Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) speaks to reporters outside the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol on October 1, 2025, in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Democratic senators on Monday blamed the White House’s push to speed up the rollout of artificial intelligence data centers and attacks on renewable energy for rising power prices in some parts of the United States.
In a letter sent Monday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont and others demanded that the White House and Commerce Department detail what steps they have taken to protect consumers from the effects of large data centers.
Voters are increasingly feeling the pinch of rising electricity prices. Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won landslide victories last week on the issue in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.
The senators took aim at the White House’s relationships with the following companies: meta, alphabet, oracleOpenAI, and the support the government has shown for companies’ data center plans.
The Trump administration has “already failed to prevent rising power prices due to a surge in new commercial demand driven by new data centers,” the senators wrote. They accused the White House of exacerbating the problem by opposing expansion of solar and wind power.
In a statement, the White House blamed the Biden administration and its renewable energy policies for driving up electricity prices.
White House Press Secretary Taylor Rogers said in a statement that President Donald Trump “declared an energy emergency to reverse four years of disastrous Biden policies, accelerate major grid infrastructure projects, and promote the expansion of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power.”
The scale of the tech industry’s AI plans is ballooning. OpenAI and NvidiaFor example, in September we signed a contract to build a 10 gigawatt data center to train and run AI applications. This corresponds to New York City’s baseline peak demand for the summer of 2024.
The scale of these plans raises questions about whether enough electricity will be available to meet demand and who will pay for the new generation of electricity needed. Renewable energy, particularly solar power and energy storage, are sources of power that can be deployed now to meet demand.
U.S. retail electricity prices rose by an average of about 6% through August 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration. However, prices can vary widely by region.
Download the full letter here.
