EXTRAORDINARY POWER DEMAND

Hyperscale and large-scale data centers may require extraordinary electrical capacity and significant supporting utility and transmission infrastructure.

A single large facility can require hundreds of megawatts of power — the equivalent of powering tens of thousands of homes. In some cases, data center campuses have requested gigawatt-level capacity from regional utilities.

This level of demand may require new power generation facilities, new or upgraded transmission lines, and substantial investment in distribution infrastructure. These costs may ultimately be borne, at least in part, by the existing ratepayers and taxpayers of the community.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence workloads has accelerated power demand projections for data center facilities beyond what many utility systems anticipated in their long-term capacity planning.