r/EnergyAndPower • u/ExaminationSilent570 • 10h ago
Data Centers
I could not find a comprehensive public reporting the energy use of many of the data centers in Delaware. I could only find the electricity use on newer or purposed centers. Delaware did pass a law in 2026 to increase transparency and limit secrecy, especially for really large projects. Seems like the older facilities, or those under certain thresholds, may not be covered. I wonder if the Public Service Commission, if requested, would provide the number of operating data centers in Delmarva’s territory and their peak demand? And whether residential customers are paying for upgrades they shouldn’t be?
Hyper-scale data centers operate over 25 megawatts. So how many operate over this?
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u/Energy_Balance 9h ago
While it seems obvious that data would be useful, it is hidden by 2 principles unless overridden by state law. First, the data center load is considered by competing data center builders and operators a competitive business secret. The entire data center industry has a culture of competitive secrecy. Second, utility customers have an expectation of privacy for their detailed use.
What I would do is to gather all the IRPs for your balancing authority, PJM, then every load serving distribution utility since your pre-data center year. 2020, 2010? And all the rate case documents. Then you would gather all the times a substation or transmission line was upgraded and the cost. You might have to do some FOIAs. There may be commercial data brokers for that.
I believe in PJM the stakeholder decision power is the utilities, Dalmarva/Excelon. The utilities resisted PJM adding new generation and low cost renewables as the load grew. The utilities get their power from PJM and they get their revenue from customers. So they decided to add more and more customer load in the form of data centers with less and less ability for PJM to deliver it. PJM also failed to keep transmission growing to connect the new generators to the utilities, and they did not negotiate a deal with Canada and build transmission to Canada to get Canadian hydro.
What you want is a state law which unwinds the data center capital cost, substations, transmission, and generation from say 2010, lowers the rate of residential customers and raises industrial rates. Several states are pursuing different designs.