To address concerns about the rising cost of energy due to the data center boom, several big tech companies came to an agreement with Duke Energy and customer advocacy groups on a set of rules to ensure data centers pay their fair share for the power they use.
The concerns stem from the dramatic demands for energy that some of these projects require. The rules apply to projects demanding 50MW or more, which is about equivalent to the amount of electricity used by the roughly 40,000 households in the city of Concord.
For Duke Energy to provide all that power, it needs to build new power plants and a lot of new infrastructure like transmission lines and substations before the projects come online. However, under current state regulations, there’s no guarantee that data center project would actually use all the power it’s demanding, or would get built at all. This would leave other residential or business customers stuck paying for all that construction through our power bills…