03/05/2025 at 10:00AM
The Subcommittee on Energy has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday, March 5, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. (ET) in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building. The title of the hearing is “Scaling for Growth: Meeting the Demand for Reliable, Affordable Electricity.” This hearing will explore the challenges faced by utilities and grid operators to deliver reliable, affordable electricity to meet the growing demand for power across the nation.
Witnesses:
- Todd Brickhouse, CEO and General Manager of Basin Electric Power Cooperative
- Asim Z. Haque, Senior Vice President for Governmental and Member Services, PJM
- Noel W. Black, Senior VP of Regulatory Affairs, Southern Company
- Tyler H. Norris, James B. Duke Fellow, Duke University
Data centers house servers and other computing infrastructure required to store, process, and share data used for digital applications and services. Expanded use of AI, machine learning, and cloud services by data centers drives up electricity demand as these processes continuously perform energy intensive applications.
In addition, data centers require significant electricity to power cooling systems to preserve the integrity of the servers. As an example, one ChatGPT query consumes ten times the electricity compared to one query of Google’s search engine. Currently, data centers consume 4 percent of U.S. electricity generation and could consume as much as 9 percent by the end of the decade.
This rate of growth is expected to continue as companies compete on a domestic and international level in the race to capture the AI market and expand digital services into all manner of industry and manufacturing.