Two U.S. senators on Thursday delivered the latest salvo in an increasingly active front against data centers and their energy use. Sens. Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) asking it to collect details about energy use from data centers and how that use impacts the power grid.
In a letter seen by TechCrunch, the senators asked the EIA to “establish mandatory annual reporting requirements for data centers and other large loads,” the senators wrote in the letter. “As electricity demand growth continues to accelerate after years of relative stagnation, the lack of reliable, standardized data on heavy-duty energy consumption poses significant risks to effective grid planning and monitoring.” Wired first reported on the letter.
The letter is not the first move by politicians to impose new regulatory requirements on data centers. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced Wednesday that they would introduce legislation that would halt new data center construction until Congress can reach an agreement on how to regulate AI.
Energy usage by data centers has increased explosively in recent years. For example, Google’s data centers doubled their consumption between 2020 and 2024. This trend is not likely to change in the near future. By 2035, planned new data centers will nearly triple the sector’s energy demands.
EIA is a government agency tasked with collecting and analyzing data related to energy systems, much like the Census Bureau of the power grid. It was established in 1977 under the Department of Energy in response to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.
For decades, EIA has collected a wealth of information about energy use in the United States, including costs, sources of electricity generation, and energy efficiency programs. We also track how different sectors use energy, although we only focus on four very broad categories: residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation.
Hawley and Warren also want the EIA to collect more detailed information about data centers, such as how energy consumption differs between AI computing tasks and general cloud services.
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The senators have very specific requests for what the data should look like, including hourly and annual data, such as peak energy loads and the rates businesses pay. They also want to know what grid upgrades will be required by adding large new loads, how those upgrades will be paid for, and whether data center customers are participating in demand response programs. In demand response programs, power companies pay heavy users to reduce their usage over a set period of time.
The letter references EIA administrator Tristan Abbey, who said in December that EIA would play a “critical role” in gathering data on energy demand from data centers. Hawley and Warren asked authorities to respond to the letter by April 9.
This process may already be underway, but the EIA has not announced whether it is happening or not. Any changes to the EIA study must go through the Office of Management and Budget process and require a public comment period.
“We get requests for analysis very often, but requests for actual new products are much less frequent,” Abbey said at a public event in December. “It will probably take about two years to launch a new investigation from scratch. However, there are authorities who can circumvent the two-year process by conducting a more narrowly scoped investigation, which could potentially provide a sharper signal.”
