US senators ask EIA to collect data centre power bills

Two US senators want federal energy statisticians to start collecting data centre power bills, down to hourly loads and the rates companies pay—an early step toward treating AI compute as a regulated utility input rather than a private operational detail. According to TechCrunch, Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Elizabeth Warren have asked the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to establish a mandatory annual reporting requirement for data centres and other large electricity loads, arguing that planners lack “reliable, standardized data” as demand accelerates.

The request is unusually granular. The senators want hourly, annual and peak load figures; a breakdown between AI workloads and conventional cloud services; details of grid upgrades required by large new connections; who pays for those upgrades; and whether data centres participate in demand-response programmes where utilities pay customers to curtail usage. Wired first reported the letter, TechCrunch says, and the lawmakers asked the EIA to respond by April 9.

The timing reflects how quickly data centres have moved from being a commercial real-estate category to a grid planning problem. TechCrunch notes that Google’s data centres doubled electricity consumption between 2020 and 2024, and that planned new data centres could nearly triple the sector’s power demand by 2035. In markets where generation, transmission, and permitting already move slowly, large “new loads” force a decision: build more capacity, ration existing capacity, or shift costs onto other users.

Washington is now probing the accounting that determines who absorbs those costs. If a utility must upgrade substations or transmission to serve a hyperscale facility, the bill can be spread across ratepayers, charged directly to the data centre, or socialised through public incentives. The senators’ letter asks explicitly how upgrades are financed, signalling that “AI growth” is becoming a contested line item in electricity rate cases.

The EIA is not a regulator; it is a data-collection agency inside the Department of Energy, created in 1977 after the oil shocks to provide a statistical backbone for energy policy. But once a sector becomes a named category in federal surveys, it becomes legible to lawmakers and agencies that write rules. EIA administrator Tristan Abbey said in December that the agency would be an “essential player” in collecting demand data from data centres, and warned that creating a new survey from scratch can take about two years—unless the agency uses narrower authorities to move faster.

The letter also lands alongside more direct political threats. TechCrunch reports that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said they will introduce legislation to halt new data centre construction until Congress agrees on how to regulate AI. A moratorium proposal and a reporting mandate are different tools, but they point in the same direction: compute capacity is being pulled into the permitting-and-oversight machinery used for other constrained infrastructure.

For operators, the immediate burden is compliance paperwork. The longer-term effect is that electricity access—once negotiated privately with utilities—starts to resemble a licence. The EIA’s next survey form may end up as the first document in a file that decides which projects get built and which wait for “grid readiness.”

If the agency adopts the senators’ proposal, the first numbers it publishes will be mundane: megawatts by hour, dollars per kilowatt-hour, upgrade costs by region. They will also tell regulators exactly where the bottlenecks are.