificial intelligence technology, with many fearful that the facilities will increase electricity bills.New polling found that roughly 84% of people are concerned about how data centers will affect their local electricity prices, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC.Support for data centers has also rapidly decreased this year. July polling from Politico and Public First found that opposition to data centers grew significantly from January to July, jumping from 28% to 41%.Sideris pushed back on the concerns, telling the Washington Examiner that the narrative that data centers will inflate electricity prices is mostly “misinformation and misunderstandings.”He pointed to federal and local initiatives to protect consumers from feeling the cost of the data center build-out, including the Trump administration’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, in which tech giants, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, have vowed to secure their own power when building AI data centers.Duke Energy has signed on to the pledge and launched its own Customer Protection Plus Commitment. This framework requires data center projects to pay for all the infrastructure needed for their energy consumption, provide proof of deposits for that infrastructure, and sign termination clauses to prevent any stranded assets.Sideris said the company is also taking certain measures to ensure that each project added to its queue will not reduce the reliability of the local grid. These measures are similar to those being implemented in the state of Texas, which has paused data center approvals until state regulators can audit proposed projects.“We pushed a lot of them out of our queue so that we could focus on the ones that are real and making sure that … we’re not over-investing or doing things that we don’t need to do because they may or may not come,” he said. “So that’s what Texas is doing with their moratorium.”Sideris has estimated that with these protections, every gigawatt of data centers added to the Duke Energy portfolio could provide $1 billion in savings to customers over the life of that contract.“There’s a lot of misunderstanding of they’re they’re not paying and how they’re doing that,” Sideris said.When pressed on whether immediate investments in the grid, such as upgrading or building new infrastructure, could increase electricity bills, Sideris said the company has structured its tariffs and contracts to avoid that trickle-down effect.In addition to cost savings, he claimed data center projects are generating thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent on-site positions in its service region.“We have a big Amazon site going in in Richmond County, North Carolina,” he said. “They have 2,000 folks working on that data center right now, and there’s going to be 500 permanent employees.”THE DIGITAL HANGING OF DATA CENTERS: BIG TECH’S MOST DANGEROUS PR FAILUREMost people are skeptical that data center construction will create jobs, according to the new AP-NORC polling.The survey found that only 20% of those polled view data centers as beneficial for job creation. About 29% said data centers were somewhat beneficial, while 34% said the facilities were not very beneficial for job creation or not at all.